Sharif Digital Repository

The widespread expansion of the semiconductor industry and various production phases have led to the increased importance of fabricating highly secure chips. Both in factories manufacturing and later at actual operation, digital integrated circuits (IC) might encounter a variety of hardware attacks, one type of which involves Hardware Trojans (HT). Due to their diversity, it has become a major hardware security challenge to prevent, detect and track down HTs. In this regard, the first step is to understand the taxonomy of Trojans and the current ways in which they can be encountered. For that purpose, certain classifications are required. With their downsized dimensions, the Trojans have... 

Analysis of the multispectral remotely sensed images of the areas destroyed by an earthquake is proved to be a helpful tool for destruction assessments. The performance of such methods is highly dependant on the preprocess that registers the two shots before and after an event. In this paper, we propose a new fast and reliable change detection method for remotely sensed images and analyze its performance. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All right reserved  

The emerging environmental consequences of overdependence on fossil fuels have pushed many countries to invest in clean and renewable sources of power. Countries like Iran where these sources can be found in abundance can take advantage of this potential to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. This study investigated the feasibility of the standalone use of a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) to power buildings in the Bostegan village in the Hormozgan province of Iran. Technical, economic, and environmental assessments were performed with the help of the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) software, and the optimal configuration for the system components was... 

The emerging environmental consequences of overdependence on fossil fuels have pushed many countries to invest in clean and renewable sources of power. Countries like Iran where these sources can be found in abundance can take advantage of this potential to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. This study investigated the feasibility of the standalone use of a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) to power buildings in the Bostegan village in the Hormozgan province of Iran. Technical, economic, and environmental assessments were performed with the help of the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) software, and the optimal configuration for the system components was... 

Islanding detection is a great challenge in connecting distributed generation (DG) in electrical power systems. Islanding detection methods are categorized into three groups, i.e., communication based methods, active, and passive methods. Communication based methods are established upon communication between utilities and DGs and have the inconvenience of being expensive and are limited in use. Active methods perturb the system with a disturbance and the system response to the disturbance is analyzed. Although, these methods have small Non Detection Zone, (NDZ) they degrade the power quality. Passive methods monitor one of the grid variables. Their implementation is easy but their NDZ is... 

This paper proposes a fault detection and protection strategy for islanded inverter-based microgrids (IBMGs). Reliable and accurate protection is one of the main challenges in the proliferation of modern microgrids (MGs). Considering the limited fault current of the voltage-frequency controlled inverter-based distributed energy resources (VF-IBDERs), the protection is more challenging in islanded IBMGs. In this regard, the control scheme of VF-IBDER with a current limiting strategy plays an important role. Due to the limited fault currents close to the converter nominal current, the conventional fault detection methods do not work properly. In addition, bi-directional fault currents worsen... 

This paper proposes a fault detection and protection strategy for islanded inverter-based microgrids (IBMGs). Reliable and accurate protection is one of the main challenges in the proliferation of modern microgrids (MGs). Considering the limited fault current of the voltage-frequency controlled inverter-based distributed energy resources (VF-IBDERs), the protection is more challenging in islanded IBMGs. In this regard, the control scheme of VF-IBDER with a current limiting strategy plays an important role. Due to the limited fault currents close to the converter nominal current, the conventional fault detection methods do not work properly. In addition, bi-directional fault currents worsen... 

To mitigate environmental pollution and food contamination caused by inappropriate and excessive herbicide usage, most potent herbicides should be screened to control rice weeds. A research trial was executed for assessing the comparative efficacy of different herbicides to control rice field weeds and to evaluate the toxicity on rice under normal (distilled water) as well as different salinity levels (4 and 8 dS m-1). The study was designed to select the most potent herbicide and its appropriate dose for weed control of rice crop in coastal areas. Fourteen herbicidal treatments were included weed free crop, Pretilachlor (0.25, 0.50, 0.375 and 0.75 kg a.i. ha-1), Propanil + Thiobencarb (0.6... 

I present an in-depth review of the trends and the directions taken by researchers worldwide in optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA) systems. I highlight those trends and features that I believe are essential to the successful introduction of various OCDMA techniques in communication systems and data networks in the near future. In particular I begin by giving a comprehensive review of the construction of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs). Specifically I discuss the recently developed algorithms that are based on matrix algebra, which simplify and enhance the efficiencies of algorithms in OOC generation. In communication systems studies I first focus on and discuss various OCDMA... 

Correctly detecting the position where a concept begins to drift is important in mining data streams. In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting concept drift. The proposed method, which can detect different types of drift, is based on processing data chunk by chunk and measuring differences between two consecutive batches, as drift indicator. In order to evaluate the proposed method we measure its performance on a set of artificial datasets with different levels of severity and speed of drift. The experimental results show that the proposed method is capable to detect drifts and can approximately find concept drift locations  

Insider threat is a significant security risk for organizations and hard to detect. Most introduced detection methods need contextual data entries about users, or preprocessed user activity logs to detect insider threats which it is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce a behavior analysis method that learns its context and detects multiple types of insider threats from raw logs and network traffic in real-time. This method, named XABA, learns user roles and exclusive behaviors, through analyzing raw logs related to each network session of the user. Then it checks for some abnormal patterns, and if so, triggers the appropriate alert. XABA is implemented on the big-stream... 

This study proposes a new fault detection method for modular multilevel converter (MMC) semiconductor power switches. While in common MMCs, the cells capacitor voltages are measured directly for control purposes, in this study voltage measurement point changes to the cell output terminal improving fault diagnosis ability. Based on this measurement reconfiguration, a novel fault detection algorithm is designed for MMCs semiconductor power switches. The open circuit and short circuit faults are detected based on unconformity between modules output voltage and switching signals. Simulation and experimental results confirm accurate and fast operation of the proposed method in faulty cell... 

The problem of signal detection using a flexible and general model is considered. Owing to applicability and flexibility of sparse signal representation and approximation, it has attracted a lot of attention in many signal processing areas. In this study, the authors propose a new detection method based on sparse decomposition in a union of subspaces model. Their proposed detector uses a dictionary that can be interpreted as a bank of matched subspaces. This improves the performance of signal detection, as it is a generalisation for detectors. Low-rank assumption for the desired signals implies that the representations of these signals in terms of some proper bases would be sparse. Their... 

In this paper, the power quality of a single-phase photovoltaic grid connected inverter when uses active islanding detection methods is investigated. Two main groups of these methods are analyzed in this paper. The main focus is on the output power quality of PV sources for these methods. Also the variation of output current THD, while the output power changes, is explored. The variation of output current THD is measured when the parameters of active islanding detection method are changed, and the limitation of these parameters for complying power quality standards in the nominal output power is detected. ©2009 IEEE  

Optical tweezers have proven to be indispensable tools for pico-Newton range force spectroscopy. A quadrant photodiode (QPD) positioned at the back focal plane of an optical tweezers’ condenser is commonly used for locating the trapped object. In this Letter, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we introduce a moiré pattern-based detection method for optical tweezers. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that this detection method could provide considerably better position sensitivity compared to the commonly used detection systems. For instance, position sensitivity for a trapped 2.17 μm polystyrene bead is shown to be 71% better than the commonly used QPD-based... 

In recent years, hardware Trojans (HTs) have become one of the main challenging concerns within the chain of manufacturing digital integrated circuit chips. Because of their diversity in chips, HTs are difficult to detect and locate. This paper attempted to propose a new improved method for detection and localization of HTs based on the real-time logical values of nodes. The algorithm extracts the nodes with special attributes. At the next stage, the nodes with the greatest similarity in terms of logical value are selected as targets. Depending on the size of the circuit, the extraction continues until a sufficient number of similar nodes has been selected. The logical relationship between... 

The detection and location of any Partial Discharge (PD) signal requires an accurate frequency dependent cable model to correctly simulate the PD signal attenuation during its propagation in the cable. This model should be capable of simulating the semiconducting layers, which have significant effects on PD signal attenuation and its propagation velocity. There is a substantial need for improvements in the flexibility of the transient cable model through direct introduction of the two semiconducting layers in the cable model. This can be employed in the next step to develop a 3-phase cable model for ATP. This paper has derived an impedance formula for the semiconducting layers. The... 

In this paper, the detection of a coded signal in additive white Gaussian noise and the interference is studied, where there is no knowledge about the correlation between the received symbols and about the noise and interference parameters. The Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimates of the unknown parameters are found, they are substituted in the probability density functions of the observation and the Generalized Likelihood Ratio (GLR) detector is derived. This detector can also be used for the activity detection of a signal in unknown Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI). In this case, the interference is modeled as the unknown correlation between the received symbols. Simulation examples are... 

Employing an admittance representation in the form of a black box model approximated by rational functions for linear power system components or network equivalents to be included in electromagnetic transient studies is a well-known method which improves calculation efficiency. All of the methods that have been proposed to solve the rational approximation problem have made efforts to overcome the problem of preserving the passivity of the final model. Passivity is a vital property, since a non-passive model may lead to an unstable transient simulation in the time domain. In this paper a post-processing technique for passivity enforcement through an iterative process for the detection and... 

In this paper, a design and construction method for an omnidirectional vision system is described, including how to use it on autonomous soccer robots for object detection, localization and, also, collision avoidance in the middle size league of RoboCup. This vision system uses two mirrors, flat and hyperbolic. The flat mirror is used for detecting very close objects around the robot body and the hyperbolic one is used as a global viewing device to construct a world model for the soccer field. This world model contains information about the position and orientation of the robot itself and the position of other objects in a fixed coordinate system. In addition, a fast object detection method...