Sharif Digital Repository

Calcium is a highly widespread and versatile intracellular ion that can control a wide range of temporal dynamics in the brain such as synaptic plasticity. This brief presents a novel and efficient digital circuit for implementing a calcium-based plasticity model aimed at reproducing relevant biological dynamics. Accordingly, we investigate the feasibility of the proposed model in a minimal neural network stressing on the effect of calcium oscillations on synaptic plasticity with various neuronal stimulation protocols. MATLAB simulations and physical implementations on field-programmable gate array confirm that the proposed model, with considerably low hardware overhead, can fairly mimic the... 

Significant increase of static power in nano-CMOS era and, subsequently, the end of Dennard scaling has put a Power Wall to further integration of CMOS technology in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). An efficient solution to cope with this obstacle is power gating inactive fractions of a single die, resulting in Dark Silicon. Previous studies employing power gating on SRAM-based FPGAs have primarily focused on using large-input Look-up Tables (LUTs). The architectures proposed in such studies inherently suffer from poor logic utilization which limits the benefits of power gating techniques. This paper proposes a Power-Efficient Architecture for FPGAs (PEAF) based on combination of... 

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2-way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side-channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the... 

Current-transformer (CT) saturation causes severe distortion in the measured current waveform which may lead to maloperation of the protective devices. This paper proposes a low-cost, power-electronic device to prevent the CT from saturation. The proposed compensator is inserted in series with the relay in the CT secondary circuit and acts as a controlled voltage source (CVS). The proposed CVS generates a time-varying voltage to cancel the voltage developed across the CT burden; therefore, the CT magnetic flux remains almost constant and undistorted during the power system transients. It will be shown that this device can precisely compensate fault current, inrush current, and other probable... 

In distribution systems, feeder reconfiguration (FR) can lead to loss reduction, reliability improvement and some other economic savings. These advantages can be intensified by proper control and switching of Capacitor Banks (CBs). In this paper, using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique, a novel method is proposed for simultaneous dynamic scheduling of FR and CB switching in the presence of DG units having uncertain and variant generations over time. This method is applicable to both smart and classic distribution systems. While for the latter, state estimation method should be used to estimate the loads at different buses by employing a limited number of measurements. The objective of... 

In this paper, we propose a mm-wave transmitter architecture intended for radar and 5G MIMO applications with beam steering over 57-63 GHz frequency band. Each transmitter chain comprises an all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) CMOS IC chip intended to be dictated to a single antenna unit within an array. For demonstration purposes, each IC is embedded on a printed circuit board (PCB) to provide beam steering using highly accurate digital approach. The overall transmitter is connected to an antenna array with half wavelength spaced elements to maximize the beam scanning coverage. The ADPLL boards are fabricated and a calibration technique is carried out to align amplitude-phase of all... 

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging modality that provides cross-sectional images from microstructures of tissues. This optical imaging system works based on Michelson interferometry principle and has intermediate resolution and penetration depth which makes it appropriate for imaging thin tissues such as skin and eye. OCT images suffer from three main artifacts that make images difficult to be analyzed. The first one is small grainy structures called speckle which degrade image quality and decreases axial and lateral resolution. The second one is light intensity attenuation which is a function of depth. It happens because of absorbing and scattering nature of tissue... 

Adapting natural phenomena rendering for realtime applications has become a common practice in computer graphics.We propose a GPU-based multi-band method for optimized synthesis of "far from coast" ocean waves using an empirical Fourier domain model. Instead of performing two independent syntheses for low- and high-band frequencies of ocean waves, we perform only low-band synthesis and employ results to reproduce high frequency details of ocean surface by an optimized iterative up-sampling stage. Our experimental results show that this approach greatly improves the performance of original multi-band synthesis while maintaining image quality. © Springer-Verlag 2009  

This paper presents a method to control a manipulator system grasping a rigid-body payload so that the motion of the combined system as a consequence of external applied forces is the same as any other free-floating rigid-body (with different inertial properties). This allows 0-g emulation of a scaled spacecraft prototype under the test in a 1-g laboratory environment. The controller consisting of motion feedback and force/moment feedback adjusts the motion of the test spacecraft so as to match that of the flight spacecraft, even if the latter has flexible appendages (such as solar panels) and the former is rigid. The stability of the overall system is analytically investigated, and the... 

Large-scale simulation of spiking neural networks on hardware with a remarkable resemblance to their mathematical models is a key objective of the neuromorphic discipline. This issue is, however, considerably resource-intensive due to the presence of nonlinear terms in neuron models. This paper proposes a novel uniform piecewise linear segmentation approach for nonlinear function evaluations. Employing the proposed approach, we present a uniform-segmented adaptive exponential neuron model capable of accurately producing various responses exhibited by the original model and suitable for efficient large-scale implementation. In contrast to previous nonuniform-segmented neuron models, the... 

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing services, the more number of cloud data centers are constructed over the globe. This makes the power consumption of cloud data center elements as a big challenge. Hereby, several software and hardware approaches have been proposed to handle this issue. However, this problem has not been optimally solved yet. In this paper, we propose an online cloud resource management with live migration of virtual machines (VMs) to reduce power consumption. To do so, a prediction-based and power-aware virtual machine allocation algorithm is proposed. Also, we present a three-tier framework for energy-efficient resource management in cloud data centers.... 

We propose a new nonlinear Rao-Nam like symmetric key encryption scheme. In our design, we employ a specific type of coded modulation schemes namely quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) lattice-codes which have low-complexity encoding and decoding algorithms. Due to the application of coded modulation schemes in our design, the proposed scheme performs encryption, encoding and modulation simultaneously. Therefore, we regard the proposed scheme as a joint cryptosystem. The proposed joint cryptosystem withstands all variants of chosen plaintext attacks applied on Rao-Nam like cryptosystems due to its nonlinearity. Moreover, some conditions implying the uniformity of the ciphertexts... 

Isogeny-based cryptography is one of the promising post-quantum candidates mainly because of its smaller public key length. Due to its high computational cost, efficient implementations are significantly important. In this paper, we have proposed a high-speed FPGA implementation of the supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) and key encapsulation (SIKE). To this end, we have adapted the algorithm of finding optimal large-degree isogeny computation strategy for hardware implementations. Using this algorithm, hardware-suited strategies (HSSs) can be devised. We have also developed a tool to schedule field arithmetic operations efficiently using constraint programming. This tool enables... 

Cooperative relaying can be introduced as a promising approach for data communication in the Internet of Things (IoT), where the source and the destination may be placed far away. In this paper, by taking a variety of realistic hardware imperfections (HWIs) and channels estimation errors (CEEs) into account, the secrecy performance of a three-hop cooperative network with a source, a destination and two consecutive amplify-and-forward (AF) relays is investigated. The relays are considered to be untrusted, i.e., while they are mandatory helpers for data transmission, they may overhear the received signals. We adopt the artificial noise injection scheme, to keep the source message secret from... 

In this study, a new heuristic multiple model filter, called Multiple Model Extended Continuous Ant Colony Filter, is proposed to solve a nonlinear multiple model state estimation problem. In this filter, a bank of extended continuous ant colony filters are run in parallel to solve the multiple model estimation problem. The probability of each model is continually updated and consequently both the true model and the states of the nonlinear system are updated based on the weighted sum of the filters. The new multiple model filter is tested on an engineering problem. The problem is to estimate simultaneously the states of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle as well as the wind model, applied... 

The growing complexity of today's embedded systems demands new methodologies and tools to manage the problems of analysis, design, implementation, and validation of complex-embedded systems. Focusing on this issue, this paper describes a design and implementation toolset using our ODYSSEY methodology, which advocates object-oriented (OO) modeling of embedded systems and its ASIP-based implementation. The proposed approach promotes a smooth transition from high-level object-oriented specification to the final embedded system, which is composed of hardware and software components. The transition from higher to lower abstraction levels is facilitated by the use of our GUI, which supports the... 

The pyramid network is one of the most important interconnection topologies used as hardware architecture or software data structure. It has a combined tree-mesh structure making it suitable for solving many parallel problems and applications. This paper proposes a parallel algorithm for Hermite Interpolation on the Pyramid network which has at least N nodes. The proposed algorithm has 3 phases: initialization, main, and final. The algorithm is optimal with a time complexity of O(N) for an N-point interpolation. ©2007 IEEE  

In this paper, a hardware control flow checking technique is presented and evaluated. This technique uses reconfigurable of the shelf FPGA in order to concurrently check the execution flow of the target micro processor. The technique assigns signatures to the main program in the compile time and verifies the signatures using a FPGA as a watchdog processor to detect possible violation caused by the transient faults. The main characteristic of this technique is its ability to be applied to any kind of processor architecture and platforms. The low imposed hardware and performance overhead by this technique makes it suitable for those applications in which cost is a major concern, such as... 

In cloud computing services, high availability is one of the quality of service requirements which is necessary to maintain customer confidence. High availability systems can be built by applying redundant nodes and multiple clusters in order to cope with software and hardware failures. Due to cloud computing complexity, dependability analysis of the cloud may require combining state-based and nonstate-based modeling techniques. This article proposes a hierarchical model combining reliability block diagrams and continuous time Markov chains to evaluate the availability of OpenStack private clouds, by considering different scenarios. The steady-state availability, downtime, and cost are used... 

The rapid growth in the supply chain of electronic devices has led companies to purchase Intellectual Property or Integrated Circuits from unreliable sources. This dispersion in the design to fabrication stages of IP/IC has led to new attacks called hardware Trojans. Hardware Trojans can bargain information, reduce performance, or cause failure. Various methods have been introduced to detect or prevent hardware Trojans. Machine learning methods are one of these. Selecting the type and number of input variables in the learning algorithm has an important role in the performance of the learning model. Some previous hardware Trojan detection studies have used structural gate-level features to...