Sharif Digital Repository

Soft errors due to cosmic radiations are the main reliability threat during lifetime operation of digital systems. Fast and accurate estimation of soft error rate (SER) is essential in obtaining the reliability parameters of a digital system in order to balance reliability, performance, and cost of the system. Previous techniques for SER estimation are mainly based on fault injection and random simulations. In this paper, we present an analytical SER modeling technique for ASIC designs that can significantly reduce SER estimation time while achieving very high accuracy. This technique can be used for both combinational and sequential circuits. We also present an approach to obtain... 

In this paper, a second order accurate cell-centered finite volume method (FVM) is coupled with a finite element method (FEM) to solve the deformation of a saturated porous layer based on Biot's consolidation model. The proposed numerical technique is applied to the fully unstructured triangular grids to simulate actual geological formations. To reconstruct the pressure gradient at control volume faces, the diamond scheme is implemented as a multipoint flux approximation method. Also the least square algorithm is used to interpolate pressure at the vertices from the cell-center values. The stability of this numerical model is studied in comparison to the different FEMs through various... 

In this paper a locally mass conservative finite volume method is employed to model the one-dimensional, two-phase immiscible flow in a poroelastic media. Since, an appropriate choice of primary variables is critical in simulating multiphase subsurface flow, depending on such a choice, the governing equations can be expressed in different forms. By implementing Picard iteration to a highly nonlinear system of equations, three numerical models including pressure form, mixed form and mixed form with a modified Picard linearization are developed in this study. These models have been evaluated in terms of stability, convergence and mass conservation in various one-dimensional test cases.... 

In this study, two classes of advanced finite volume schemes, including Multi-Point Flux Approximation (MPFA) and Dual Discrete Finite Volume (DDFV) method, have been employed in conjunction with the finite element (FE) geomechanics simulator to model the coupled fluid-solid system. Fully saturated porous media with poroelastic behavior, random field permeability and elastic modulus are considered as parameters. The performance of the proposed hydro-mechanical models, including MPFA O-FEM and DDFV-FEM, is examined through different test cases. First, the models are validated and compared with the closed-form solutions in the homogeneous domain. Second, the methods' stability and convergence... 

This paper presents a new approach to better utilize international air-corridors for formation flights. Using Particle Swarm Optimization, we show how different long-range flights can be brought together to form a formation. The idea serves both to increase international air-corridor capacities together and to decrease fuel consumption up to 8-10%. Case studies show that there are many places which such an approach could effectively be implemented to help cope with increase in fuel price as well as the demand for aerial transport of passengers and goods  

Generous flexibility of Look-Up Tables (LUTs) in implementing arbitrary functions comes with significant performance and area overheads compared with their Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) equivalent. One approach to alleviate such overheads is to use less flexible logic elements capable to implement majority of logic functions. In this paper, we first investigate the most frequently used functions in standard benchmarks and then design a set of less-flexible but area-efficient logic cells, called Hard Logics (HL). Since higher input functions have diverse classes, we leverage Shannon decomposition to break them into smaller ones to either reduce the HL design space complexity... 

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... 

Groundwater vulnerability assessment of urban areas is a challenging task in the fast trend of urbanization around the globe. This study introduces a new approach for modifying well-known parameters of common vulnerability indexes to adjust them for urban areas. The approach is independent of a specific weighting system. The aquifer of Mashhad city, contaminated by domestic wastewater, is selected as a case in this study. In order to evaluate the aquifer vulnerability due to anthropogenic activities, at first, parameters of depth to groundwater, recharge, land use, and soil are modified based on their basic concepts and their influences on contamination attenuation. Then, the modified... 

Food, energy, and water (FEW) resources have high interconnection and interdependencies as each resource can be affected by the other two. Thus, the Nexus approach is introduced and implemented to manage FEW. This chapter discusses each sector of FEW: availability, production, consumption, interaction, and interconnection between them, and finally suggests some action to improve the operation of the Nexus. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020  

While the transistor density continues to grow exponentially in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the increased leakage current of CMOS transistors act as a power wall for the aggressive integration of transistors in a single die. One recently trend to alleviate the power wall in FPGAs is to turn off inactive regions of the silicon die, referred to as dark silicon. This paper presents a reconfigurable architecture to enable effective fine-grained power gating of unused Logic Blocks (LBs) in FPGAs. In the proposed architecture, the traditional soft logic is replaced with Mega Cells (MCs), each consists of a set of complementary Generic Reconfigurable Hard Logic (GRHL) and a conventional... 

In this paper a finite volume (FV) numerical method is implemented to solve a Biot consolidation model with discontinuous coefficients. Our studies show that the FV scheme leads to a locally mass conservative approach which removes pressure oscillations especially along the interface between materials with different properties and yields higher accuracy for the flow and mechanics parameters. Then this numerical discretization is utilized to investigate different sequential strategies with various degrees of coupling including: iteratively, explicitly and loosely coupled methods. A comprehensive study is performed on the stability, accuracy and rate of convergence of all of these sequential... 

Nanoelectromechanical (NEM) relays are a promising emerging technology that has gained widespread research attention due to its zero leakage current, sharp ON-OFF transitions, and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatibility. As a result, NEM relays have been significantly investigated as highly energy-efficient design solutions. A major shortcoming of NEMs preventing their widespread use is their limited switching endurance. Hence, in order to utilize the low-power advantages of NEM relays, further device, circuit, and architectural techniques are required. In this paper, we introduce the concept of shadow NEM relays, which is a circuit-level technique to leverage the energy... 

The increased leakage power of deep-nano technologies in the one hand, and exponential growth in the number of transistors in a given die particularly in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have resulted in an intensified rate of static power dissipation as well as power density. This ever-increasing static power consumption acts as a power wall to further integration of transistors and has caused the breakdown of Dennard scaling. To meet the available power budget and preclude reliability challenges associated with high power density, designers are obligated to restrict the active percentage of the chip by powering off a selective fraction of silicon die, referred to as Dark Silicon.... 

Nowadays, embedded processors are widely used in wide range of domains from low-power to safety-critical applications. By providing prominent features such as variant peripheral support and flexibility to partial or major design modifications, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are commonly used to implement either an entire embedded system or a hardware description language-based processor, known as soft-core processor. FPGA-based designs, however, suffer from high power consumption, large die area, and low performance that hinders common use of soft-core processors in low-power embedded systems. In this paper, we present an efficient reconfigurable architecture to implement soft-core... 

This paper presents an analytical approach to estimate the speedup in a simulation-emulation cooperation environment. The speedup of this approach as compared with the speedup of a pure simulation is analyzed. Also, an analysis of the speedup is given when different types of application instructions are utilized. The analysis is based on using both Verilog and VHDL. The results show that when only the simulation part of the simulation-emulation co-operation is used, the speedup is higher, than when the pure simulation is used. The total speedup is also depended on the type of application instructions and the communication cycle time between the simulator and the emulator. © 2002 IEEE  

With continuous technology downscaling, the rate of radiation induced soft errors is rapidly increasing. Fast and accurate soft error vulnerability analysis in early design stages plays an important role in cost-effective reliability improvement. However, existing solutions are suitable for either regular (a.k.a address-based such as memory hierarchy) or irregular (random logic such as functional units and control logic) structures, failing to provide an accurate system-level analysis. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach integrating architecture-level and logic-level techniques to accurately estimate the vulnerability of all regular and irregular structures within a microprocessor.... 

Fast, accurate, and detailed Soft Error Rate (SER) estimation of digital circuits is essential for cost-efficient reliable design. A major step to accurately estimate a circuit SER is the computation of failure probability, which requires the computation of three derating factors, namely logical, electrical, and timing derating. The unified treatment of these derating factors is crucial to obtain accurate failure probability. Existing SER estimation techniques are either unscalable to large circuits or inaccurate due to lack of unified treatment of all derating factors. In this paper, we present fast and efficient algorithms to estimate SERs of circuit components in the presence of single... 

Continuous shrinking of transistor size to provide high computation capability along with low power consumption has been accompanied by reliability degradations due to e.g., aging phenomenon. In this regard, with huge number of configuration bits, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are more susceptible to aging since aging not only degrades the performance, it may additionally result in corrupting the configuration cells and thus causing permanent circuit malfunctioning. While several works have investigated the aging effects in Look-Up Tables (LUTs), the routing fabric of these devices is seldom studied - even though it contributes to the majority of FPGAs' resources and configuration... 

In this work, the rising of a single bubble in a quiescent liquid under microgravity condition was simulated. In addition to general studies of microgravity effects, the initiation of hydrodynamic convection, solely due to the variations of interface curvature (surface tension force) and thus the generation of shearing forces at the interfaces, was also studied. Then, the variation of surface tension due to the temperature gradient (Marangoni convection), which can initiate the onset of convection even in the absence of buoyancy, was studied. The related unsteady incompressible full Navier-Stokes equations were solved using a finite difference method with a structured staggered grid. The... 

In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the impact of aging on the interconnection network of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and propose novel approaches to mitigate the aging effects on the routing network. We first show the insignificant impact of aging on data integrity of FPGAs, i.e., static noise margin and soft error rate of the configuration cells, as well as we show the negligible impact of the mentioned degradations on the FPGA performance. As such, we focus on the performance degradation of datapath transistors. In this regard, we propose a routing accompanied by a placement algorithm that prevents constant stress on transistors by evenly distributing the...