An in vitro study of the radiobiological effects of flattening filter free radiotherapy treatments

Flattening filter free (FFF) linear accelerators allow for an increase in instantaneous dose-rate of the x-ray pulses by a factor of 2-6 over the conventional flattened output. As a result, radiobiological investigations are being carried out to determine the effect of these higher dose-rates on cell response. The studies reported thus far have presented conflicting results, highlighting the need for further investigation. To determine the radiobiological impact of the increased dose-rates from FFF exposures a Varian Truebeam medical linear accelerator was used to irradiate two human cancer cell lines in vitro, DU-145 prostate and H460 non-small cell lung, with both flattened and FFF 6 MV beams. The fluence profile of the FFF beam was modified using a custom-designed Nylon compensator to produce a similar dose profile to the flattened beam (6X) at the cell surface but at a higher instantaneous dose-rate. For both cell lines there appeared to be no significant change in cell survival. Curve fitting coefficients for DU145 cells irradiated with constant average dose-rates were 6X: alpha = 0.09 +/- 0.03, beta = 0.03 +/- 0.01 and 6FFF: alpha = 0.14 +/- 0.13, beta = 0.03 +/- 0.02 with a significance of p = 0.75. For H460 cells irradiated with the same instantaneous dose-rate but different average dose-rate the fit coefficients were 6FFF (low dose-rate): alpha = 0.21 +/- 0.11, 0.07 +/- 0.02 and 6FFF (high dose-rate): alpha = 0.21 +/- 0.16, 0.07 +/- 0.03, with p = 0.79. The results indicate that collective damage behaviour does not occur at the instantaneous dose-rates investigated here and that the use of either modality should result in the same clinical outcome, however this will require further validation in vivo.

Modified Thomson spectrometer design for high energy, multi-species ion sources

A modification to the standard Thomson parabola spectrometer is discussed, which is designed to measure high energy (tens of MeV/nucleon), broad bandwidth spectra of multi-species ions accelerated by intense laser plasma interactions. It is proposed to implement a pair of extended, trapezoidal shaped electric plates, which will not only resolve ion traces at high energies, but will also retain the lower energy part of the spectrum. While a longer (along the axis of the undeflected ion beam direction) electric plate design provides effective charge state separation at the high energy end of the spectrum, the proposed new trapezoidal shape will enable the low energy ions to reach the detector, which would have been clipped or blocked by simply extending the rectangular plates to enhance the electrostatic deflection.

Hybrid address spaces: A methodology for implementing scalable high-level programming models on non-coherent many-core architectures

This paper introduces hybrid address spaces as a fundamental design methodology for implementing scalable runtime systems on many-core architectures without hardware support for cache coherence. We use hybrid address spaces for an implementation of MapReduce, a programming model for large-scale data processing, and the implementation of a remote memory access (RMA) model. Both implementations are available on the Intel SCC and are portable to similar architectures. We present the design and implementation of HyMR, a MapReduce runtime system whereby different stages and the synchronization operations between them alternate between a distributed memory address space and a shared memory address space, to improve performance and scalability. We compare HyMR to a reference implementation and we find that HyMR improves performance by a factor of 1.71× over a set of representative MapReduce benchmarks. We also compare HyMR with Phoenix++, a state-of-art implementation for systems with hardware-managed cache coherence in terms of scalability and sustained to peak data processing bandwidth, where HyMR demon- strates improvements of a factor of 3.1× and 3.2× respectively. We further evaluate our hybrid remote memory access (HyRMA) programming model and assess its performance to be superior of that of message passing.

Systolic two-port adaptor for high performance wave digital filtering

The authors present a VLSI circuit for implementing wave digital filter (WDF) two-port adaptors. Considerable speedups over conventional designs have been obtained using fine grained pipelining. This has been achieved through the use of most significant bit (MSB) first carry-save arithmetic, which allows systems to be designed in which latency L is small and independent of either coefficient or input data wordlength. L is determined by the online delay associated with the computation required at each node in the circuit (in this case a multiply/add plus two separate additions). This in turn means that pipelining can be used to considerably enhance the sampling rate of a recursive digital filter. The level of pipelining which will offer enhancement is determined by L and is fine-grained rather than bit level. In the case of the circuit considered, L = 3. For this reason pipeline delays (half latches) have been introduced between every two rows of cells to produce a system with a once every cycle sample rate.

Synthesizable high performance adaptive equaliser and viterbi decoder for the class-IV PRML channel

The design and VLSI implementation of two key components of the class-IV partial response maximum likelihood channel (PR-IV) the adaptive filter and the Viterbi decoder are described. These blocks are implemented using parameterised VHDL modules, from a library of common digital signal processing (DSP) and arithmetic functions. Design studies, based on 0.6 micron 3.3V standard cell processes, indicate that worst case sampling rates of 49 mega-samples per second are achievable for this system, with proportionally high sampling rates for full custom designs and smaller dimension processes. Significant increases in the sampling rate, from 49 MHz to approximately 180 MHz, can be achieved by operating four filter modules in parallel, and this implementation has 50% lower power consumption than a pipelined filter operating at the same speed.

High-impedance metasurfaces with interwoven conductor patterns

High impedance metasurfaces (HIMSs) formed by interwoven conductor arrays are proposed. Bandwidth comparable with that of the basic square patches is achieved at an order of magnitude smaller unit cells. The presented structures are apt for small mobile terminals and low frequency applications.

Interwoven spiral arrays on ferrite-dielectric substrates for high-impedance metasurfaces

A high impedance metasurface (HIMS) composed of the arrays of intertwined planar spirals on thin (~0.1λ) ferrite-dielectric substrate is proposed. The HIMS exhibits fractional bandwidth in excess of 10% and excellent angular and polarisation stability of the circular polarised waves at oblique incidence.

Holistic Design Strategy for High-Selectivity Low-Loss Integrated Millimetre-Wave Image-Reject Filters

To alleviate practical limitations in the design of mm-wave on-chip image-reject filters, systematic design methodologies are presented. Three low-order filters with high-selectivity and low-loss characteristics are designed and compared. Transmission zeroes are created by means of a quarter-wave transmission line (filter 1) and a series LC resonator (filters 2 and 3). Implemented on SiGe, the filters occupy 0.125, 0.064, and 0.079 mm2 chip area including pads. The measured transmission
losses across 81-86 GHz E-Band frequency range are 3.6-5.2 dB for filter 1, 3.1-4.7 dB for filter 2 and 3.6-5 dB for filter 3 where rejection levels at the image band are greater than 30 dB.

Superluminous Supernovae as Standardizable Candles and High-Redshift Distance Probes

We investigate the use of type Ic superluminous supernovae (SLSN Ic) as standardizable candles and distance indicators. Their appeal as cosmological probes stems from their remarkable peak luminosities, hot blackbody temperatures, and bright rest-frame ultraviolet emission. We present a sample of 16 published SLSN, from redshifts 0.1 to 1.2, and calculate accurate K corrections to determine uniform magnitudes in 2 synthetic rest-frame filter bandpasses with central wavelengths at 400 nm and 520 nm. At 400 nm, we find an encouragingly low scatter in their uncorrected, raw mean magnitudes with M(400) = -21.86 ± 0.35 mag for the full sample of 16 objects. We investigate the correlation between their decline rates and peak magnitude and find that the brighter events appear to decline more slowly. In a manner similar to the Phillips relation for type Ia SNe (SNe Ia), we define a ΔM 20 decline relation. This correlates peak magnitude and decline over 20 days and can reduce the scatter in standardized peak magnitudes to ±0.22 mag. We further show that M(400) appears to have a strong color dependence. Redder objects are fainter and also become redder faster. Using this peak magnitudecolor evolution relation, a surprisingly low scatter of between ±0.08 mag and ±0.13 mag can be found in peak magnitudes, depending on sample selection. However, we caution that only 8 to 10 objects currently have enough data to test this peak magnitudecolor evolution relation. We conclude that SLSN Ic are promising distance indicators in the high-redshift universe in regimes beyond those possible with SNe Ia. Although the empirical relationships are encouraging, the unknown progenitor systems, how they may evolve with redshift, and the uncertain explosion physics are of some concern. The two major measurement uncertainties are the limited numbers of low-redshift, well-studied objects available to test these relationships and internal dust extinction in the host galaxies.

Flexible management of bandwidth and redundancy in fieldbuses

Os sistemas distribuídos embarcados (Distributed Embedded Systems – DES) têm sido usados ao longo dos últimos anos em muitos domínios de aplicação, da robótica, ao controlo de processos industriais passando pela aviónica e pelas aplicações veiculares, esperando-se que esta tendência continue nos próximos anos. A confiança no funcionamento é uma propriedade importante nestes domínios de aplicação, visto que os serviços têm de ser executados em tempo útil e de forma previsível, caso contrário, podem ocorrer danos económicos ou a vida de seres humanos poderá ser posta em causa. Na fase de projecto destes sistemas é impossível prever todos os cenários de falhas devido ao não determinismo do ambiente envolvente, sendo necessária a inclusão de mecanismos de tolerância a falhas. Adicionalmente, algumas destas aplicações requerem muita largura de banda, que também poderá ser usada para a evolução dos sistemas, adicionandolhes novas funcionalidades. A flexibilidade de um sistema é uma propriedade importante, pois permite a sua adaptação às condições e requisitos envolventes, contribuindo também para a simplicidade de manutenção e reparação. Adicionalmente, nos sistemas embarcados, a flexibilidade também é importante por potenciar uma melhor utilização dos, muitas vezes escassos, recursos existentes. Uma forma evidente de aumentar a largura de banda e a tolerância a falhas dos sistemas embarcados distribuídos é a replicação dos barramentos do sistema. Algumas soluções existentes, quer comerciais quer académicas, propõem a replicação dos barramentos para aumento da largura de banda ou para aumento da tolerância a falhas. No entanto e quase invariavelmente, o propósito é apenas um, sendo raras as soluções que disponibilizam uma maior largura de banda e um aumento da tolerância a falhas. Um destes raros exemplos é o FlexRay, com a limitação de apenas ser permitido o uso de dois barramentos. Esta tese apresentada e discute uma proposta para usar a replicação de barramentos de uma forma flexível com o objectivo duplo de aumentar a largura de banda e a tolerância a falhas. A flexibilidade dos protocolos propostos também permite a gestão dinâmica da topologia da rede, sendo o número de barramentos apenas limitado pelo hardware/software. As propostas desta tese foram validadas recorrendo ao barramento de campo CAN – Controller Area Network, escolhido devido à sua grande implantação no mercado. Mais especificamente, as soluções propostas foram implementadas e validadas usando um paradigma que combina flexibilidade com comunicações event-triggered e time-triggered: o FTT – Flexible Time- Triggered. No entanto, uma generalização para CAN nativo é também apresentada e discutida. A inclusão de mecanismos de replicação do barramento impõe a alteração dos antigos protocolos de replicação e substituição do nó mestre, bem como a definição de novos protocolos para esta finalidade. Este trabalho tira partido da arquitectura centralizada e da replicação do nó mestre para suportar de forma eficiente e flexível a replicação de barramentos. Em caso de ocorrência de uma falta num barramento (ou barramentos) que poderia provocar uma falha no sistema, os protocolos e componentes propostos nesta tese fazem com que o sistema reaja, mudando para um modo de funcionamento degradado. As mensagens que estavam a ser transmitidas nos barramentos onde ocorreu a falta são reencaminhadas para os outros barramentos. A replicação do nó mestre baseia-se numa estratégia líder-seguidores (leaderfollowers), onde o líder (leader) controla todo o sistema enquanto os seguidores (followers) servem como nós de reserva. Se um erro ocorrer no nó líder, um dos nós seguidores passará a controlar o sistema de uma forma transparente e mantendo as mesmas funcionalidades. As propostas desta tese foram também generalizadas para CAN nativo, tendo sido para tal propostos dois componentes adicionais. É, desta forma possível ter as mesmas capacidades de tolerância a falhas ao nível dos barramentos juntamente com a gestão dinâmica da topologia de rede. Todas as propostas desta tese foram implementadas e avaliadas. Uma implementação inicial, apenas com um barramento foi avaliada recorrendo a uma aplicação real, uma equipa de futebol robótico onde o protocolo FTT-CAN foi usado no controlo de movimento e da odometria. A avaliação do sistema com múltiplos barramentos foi feita numa plataforma de teste em laboratório. Para tal foi desenvolvido um sistema de injecção de faltas que permite impor faltas nos barramentos e nos nós mestre, e um sistema de medida de atrasos destinado a medir o tempo de resposta após a ocorrência de uma falta.

Reconfigurable transmitters for software-defined radios

Flexible radio transmitters based on the Software-Defined Radio (SDR) concept are gaining an increased research importance due to the unparalleled proliferation of new wireless standards operating at different frequencies, using dissimilar coding and modulation schemes, and targeted for different ends. In this new wireless communications paradigm, the physical layer of the radio transmitter must be able to support the simultaneous transmission of multi-band, multi-rate, multi-standard signals, which in practice is very hard or very inefficient to implement using conventional approaches. Nevertheless, the last developments in this field include novel all-digital transmitter architectures where the radio datapath is digital from the baseband up to the RF stage. Such concept has inherent high flexibility and poses an important step towards the development of SDR-based transmitters. However, the truth is that implementing such radio for a real world communications scenario is a challenging task, where a few key limitations are still preventing a wider adoption of this concept. This thesis aims exactly to address some of these limitations by proposing and implementing innovative all-digital transmitter architectures with inherent higher flexibility and integration, and where improving important figures of merit, such as coding efficiency, signal-to-noise ratio, usable bandwidth and in-band and out-of-band noise will also be addressed. In the first part of this thesis, the concept of transmitting RF data using an entirely digital approach based on pulsed modulation is introduced. A comparison between several implementation technologies is also presented, allowing to state that FPGAs provide an interesting compromise between performance, power efficiency and flexibility, thus making them an interesting choice as an enabling technology for pulse-based all-digital transmitters. Following this discussion, the fundamental concepts inherent to pulsed modulators, its key advantages, main limitations and typical enhancements suitable for all-digital transmitters are also presented. The recent advances regarding the two most common classes of pulse modulated transmitters, namely the RF and the baseband-level are introduced, along with several examples of state-of-the-art architectures found on the literature. The core of this dissertation containing the main developments achieved during this PhD work is then presented and discussed. The first key contribution to the state-of-the-art presented here consists in the development of a novel ΣΔ-based all-digital transmitter architecture capable of multiband and multi-standard data transmission in a very flexible and integrated way, where the pulsed RF output operating in the microwave frequency range is generated inside a single FPGA device. A fundamental contribution regarding the simultaneous transmission of multiple RF signals is then introduced by presenting and describing novel all-digital transmitter architectures that take advantage of multi-gigabit data serializers available on current high-end FPGAs in order to transmit in a time-interleaved approach multiple independent RF carriers. Further improvements in this design approach allowed to provide a two-stage up-conversion transmitter architecture enabling the fine frequency tuning of concurrent multichannel multi-standard signals. Finally, further improvements regarding two key limitations inherent to current all-digital transmitter approaches are then addressed, namely the poor coding efficiency and the combined high quality factor and tunability requirements of the RF output filter. The followed design approach based on poliphase multipath circuits allowed to create a new FPGA-embedded agile transmitter architecture that significantly improves important figures of merit, such as coding efficiency and SNR, while maintains the high flexibility that is required for supporting multichannel multimode data transmission.

Compact high linearity switchable dual-mode microstrip bandpass filters

A compact highly linear microstrip dual-mode electronically switchable filter is presented. The key characteristics of the dual-mode switchable filter are investigated and described. A second order filter design procedure is outlined to facilitate the realisation of Butterworth and Chebyshev functions. The proposed filter was built and tested with NXP pin diode model BAP65-03. The measured and simulated results are in good agreement. The measured insertion loss in the ON state was 3.0 dB the isolation in the OFF state was 45 dB at the centre frequency. An evaluation of filter distortion is presented for digitally modulated 16 QAM and QPSK signals.

Adaptive modeling and high quality spectral estimation for speech enhancement

In this work an adaptive modeling and spectral estimation scheme based on a dual Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) is proposed for speech enhancement. Both speech and noise signals are modeled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and improves time-frequency resolution. The model parameters are arranged to obtain a combined state-space model and are also used to calculate instantaneous power spectral density estimates. The speech enhancement is performed by a dual discrete Kalman filter that simultaneously gives estimates for the models and the signals. This approach is particularly useful as a pre-processing module for parametric based speech recognition systems that rely on spectral time dependent models. The system performance has been evaluated by a set of human listeners and by spectral distances. In both cases the use of this pre-processing module has led to improved results.

Adaptive filtering for high quality HMM based speech synthesis

In this work an adaptive filtering scheme based on a dual Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) is proposed for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based speech synthesis quality enhancement. The objective is to improve signal smoothness across HMMs and their related states and to reduce artifacts due to acoustic model's limitations. Both speech and artifacts are modelled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and improves time-frequency resolution. Themodel parameters are arranged to obtain a combined state-space model and are also used to calculate instantaneous power spectral density estimates. The quality enhancement is performed by a dual discrete Kalman filter that simultaneously gives estimates for the models and the signals. The system's performance has been evaluated using mean opinion score tests and the proposed technique has led to improved results.

Inference for nonparametric high-frequency estimators with an application to time variation in betas

We consider the problem of conducting inference on nonparametric high-frequency estimators without knowing their asymptotic variances. We prove that a multivariate subsampling method achieves this goal under general conditions that were not previously available in the literature. We suggest a procedure for a data-driven choice of the bandwidth parameters. Our simulation study indicates that the subsampling method is much more robust than the plug-in method based on the asymptotic expression for the variance. Importantly, the subsampling method reliably estimates the variability of the Two Scale estimator even when its parameters are chosen to minimize the finite sample Mean Squared Error; in contrast, the plugin estimator substantially underestimates the sampling uncertainty. By construction, the subsampling method delivers estimates of the variance-covariance matrices that are always positive semi-definite. We use the subsampling method to study the dynamics of financial betas of six stocks on the NYSE. We document significant variation in betas within year 2006, and find that tick data captures more variation in betas than the data sampled at moderate frequencies such as every five or twenty minutes. To capture this variation we estimate a simple dynamic model for betas. The variance estimation is also important for the correction of the errors-in-variables bias in such models. We find that the bias corrections are substantial, and that betas are more persistent than the naive estimators would lead one to believe.