Design flow for efficient FPGA reconfiguration

In Run Time Reconfiguration (RTR) systems, the amount of reconfiguration is considerable when compared to the circuit changes implemented. This is because reconfiguration is not considered as part of the design flow. This paper presents a method for reconfigurable circuit design by modeling the underlying FPGA reconfigurable circuitry and taking it into consideration in the system design. This is demonstrated for an image processing example on the Xilinx Virtex FPGA.

Multiplier-less realization of a poly-phase filter using LUT-based FPGAs

In DSP applications such as fixed transforms and filtering, the full flexibility of a general-purpose multiplier is not required and only a limited range of values is needed on one of the multiplier inputs. A new design technique has been developed for deriving multipliers that operate on a limited range of multiplicands. This can be used to produce FPGA implementations of DSP systems where area is dramatically improved. The paper describes the technique and its application to the design of a poly-phase filter on a Virtex FPGA. A 62% area reduction and 7% speed increase is gained when compared to an equivalent design using general purpose multipliers. It is also compared favourably to other known fixed coefficient approaches.

Is there a place for e-learning in clinical skills? A survey of undergradute medical students experiences and attitudes

e-learning is established in many medical schools. However the effectiveness of e-learning has been difficult to quantify and there have been concerns that such educational activities may be driven more by novelty, than pedagogical evidence. Where some domains may lend themselves well to e-learning, clinical skills has been considered a challenging area for online learning.

The "Art" of Criticism: Rubén Darío and his Unknown Chronicles of the 1895 Salon for "La Prensa"

With the impetus that has led recent studies on Latin American Modernism to a reevaluation of the sense of cultural fluxes from the modernity capitals to its peripheries –discarding categories such as “influence”, “exotism” and “ivory tower”, stereotypes that have clouded critical understanding of this aesthetics for decades- the present study intends to investigate a persistent practice of the main writers of the movement. This practice is modernist pictorial criticism, a genre that will be approached through the analysis of an unknown corpus: the seven chronicles Rubén Darío published in the journal La Prensa on occasion of the third art exposition of the Ateneo de Buenos Aires. Our hypothesis is that the rare creators of images portrayed by Darío by the end of 1895 work as a visual counterpoint of the eccentric writers’ biographical sketches that a year later will be part of the fundamental volume Los raros (1896). In this early “salon”, which we reproduce in its entirety, accompanied by explanatory notes, the leader of Modernism rehearses and consolidates his transcultural work with the universal tradition –now applied to the Salons (1845-1860) by Charles Baudelaire and to the monumental project by John Ruskin in Modern painters (1843-1860)- to legitimate, from another subgenre of Modernist criticism, a new figure of the critic, in dissent with the Enlightenment model of the writer.