Host Personal Computer Research Articles

High-precision high-speed nanopore ping-pong control system based on field programmable gate array.

"Molecular ping-pong," emerging as a control strategy in solid-state nanopore technology, presents a highly promising approach for repetitive measurements of single biomolecules, such as DNA. This paper introduces a high-precision, high-speed nanopore molecular ping-pong control system consisting of a home-built trans-impedance amplifier (TIA), a control system based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), and a LabVIEW program operating on the host personal computer. Through feedback compensation and post-stage boosting, the TIA achieves a high bandwidth of about 200kHz with a gain of 100 MΩ, along with low input-referred current noise of 1.6 × 10-4pA2/Hz at 1kHz and 1.1 × 10-3pA2/Hz at 100kHz. The FPGA-based control system demonstrates a minimum overall response time (tdelay) of 6.5 μs from the analog input current signal trigger to the subsequent reversal of the analog output drive voltage signal, with a control precision of 1 μs. Additionally, a LabVIEW program has been developed to facilitate rapid data exchange and communication with the FPGA program, enabling real-time signal monitoring, parameter adjustment, and data storage. Successful recapture of individual DNA molecules at various tdelay, resulting in an improvement in capture rate by up to 2 orders of magnitude, has been demonstrated. With unprecedented control precision and capture efficiency, this system provides robust technical support and opens novel research avenues for nanopore single-molecule sensing and manipulation.

Microcontroller-based acquisition system for evoked otoacoustic emissions: Protocol and methodology

This work presents the development of a signal acquisition and processing system for the fast detection of Transient-Evoked Otoacoustic Emissions (TEOAE). It was built under IEC 60645-6, IEC 62304, and IEC 82304-1 standards. Hardware and firmware specifications based on a Cortex-M7 microcontroller and an ER-10D acquisition probe are presented. A user interface was designed for parameter configuration and monitoring the detection process in a host personal computer. The signal processing chain is presented, and a time–frequency binary-mask approach is proposed to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, leading to a significant decrease in the average detection time. Results obtained with the implemented prototype for two different detection strategies were compared with those from a commercial equipment. Screening tests were performed with eight volunteers and one neonate with normal hearing. On average, the proposed hardware and associated signal processing methods provided a detection time fourteen times faster than the analyzed commercial system. These results are of special interest to developers of TEOAE screening systems.

Optimal Control Design and Online Controller-Area-Network Bus Data Analysis for a Light Commercial Hybrid Electric Vehicle

In this article, a hybrid powertrain for the Volkswagen (VW) Crafter is designed using the Model-In-The-Loop (MIL) method. An enhanced Proportional-Integral (PI) control technique based on integral cost functions is developed by carrying out a time-based simulation in MATLAB/Simulink software to realize the optimal fuel economy of the vehicle. Moreover, a comparative study is conducted between the vehicle’s hybrid and pure electric versions to assess the optimal battery energy consumption per unit distance traveled. Communication within our vehicles’ Electronic Control Units (ECUs) is facilitated by a message-based protocol called a Controller Area Network (CAN). Consequently, this paper presents an online CAN Bus data analysis using the Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) method. This method uses a standard frame, J1939 CAN protocol, implemented with Net CAN Plus 110 hardware. A graphical user interface is developed on a host Personal Computer (PC) using LabVIEW for decoding the acquired raw CAN data to physical values. The simulation results reveal that the proposed controller is promising and suitable for realizing optimal performance over the HIL method.

SDR-based Intelligent Cooperative Spectrum Sensing for Cognitive Radio Systems

In this paper, the software and hardware of a software-defined radio (SDR) platform are used to implement and verify the blind real-time sensing act of intelligent collaborative spectrum sensing based on a new theoretical formula for constructing denoised mixed features named MSKU3 and paired with an unsupervised machine learning K-Medoids algorithm. Two low-cost RTL-SDR dongle hardware receivers are used as two cooperative unlicensed secondary users to capture the radio frequency of a licensed primary user channel. A host personal computer is used as a fusion center to run GNU-Radio software signal processing blocks to implement the developed method, and a single Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) N210 hardware transmitter based on FPGA is used to take up unoccupied desired radio frequency bandwidth. Two scenarios of signal-to-noise ratio levels have been adopted to verify and test the sensing performance of the developed system. The first one occurs when unlicensed secondary users have equal signal-to-noise ratio values. The second occurs when unlicensed secondary users have different signal-to-noise ratio values since each secondary user has their location. The experimental results of detecting action in terms of the probability of detection for the proposed method show that the theoretical and practical results are very close to each other.

Development of an Online Role-play-based Medical Interview Training Method for Fourth-year Pharmacy Students

With the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, businesses are rapidly expanding their online practices, and the online medical care system has been established and is growing. The field of pharmacy education is also looking for ways to conduct practical online training. Hence, we developed an online role-play-based medical interview training method for fourth-year pharmacy students. The purpose of this study was to describe in detail this method and to clarify the effect of online on medical interviewing practice. The training sessions were conducted using video teleconferencing software. Two settings were used for the role-play scenarios: the pharmacy and hospital. To evaluate the effectiveness of the sessions, a questionnaire was sent to the students, and the results were analyzed using text mining. The most important requirement for successfully conducting the interviews was a stable voice connection, and we reduced audio interruptions and delays by connecting the host personal computer to a wired local area network. We also solved the problem of howling when multiple terminals were installed in the same room by muting all devices in the room. Results of the analysis of the questionnaires suggested that students were more tense online. We also found that students perceived a difference between online and face-to-face interviews in terms of eye contact and the presentation of documents. In this way, we succeeded in conducting smooth online role-playing sessions while taking countermeasures against infection. In the future, it will be necessary to devise nonverbal communication methods and digital methods of presenting the training material.

A dual-layer context-based architecture for the detection of anomalous instructions sent to medical devices

Complex medical devices are controlled by instructions sent from a host personal computer (PC) to the device. Anomalous instructions can introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients (e.g., radiation overexposure), to physical device components (e.g., manipulation of device motors), or to functionality (e.g., manipulation of medical images). Threats can occur due to cyber-attacks, human error (e.g., using the wrong protocol, or misconfiguring the protocol's parameters by a technician), or host PC software bugs. Thus, anomalous instructions might represent an intentional threat to the patient or to the device, a human error, or simply a non-optimal operation of the device.To protect medical devices, we propose a new dual-layer architecture. The architecture analyzes the instructions sent from the host PC to the physical components of the device, to detect anomalous instructions using two detection layers: (1) an unsupervised context-free (CF) layer that detects anomalies based solely on the instruction's content and inter-correlations; and (2) a supervised context-sensitive (CS) layer that detects anomalies in both the clinical objective and patient contexts using a set of supervised classifiers pre-trained for each specific context.The proposed dual-layer architecture was evaluated in the computed tomography (CT) domain, using 4842 CT instructions that we recorded, including two types of CF anomalous instructions, four types of clinical objective context instructions and four types of patient context instructions. The CF layer was evaluated using 14 unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms. The CS layer was evaluated using six supervised classification algorithms applied to each context (i.e., clinical objective or patient).Adding the second CS supervised layer to the architecture improved the overall anomaly detection performance (by improving the detection of CS anomalous instructions [when they were not also CF anomalous]) from an F1 score baseline of 72.6%, to an improved F1 score of 79.1% to 99.5% (depending on the clinical objective or patient context used). Adding, the semantics-oriented CS layer enables the detection of CS anomalies using the semantics of the device's procedure, which is not possible when using just the purely syntactic CF layer. However, adding the CS layer also introduced a somewhat increased false positive rate (FPR), and thus reduced somewhat the specificity of the overall process.We conclude that by using both the CF and CS layers, a dual-layer architecture can better detect anomalous instructions to medical devices. The increased FPR might be reduced, in the future, through the use of stronger models, and by training them on more data. The improved accuracy, and the potential capability of adding explanations to both layers, might be useful for creating decision support systems for medical device technicians.

A USRP-Based Testbed for Wideband Ranging and Positioning Signal Acquisition

For validation and demonstration of high accuracy ranging and positioning algorithms and systems, a wideband radio signal generation and acquisition testbed, tightly synchronized in time and frequency, is needed. The development of such a testbed requires solutions to several challenges. Tight time and frequency synchronization, derived from a centrally distributed time-frequency reference signal, needs to be maintained in the hardware of the transmitter and receiver nodes, and wideband signal acquisition requires sustainable data throughput between the receiver and host PC as well as data storage at GB level. This article presents a testbed for wideband radio signal acquisition, for validation and demonstration of high accuracy ranging and positioning. It consists of multiple Ettus X310 universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) and supports high accuracy (<; 100 ps) time-deterministic, sustainable signal transmission and acquisition, with a bandwidth up to 320 MHz (in dual channel mode) and frequencies up to 6 GHz. Generation and processing of wideband arbitrary signal waveforms is done offline. To realize these features, radio frequency on chip (RFNoC) compatible HDL units were developed for integration in the X310 SDR platform. Wideband transmission and signal acquisition at a lower duty cycle is applied to reduce the data offloading throughput to the host's personal computer (PC). Benchmarking of the platform was performed to demonstrate sustainable long duration dual channel acquisition. Indoor range measurements with the synchronous operation of the testbed show a decimeter-level accuracy.

Analysis of Human Acupoint Biological Information and Neural Electric Activity Based on Ultrasonographic Image

To find out the bioelectric signal discriminative features of different acupoints at the same time and at the same acupoint, and then analyze these differences to determine the type of acupuncture points and assist in judging the patient's condition, a hardware system was designed that can collect subcutaneous potential information of acupoints. Then, the changes of ultrasonic images were analyzed after acupuncture at Zu San Li, as well as the influence of acupuncture at Zu San Li on vagal nerve activity. The hardware system is composed of 4 parts: an analog circuit module, a digital circuit module, a power module, and a host personal computer. The power module adopted dual-module power supply mode, which was composed of MC78M05CT and LM2576 and their related peripheral circuits to ensure the stability of the circuit. The analog circuit module collected the electric signals from the 2 acupoints of Zu San Li and Shang Ju Xu of the volunteers' calves through a multistage electrode probe. In the amplifier module, Butterworth filter and 50 HZ notch are used to reduce the noise of electric signals. The filtered and amplified electric signals are converted into A/D converter in the digital circuit module. Serial communication is used to transmit data to the upper computer of the personal computer to compare the noise reduction effect of acupoint information, multiple sequences of different acupoints, and multiple sequences of the same acupoint. The influence of acupuncture at the Zu San Li acupoint on the muscle tension around the acupoint was investigated by shear wave acoustic elastic imaging technology. The influence of acupuncture at this acupoint was explored on vagal nerve activity. The results show that the wavelet noise reduction method can greatly filter out the interference signals. In the case of artificial stimulation, the signal waveform of each twist shows a big increase, and the comparison shows that there is no significant change in the frequency of other bands. Through ultrasonic image evaluation, it was found that acupuncture at Zu San Li can significantly affect the mean value of Young modulus. After acupuncture at Zu San Li, the vagal activity was increased and the balance ratio of sympathetic vagal activity was reduced. Part of the potential frequency of the acupoint is extremely active, which is the response potential of the subcutaneous induction tissue at the acupoint, which proved the feasibility of collecting electric signals around the acupoints in this kind of hardware system. It is of great significance to diagnose the disease according to the characteristics of acupoint electric signals.

A microchip microcontroller-based transducer controller for non-contact scanning probe microscopy with phase-locked loop, amplitude, and Q control.

An inexpensive yet versatile transducer controller for non-contact scanning probe microscopy (SPM) based on a PIC32 microcontroller from Microchip Technology, Inc is described. In addition to feedback control using the amplitude or phase of the signal from the non-contact transducer, the controller includes a phase-locked loop for frequency-shift feedback, as well as fixed-amplitude, quality factor (Q) control, and self-excitation modes. Apart from the input amplifiers, output buffers, and the Q-control circuit, all other functions of the controller are instantiated in software on the microchip, enabling rapid changes in operating parameters if needed. The controller communicates with a host personal computer via a simple serial connection. The controller has been tested with a quartz tuning-fork transducer but can be used with any oscillating non-contact transducer.

Development of Custom Interface Driver between USRP and SoC devices for SDR Applications

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is used to provide position based on satellite constellation. The GNSS Software defined radio (SDR) is a software approach which is more flexible than Hardware receivers. In GNSS SDR, most of the RF frontends are interfaced with a host-Personal Computer (PC). The host-PC based GNSS-SDR systems suffer from computational complexity and latency between IQ samples of GNSS signals. There are several RF front ends available to capture the real time signals. Among all these, USRP RF frontends are flexible for the prototype development. Earlier the host-PC was interfaced with the USRP device for the SDR implementation. In this work the, USRP N210 is interfaced with Zynq SoC device for GNSS SDR applications. This approach will introduce parallelism, which in turn leads to reduction in latency between IQ samples. A custom Ethernet driver to interface the USRP N210 with Zynq SoC device is proposed. The experimental results showcase that the proposed SoC based approach is suitable for GNSS-SDR prototype.

Research on the Communication of the Serial Port between the Host Personal Computer and CC2430

The system completes the communication between the personal computer and the CC2430 by the serial port. The serial port is not the RS232 serial port but a port from A type to the USB port. The phenomenon of the experiment is displayed with the help of the serial debugging assistant. The operator can send the data and receive it from the personal computer to the CC2430 on the computer. On the other side, the CC2430 is able to receive the data from the host computer and send it to the host computer. This realizes the operator controls the CC2430 by the personal computer. It consists the hardware part and the software part.

Building automation: Photovoltaic assisted thermal comfort management system for energy saving

Building automation plays an important key role in the means to reduce building energy consumption and to provide comfort for building occupants. It is often that air conditioning system operating features ignored in building automation which can result in thermal discomfort among building occupants. Most automation system for building is expensive and incurs high maintenance cost. Such system also does not support electricity demand side management system such as load shifting. This paper discusses on centralized monitoring system for room temperature and photovoltaic (PV) output for feasibility study of PV assisted air conditioning system in small office buildings. The architecture of the system consists of PV modules and sensor nodes located at each room. Wireless sensor network technology (WSN) been used for data transmission. The data from temperature sensors and PV modules transmitted to the host personal computer (PC) wirelessly using Zigbee modules. Microcontroller based USB data acquisition device used to receive data from sensor nodes and displays the data on PC.

Reconfigurable ultra-wideband transmitter for generation of arbitrary impulse shapes and modulation schemes

Abstract. In this paper a reconfigurable ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) transmitter is presented. The IR signal is synthesized at an intermediate frequency (IF) by employing a multi-Nyquist digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with 12 bit resolution and an update rate of 2.3 GHz. Digital generation of signals in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) guarantees very high flexibility of the reconfigurable design. For upconversion to the radio frequency (RF) band, a first order bandpass (BP) sampling concept and an alternative conventional concept with mixer stages, have been realized. The system enables to generate signals with arbitrary modulation schemes and techniques at an external host personal computer (PC) employing MATLAB. Different measurements using a digitizing oscilloscope have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the transmitter.

A practical model‐based statistical approach for generating functional test cases: application in the automotive industry

SUMMARYWith the growing complexity of industrial software applications, industrials are looking for efficient and practical methods to validate the software. This paper develops a model‐based statistical testing approach that automatically generates online and offline test cases for embedded software. It discusses an integrated framework that combines solutions for three major software testing research questions: (i) how to select test inputs; (ii) how to predict the expected results of a test; and (iii) when to stop testing software. The automatic selection of test inputs is based on a stochastic test model that accounts for the main particularity of embedded software: time sensitivity. Software test practitioners may design one or more test models when they generate random, user‐oriented, or fault‐oriented test inputs. A formal framework integrating existing and appropriate specification techniques was developed for the design of automated test oracles (executable software specifications) and the formal measurement of functional coverage. The decision to stop testing software is based on both test coverage objectives and cost constraints. This approach was tested on two representative case studies from the automotive industry. The experiment was performed at unit testing level in a simulated environment on a host personal computer (automatic test execution). The two software functionalities tested had previously been unit tested and validated using the test design approach conventionally used in the industry. Applying the proposed model‐based statistical testing approach to these two case studies, we obtained significant improvements in performing functional unit testing in a real and complex industrial context: more bugs were detected earlier and in a shorter time. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Failure mechanism and reliability test method for USB interface circuitry on CPUs for mobile devices

This study investigated the failure mechanism of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface circuitry on CPUs for mobile devices. Specifically, CPUs of an MP3 player that had suffered only USB communication failure were taken as representative examples, and the failure mode was analyzed by system- and device-level fault isolation. Microscopic analysis revealed junction burnout in the USB interface circuitry to be the reason for failure. Root cause analysis was then conducted to identify the cause of junction burnout. Three kinds of electrical stresses, as identified by fault tree analysis, were applied to an undamaged chip and the type of resulting damage was assessed. It was found that a transient surge with a duration of current 20μs reproduced the damage seen in the representative devices. Furthermore, we prove that such a transient surge event can occur when a device is connected via USB to a host personal computer; we also detected such a real transient surge waveform. Finally, we suggest a reliability test method for evaluating robustness to transient surges in the USB interface circuit of mobile devices.

Parallelizing and optimizing a bioinformatics pairwise sequence alignment algorithm for many-core architecture

Current computer engineering evolves at an accelerated pace, with hardware advancing towards new chip multiprocessors (CMP) architectures and with supporting software gearing towards new programming and abstraction paradigms, to obtain the maximum efficiency of the hardware at a low cost. In this context, Tilera Corporation has developed a brand new CMP architecture with 64 cores (tiles) called Tile64, and has launched several Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards to be used and monitored from a host Personal Computer (PC). These cards may execute parallel applications built in C/C++ and compiled with the Tile-GCC compiler. We have previously demonstrated the usefulness of the Tile64 architecture for bioinformatics [S. Gálvez, D. Díaz, P. Hernández, F.J. Esteban, J.A. Caballero, G. Dorado, Next-generation bioinformatics: using many-core processor architecture to develop a web service for sequence alignment, Bioinformatics, 26 (2010) 683–686]. We have chosen a bioinformatics algorithm to test this many-core Tile64 architecture because of actual bioinformatics challenging needs: data-intensive workloads, space and time-consuming requirements and massive calculation. This algorithm, known as Needleman–Wunsch/Smith–Waterman (NW/SW), obtains an optimal sequence alignment in quadratic time and space cost, yet requires to be optimized to take full advantage of computing parallelization. In this paper we redesign, implement and fine-tune this algorithm, introducing key optimizations and changes that take advantage of specific Tile64 characteristics: RISC architecture, local tile’s cache, length of memory word, shared memory usage, RAM file system, tile’s intercommunication and job selection from a pool. The resulting algorithm – named MC64-NW/SW for Multicore64 Needleman–Wunsch/Smith–Waterman – achieves a gain of ∼1000% when compared with the same algorithm on a ×86 multi-core architecture. As far as we know, our NW/SW implementation is the fastest ever published for a standalone PC when aligning a pair of sequences larger than 20 kb.

Maritime radar display unit based on PC for safe ship navigation

A prototype radar display unit was implemented using inexpensive off-the-shelf components, including a nonlinear estimation algorithm for the target tracking in a clutter environment. Two custom designed boards; an analog signal processing board and a DSP board, can be plugged into an expansion slot of a personal computer (PC) to form a maritime radar display unit. Our system provided all the functionality specified in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) resolution A422(XI). The analog signal processing board was used for A/D conversion as well as rain and sea clutter suppression. The main functions of the DSP board were scan conversion and video overlay operations. A host PC was used to run the tracking algorithm of targets in clutter, using the discrete-time Bayes optimal (nonlinear, and non-Gaussian) estimation method, and the graphic user interface (GUI) software for Automatic Radar Plotting Aid (ARPA). The proposed tracking method recursively found the entire probability density function of the target position and velocity by converting into linear convolution operations.

An FPGA-Based Multiple-Axis Motion Control Chip

This paper presents the design and implementation of a multiple-axis motion control chip using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). This multiple-axis motion control chip is designed to control a multiple-axis motion system such as a robotic arm manipulator or a computer numerical control machine. The proposed motion control chip has many functions. These include velocity profile generation, interpolation calculation, inverse kinematics calculation, proportional-integral-derivative control, feedback count, pulse integration, data conversion, clock generation, and external interfacing. These functions are designed using the VHSIC hardware description language and implemented on an FPGA according to the electronic design automation design methodology. This allows for a highly sampled, accurate, flexible, compact, low-power, and low-cost motion control system. The detailed design of the proposed motion control chip is presented. A multiple-axis motion control system using this chip is implemented, and its performance is measured. The multiple-axis motion control system is implemented on a platform consisting of a chip-based multiple-axis motion controller, analog ac servo drivers, a selective compliant assembly robot arm robot, and a host personal computer.

Development of a universal serial bus interface circuit for ion beam current integrators

A universal serial bus (USB) interface circuit has been developed to enable easy interfacing of commercial as well as custom-built ion beam current integrators to personal computer (PC) based automated experimental setups. Built using the popular PIC16F877A reduced instruction set computer and a USB-universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter/first in, first out controller, DLP2232, this USB interface circuit virtually emulates the ion beam current integrators on a host PC and uses USB 2.0 protocol to implement high speed bidirectional data transfer. Using this interface, many tedious and labor intensive ion beam irradiation and characterization experiments can be redesigned into PC based automated ones with advantages of improved accuracy, rapidity, and ease of use and control. This interface circuit was successfully used in carrying out online in situ resistivity measurement of 70 keV O(+) ion irradiated tin thin films using four probe method. In situ electrical resistance measurement showed the formation of SnO(2) phase during ion implantation.

Single-chip pulse programmer for magnetic resonance imaging using a 32-bit microcontroller

A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse programmer has been developed using a single-chip microcontroller (ADmicroC7026). The microcontroller includes all the components required for the MRI pulse programmer: a 32-bit RISC CPU core, 62 kbytes of flash memory, 8 kbytes of SRAM, two 32-bit timers, four 12-bit DA converters, and 40 bits of general purpose I/O. An evaluation board for the microcontroller was connected to a host personal computer (PC), an MRI transceiver, and a gradient driver using interface circuitry. Target (embedded) and host PC programs were developed to enable MRI pulse sequence generation by the microcontroller. The pulse programmer achieved a (nominal) time resolution of approximately 100 ns and a minimum time delay between successive events of approximately 9 micros. Imaging experiments using the pulse programmer demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.