0000000000141443
AUTHOR
A. Rosado
Live demonstration: multiplexing AER asynchronous channels over LVDS Links with Flow-Control and Clock-Correction for Scalable Neuromorphic Systems
Paper presented at the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), held in Baltimore, MD, USA, on 28-31 May 2017.
Hardware-efficient matrix inversion algorithm for complex adaptive systems
This work shows an FPGA implementation for the matrix inversion algebra operation. Usually, large matrix dimension is required for real-time signal processing applications, especially in case of complex adaptive systems. A hardware efficient matrix inversion procedure is described using QR decomposition of the original matrix and modified Gram-Schmidt method. This works attempts a direct VHDL description using few predefined packages and fixed point arithmetic for better optimization. New proposals for intermediate calculations are described, leading to efficient logic occupation together with better performance and accuracy in the vector space algebra. Results show that, for a relatively s…
Synchrony Analysis of Unipolar Cardiac Mapping during Ventricular Fibrillation
Ventricular Fibrillation (VF) is one of the main causes of death in developed countries. Recent studies have shown that fibrillation have a complex organization scheme. This work uses three measures of synchrony to characterize three groups of rabbit hearts. These groups consist of rabbits trained with physical exercise (N=7), untrained rabbits treated with a drug (N=13) and a control group of untrained rabbits (N=15). Cardiac mapping records were acquired using a 240-electrode array placed on left ventricle of isolated rabbit hearts, and VF was induced pacing at increasing rates. Two acquisitions were performed: maintained perfusion, and ischemic damage produced by an artery ligation. The …
Brain Activity Characterization Induced by Alcoholic Addiction: Spectral and Causality Analysis of Brain Areas Related to Control and Reinforcement of Impulsivity
Addiction to drugs generates modifications in the brain structure and its functions. In this work, an experimental model is described, using rats to characterize the brain activity induced by alcohol addiction. Four records were obtained using electrodes located in brain areas related to impulsivity control and reinforcement, i.e. the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) cortex, together with the hippocampus (HPC). In the records, three main events related to the drinking action were selected: in the previous minute (T1), the first minute while drinking (T2) and the first minute after stopping drinking (T3).
A line-shape analysis for spin-1 NMR signals
An analytic model of the deuteron absorption function has been developed and is compared to experimental NMR signals of deuterated butanol obtained at the SMC experiment in order to determine the deuteron polarization. The absorption function model includes dipolar broadening and a frequency-dependent treatment of the intensity factors. The high-precision TE signal data available are used to adjust the model for Q-meter distortions and dispersion effects. Once the Q-meter adjustment is made, the enhanced polarizations determined by the asymmetry and TE-calibration methods compare well within the accuracy of each method. In analyzing the NMR signals, the quadrupolar coupling constants could …
A Teaching Laboratory in Analog Electronics: Changes to Address the Bologna Requirements
Training new electronics engineers presents several major challenges. This paper proposes a new approach for practical lessons in second-level analog electronics, where students get a closer view of real-world practices in electronic engineering. The authors describe and evaluate a more dynamic way of teaching practical lessons in analog electronics in the first year of an electronic engineering degree. The method consists of creating a virtual company that contracts students to develop prototypes. The design process involves theoretical concepts from the students' lessons, and poses challenges with respect to costs and teamwork. The method brings the students closer to the working environm…
Multiplexing AER asynchronous channels over LVDS links with flow-control and clock-correction for scalable neuromorphic systems
Paper presented at the 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), held in Baltimore, MD, USA, on 28-31 May 2017.
Ventricular fibrillation detection from ECG surface electrodes using different filtering techniques, window length and artificial neural networks
Medical personnel face many difficulties when diagnosing ventricular fibrillation (VF). Its correct diagnosis allows to decide the right medical treatment and, therefore, it is essential to tell it apart adequately from ventricular tachycardia (VT) and other arrhythmias. If the required therapy is not appropriate, the personnel could cause serious injuries or even induce VF. In this work, a diagnosis automatic system for the detection of VF through feature extraction was developed. To verify the validity of this method, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier was used. The ECG signals used were obtained from the MIT-BIH Malignant Ventricular Arrhythmia Database and AHA (2000 series) d…
P and R Wave Detection in Complete Congenital Atrioventricular Block
Complete atrioventricular block (type III AVB) is characterized by an absence of P wave transmission to ventricles. This implies that QRS complexes are generated in an autonomous way and are not coordinated with P waves. This work introduces a new algorithm for the detection of P waves for this type of pathology using non-invasive electrocardiographic surface leads. The proposed algorithm is divided into three stages. In the first stage, the R waves located by a QRS detector are used to generate the RR series and time references for the other stages of the algorithm. In the second stage, the ventricular activity (QT segment) is removed by using an adaptive filter that obtains an averaged pa…
The Large Hadron–Electron Collider at the HL-LHC
The Large Hadron-Electron Collider (LHeC) is designed to move the field of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) to the energy and intensity frontier of particle physics. Exploiting energy-recovery technology, it collides a novel, intense electron beam with a proton or ion beam from the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The accelerator and interaction region are designed for concurrent electron-proton and proton-proton operations. This report represents an update to the LHeC's conceptual design report (CDR), published in 2012. It comprises new results on the parton structure of the proton and heavier nuclei, QCD dynamics, and electroweak and top-quark physics. It is shown how the LH…
High performance hardware correlation coefficient assessment using programmable logic for ECG signals
Abstract Correlation coefficient is frequently used to obtain cardiac rhythm by peak estimation and appreciate differences in the signal compared to a pattern. This work focuses on the description of a real-time correlation assessment procedure. Applied to electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, a new correlation value is obtained every new sample and pulse detection information is provided. The ECG pattern is internally stored and can be changed when desired. This procedure is useful in Systems on Chip implementation and can be applied to design compact ECG monitoring systems consisting on a system on chip where programmable logic offloads the main processor. A Xilinx FPGA device has been used fo…
Fast spiking neural network architecture for low-cost FPGA devices
Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) consist of fully interconnected computation units (neurons) based on spike processing. This type of networks resembles those found in biological systems studied by neuroscientists. This paper shows a hardware implementation for SNN. First, SNN require the inputs to be spikes, being necessary a conversion system (encoding) from digital values into spikes. For travelling spikes, each neuron interconnection is characterized by weights and delays, requiring an internal neuron processing by a Postsynaptic Potential (PSP) function and membrane potential threshold evaluation for a postsynaptic output spike generation. In order to model a real biological system by arti…
Analysis of the influence of parasympathetic postganglionic neurons on cardiac response in Ventricular Fibrillation
Physical training modifies the sympathetic-vagal balance of autonomic nervous system. Previous studies have shown that such training also produces intrinsic modifications of cardiac electrophysiological properties in isolated heart during Ventricular Fibrillation (VF). Ten NZW trained rabbits were studied to test if the modifications are related to the activity of postganglionic parasympathetic neurons. Two records per subject were acquired during VF: before (G1) and after (G2) the infusion of atropine to inhibit the activity of neurons. Mapping records were obtained using a 240-channel electrode array located in the left ventricle of isolated heart (perfused by Langendorff system). VF was …
On Multiple AER Handshaking Channels Over High-Speed Bit-Serial Bidirectional LVDS Links With Flow-Control and Clock-Correction on Commercial FPGAs for Scalable Neuromorphic Systems
Address event representation (AER) is a widely employed asynchronous technique for interchanging “neural spikes” between different hardware elements in neuromorphic systems. Each neuron or cell in a chip or a system is assigned an address (or ID), which is typically communicated through a high-speed digital bus, thus time-multiplexing a high number of neural connections. Conventional AER links use parallel physical wires together with a pair of handshaking signals (request and acknowledge). In this paper, we present a fully serial implementation using bidirectional SATA connectors with a pair of low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) wires for each direction. The proposed implementation …
Implementation of a new adaptive algorithm using fuzzy cost function and robust to impulsive noise
Adaptive filters are used in a wide range of applications such as noise cancellation, system identification, and prediction. One of the main problems for theses filters is the impulsive noise as it generates algorithm unstability. This work shows the development, simulation and hardware implementation of a new algorithm robust to impulsive noise. Hardware implementation becomes essential in many cases where a real time execution, reduced size, or low power system is needed. An efficient hardware architecture is proposed and different optimizations for size and speed are developed: no need for control state machine, reduced computation requirements due to simplifications, etc. Furthermore, t…
The polarized double cell target of the SMC
The polarized target of the Spin Muon Collaboration at CERN was used for deep inelastic muon scattering experiments during 1993-1996 with a polarized muon beam to investigate the spin structure of the nucleon. Most of the experiments were carried out with longitudinal target polarization and 190 GeV muons, and some were done with transverse polarization and 100 GeV muons. Protons as well as deuterons were polarized by dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) in three kinds of solid materials - butanol, ammonia, and deuterated butanol - with maximum degrees of polarization of 94%, 91% and 60%, respectively. Considerable attention was paid to the accuracies of the NMR polarization measurements and …
An AER handshake-less modular infrastructure PCB with x8 2.5Gbps LVDS serial links
Nowadays spike-based brain processing emulation is taking off. Several EU and others worldwide projects are demonstrating this, like SpiNNaker, BrainScaleS, FACETS, or NeuroGrid. The larger the brain process emulation on silicon is, the higher the communication performance of the hosting platforms has to be. Many times the bottleneck of these system implementations is not on the performance inside a chip or a board, but in the communication between boards. This paper describes a novel modular Address-Event-Representation (AER) FPGA-based (Spartan6) infrastructure PCB (the AER-Node board) with 2.5Gbps LVDS high speed serial links over SATA cables that offers a peak performance of 32-bit 62.5…
The spin-dependent structure function g1(x) of the deuteron from polarized deep-inelastic muon scattering
We present a new measurement of the spin-dependent structure function $g_{1}^{\rm d}$ of the deuteron from deep inelastic scattering of 190 GeV polarized muons on polarized deuterons. The results are combined with our previous measurements of $g_{1}^{\rm d}$. A perturbative QCD evolution in next-to-leading order is used to compute $g_{1}^{\rm d}(x)$ at a constant $Q^{2}$. At $Q^{2} = 10$ GeV$^{2}$, we obtain a first moment $\Gamma_{1}^{\rm d} = \int_{0}^{1} g_{1}^{\rm d}{\rm d}x = 0.041 \pm 0.008$, a flavour-singlet axial charge of the nucleon $a_{0} = 0.30 \pm 0.08$, and an axial charge of the strange quark $a_{s} = -0.09 \pm 0.03$. Using our earlier determination of $\Gamma_{1}^{\rm p}$, …
Measurement of the spin-dependent structure function g1(x) of the deuteron
We report on the first measurement of the spin-dependent structure function g1d of the deuteron in the deep inelastic scattering of polarised muons off polarised deuterons, in the kinematical range 0.006<x<0.6, 1 GeV2<Q2<30 GeV2. The first moment, Γ1d=sh{phonetic}01 g1d dx=0.023±0.020 (stat.) ± 0.015 (syst.), is smaller than the prediction of the Ellis-Jaffe sum rules. Using earlier measurements of g1p, we infer the first moment of the spin-dependent neutron structure function g1n. The difference Γ1p-Γ1n=0.20 ±0.05 (stat.) ± 0.04 (syst.) agrees with the prediction of the Bjorken sum rule, Γ1p-Γ1n=0.191 ±0.002.
Instrumentation, control, and automation for submerged anaerobic membrane bioreactors
A submerged anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) demonstration plant with two commercial hollow-fibre ultrafiltration systems (PURON® , Koch Membrane Systems, PUR-PSH31) was designed and operated for urban wastewater treatment. An instrumentation, control, and automation (ICA) system was designed and implemented for proper process performance. Several single-input-single-output (SISO) feedback control loops based on conventional on off and PID algorithms were implemented to control the following operating variables: flow-rates (influent, permeate, sludge recycling and wasting, and recycled biogas through both reactor and membrane tanks), sludge wasting volume, temperature, transmembrane pr…