Download Full Article  Microsoft Palladium

Today’s personal computing environment has advanced in terms of privacy and security, while maintaining a significant amount of backward compatibility. However the evolution of a shared, open network has created new problems and requirements for trustworthy computing. As the personal computer grows more central to our lives at home, work and school, consumers and business customers alike are increasingly aware of privacy and security issues.

Palladium is the code name for an evolutionary set of features for the Microsoft Windows Operating system. When combined with a new breed of hardware and applications, these features will give individuals and groups of users greater data security, personal privacy and system integrity.

Palladium provides a solid basis for the user’s trust: a foundation on which privacy-and security-sensitive software can be built. There are many reasons why Palladium will be of advantage to users. Among these are enhanced, practical user control; the emergence of new server/service models and potentially new peer-to-peer or fully peer-distributed service models.

Introduction

            “Palladium” is the code name for an evolutionary set of features for the Microsoft® Windows® operating system. When combined with a new breed of hardware and applications, these features will give individuals and groups of users greater data security, personal privacy, and system integrity. In addition, “Palladium” will offer enterprise customers significant new benefits for network security and content protection. This topic reveals the following:

·         Examines how “Palladium” satisfies the growing demands of living and working in an interconnected, digital world

·         Catalogs some of the planned benefits offered by “Palladium”

·         Summarizes the software and hardware components of “Palladium”

The Challenge: Meeting the Emerging Requirements of an Interconnected World

            Today’s personal computing environment has advanced in terms of security and privacy, while maintaining a significant amount of backward compatibility. However, the evolution of a shared, open network (the Internet) has created new problems and requirements for trustworthy computing. As the personal computer grows more central to our lives at home, work and school, consumers and business customers alike are increasingly aware of privacy and security issues.

Now, the pressure is on for industry leaders to take the following actions:

• Build solutions that will meet the pressing need for reliability and integrity
• Make improvements to the personal computer such that it can more fully reach its potential and enable a wider range of opportunities
• Give customers and content providers a new level of confidence in the computer experience
• Continue to support backward compatibility with existing software and user knowledge that exists with Windows systems today…

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Download Full Article   HTAM

Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology brings the concept of simultaneous multi-threading to the Intel Architecture. Hyper-Threading Technology makes a single physical processor appear as two logical processors; the physical execution resources are shared and the architecture state is duplicated for the two logical processors. From a software or architecture perspective, this means operating systems and user programs can schedule processes or threads to logical processors as they would on multiple physical processors. From a micro architecture perspective, this means that instructions from both logical processors will persist and execute simultaneously on shared execution resources.

This paper describes the Hyper-Threading Technology architecture, and discusses the micro architecture details of Intel’s first implementation on the Intel Xeon processor family. Hyper-Threading Technology is an important addition to Intel’s enterprise product line and will be integrated into a wide variety of products.

INTRODUCTION

The amazing growth of the Internet and telecommunications is powered by ever-faster systems demanding increasingly higher levels of processor performance. To keep up with this demand we cannot rely entirely on traditional approaches to processor design. Microarchitecture techniques used to achieve past processor performance improvement–superpipelining, branch prediction, super-scalar execution, out-of-order execution, caches–have made microprocessors increasingly more complex, have more transistors, and consume more power. In fact, transistor counts and power are increasing at rates greater than processor performance. Processor architects are therefore looking for ways to improve performance at a greater rate than transistor counts and power dissipation. Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology is one solution.

PROCESSOR MICROARCHITECTURE

Traditional approaches to processor design have focused on higher clock speeds, instruction-level parallelism (ILP), and caches. Techniques to achieve higher clock speeds involve pipelining the microarchitecture to finer granularities, also called super-pipelining. Higher clock frequencies can greatly improve performance by increasing the number of instructions that can be executed each second. Because there will be far more instructions in-flight in a superpipelined microarchitecture, handling of events that disrupt the pipeline, e.g., cache misses, interrupts and branch mispredictions, can be costly.

ILP refers to techniques to increase the number of instructions executed each clock cycle. For example, a super-scalar processor has multiple parallel execution units that can process instructions simultaneously. With super-scalar execution, several instructions can be executed each clock cycle. However, with simple inorder execution, it is not enough to simply have multiple execution units. The challenge is to find enough instructions to execute. One technique is out-of-order execution where a large window of instructions is simultaneously evaluated and sent to execution units, based on instruction dependencies rather than program order…

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Download Full ArticleOrganic Light Emitting Diodes

Scientific research in the area of semiconducting organic materials as the active substance in light emitting diodes (LEDs) has increased immensely during the last four decades. Organic semiconductors was first reported in the 60:s and then the materials where only considered to be merely a scientific curiosity. (They are named organic because they consist primarily of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.). However when it was recognized in the eighties that many of them are photoconductive under visible light, industrial interests were attracted. Many major electronic companies, such as Philips and Pioneer, are today investing a considerable amount of money in the science of organic electronic and optoelectronic devices. The major reason for the big attention to these devices is that they possibly could be much more efficient than todays components when it comes to power consumption and produced light. Common light emitters today, Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and ordinary light bulbs consume more power than organic diodes do. And the strive to decrease power consumption is always something of matter. Other reasons for the industrial attention are i.e. that eventually organic full color displays will replace todays liquid crystal displays (LCDs) used in laptop computers and may even one day replace our ordinary CRT-screens.

Organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) operate on the principle of converting electrical energy into light, a phenomenon known as electroluminescence. They exploit the properties of certain organic materials which emit light when an electric current passes through them. In its simplest form, an OLED consists of a layer of this luminescent material sandwiched between two electrodes. When an electric current is passed between the electrodes, through the organic layer, light is emitted with a color that depends on the particular material used. In order to observe the light emitted by an OLED, at least one of the electrodes must be transparent.

When OLEDs are used as pixels in flat panel displays they have some advantages over backlit active-matrix LCD displays - greater viewing angle, lighter weight, and quicker response. Since only the part of the display that is actually lit up consumes power, the most efficient OLEDs available today use less power.

Based on these advantages, OLEDs have been proposed for a wide range of display applications including magnified microdisplays, wearable, head-mounted computers, digital cameras, personal digital assistants, smart pagers, virtual reality games, and mobile phones as well as medical, automotive, and other industrial applications.

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Download Full ArticleBoiler Instrumentation and Controls

               Instrumentation and controls in a boiler plant encompass an enormous range of equipment from simple in the small industrial plant to the complex in the large utility station. Boiler Instrumentation Control is the control over the industrial boilers. It consists of several control loops to control various systems related to a boiler. The main control of boilers   include combination control and feed water control. To do the various operations in control different hardware methods are used.

              Virtually any boiler-old or new, industrial or utility can benefit from or several control system modifications available today either by introducing advanced control schemes adding to existing control schemes

INTRODUCTION

              Instrumentation and controls in a boiler plant encompass an enormous range of equipment from simple industrial plant to the complex in the large utility station. 

             The boiler control system is the means by which the balance of energy & mass into and out of the boiler are achieved. Inputs are fuel, combustion air, atomizing air or steam &feed water. Of these, fuel is the major energy input. Combustion air is the major mass input, outputs are steam, flue gas, blowdown, radiation & soot blowing.

Control loops

          Boiler control systems contain several variable with interaction occurring among the control loops for fuel, combustion air, & feedwater . The overall system generally can be treated as a series of basic control loops connected together. for safety purposes, fuel addition should be limited by the amount of combustion air and it may need minimum limiting for flame stability.

Combustion controls

              Amounts of fuel  and air must be carefully regulated to keep excess air within close tolerances-especially over the loads. This is critical to efficient boiler operation no matter what the unit size, type of fuel fired or control system used.

Feedwater control

           Industrial boilers are subject to wide load variations and require quick responding control to maintain constant drum level. Multiple element feed water control can help faster and more accurate control response…

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Download Full ArticleFRAM

            Ferroelectric memory is a new type of semiconductor memory, which exhibit short programming time, low power consumption and nonvolatile memory, making highly suitable for application like contact less smart card, digital cameras which demands many memory write operations.

A ferroelectric memory technology consists of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology with added layers on top for ferroelectric capacitors. A ferroelectric memory cell has at least one ferroelectric capacitor to store the binary data, and one transistor that provide access to the capacitor or amplify its content for a read operation. Once a cell is accessed for a read operation, its data are presented in the form of an analog signal to a sense amplifier, where they are compared against a reference voltage to determine their logic level.

Ferroelectric memories have borrowed many circuit techniques (such as folded-bitline architecture) from DRAM’s due to similarities of their cells and DRAM’s maturity. Some architectures are reviewed here.

INTRODUCTION

             Before the 1950’s, ferromagnetic cores were the only type of random-access, nonvolatile memories available. A core memory is a regular array of tiny magnetic cores that can be magnetized in one of two opposite directions, making it possible to store binary data in the form of a magnetic field. The success of the core memory was due to a simple architecture that resulted in a relatively dense array of cells. This approach was emulated in the semiconductor memories of today (DRAM’s, EEPROM’s, and FRAM’s). Ferromagnetic cores, however, were too bulky and expensive compared to the smaller, low-power semiconductor memories. In place of ferromagnetic cores ferroelectric memories are a good substitute. The term “ferroelectric’ indicates the similarity, despite the lack of iron in the materials themselves.

            Ferroelectric memory exhibit short programming time, low power consumption and nonvolatile memory, making highly suitable for application like contact less smart card, digital cameras which demanding many memory write operations. In other word FRAM has the feature of both RAM and ROM. A ferroelectric memory technology consists of a complementry metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology with added layers on top for ferroelectric capacitors. A ferroelectric memory cell has at least one ferroelectric capacitor to store the binary data, and one or two transistors that provide access to the capacitor or amplify its content for a read operation.

A ferroelectric capacitor is different from a regular capacitor in that it substitutes the dielectric with a ferroelectric material (lead zirconate titanate (PZT) is a common material used)-when an electric field is applied and the charges displace from their original position spontaneous polarization occurs and displacement becomes evident in the crystal structure of the material. Importantly, the displacement does not disappear in the absence of the electric field. Moreover, the direction of polarization can be reversed or reoriented by applying an appropriate electric field.

A hysteresis loop for a ferroelectric capacitor displays the total charge on the capacitor as a function of the applied voltage. It behaves similarly to that of a magnetic core, but for the sharp transitions around its coercive points, which implies that even a moderate voltage can disturb the state of the capacitor. One remedy for this would be to modify a ferroelectric memory cell including a transistor in series with the ferroelectric capacitor. Called an access transistor, it wo control the access to the capacitor and eliminate the need for a square like hysteresis loop compensating for the softness of the hysteresis loop characteristics and blocking unwanted disturb signals from neighboring memory cells.

           Once a cell is accessed for a read operation, its data are presented in the form of an anal signal to a sense amplifier, where they are compared against a reference voltage to determine the logic level.

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