Automated design of freeform imaging systems

The automated design of imaging systems involving no or minimal human effort has always been the expectation of scientists,researchers and optical engineers.In addition,it is challenging to choose an appropriate starting point for an optical system design.In this paper,we present a novel design framework based on a point-by-point design process that can automatically obtain high-performance freeform systems.This framework only requires a combination of planes as the input based on the configuration requirements or the prior knowledge of designers.This point-by-point design framework is different from the decadeslong tradition of optimizing surface coefficients.Compared with the traditional design method,whereby the selection of the starting point and the optimization process are independent of each other and require extensive amount of human effort,there are no obvious differences between these two processes in our design framework,and the entire design process is mostly automated.This automated design process significantly reduces the amount of human effort required and does not rely on advanced design skills and experience.To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed design framework,we successfully designed two highperformance systems as examples.This point-by-point design framework opens up new possibilities for automated optical design and can be used to develop automated optical design in the areas of remote sensing,telescopy,microscopy,spectroscopy,virtual reality and augmented reality.

BIM-based automated design for HVAC system of office buildings-An experimental study

Although computer technologies have greatly advanced in recent years and help engineers improve work efficiency,the heating,ventilation,and air conditioning(HVAC)design process is still very time-consuming.In this paper,we propose a conceptual framework for automating the entire design process to replace current human-based HVAC design procedures.This framework includes the following automated processes:building information modeling(BIM)simplification,building energy modeling(BEM)generation&load calculation,HVAC system topology generation&equipment sizing,and system diagram generation.In this study,we analyze the importance of each process and possible ways to implement them using software.Then,we use a case study to test the automated design procedure and illustrate the feasibility of the new automated design approach.The purpose of this study is to simplify the steps in the traditional rule-based HVAC system design process by introducing artificial intelligence(Al)technology based on the traditional computer-aided design(CAD)process.Experimental results show that the automatic processes are feasible,compared with the traditional design process can effectively shorten the design time from 23.37 working hours to nearly 1 hour,and improve the efficiency.

Scavenging Microwave Wireless Power:A Unified Model,Rectenna Design Automation,and Cutting-Edge Techniques

While sufficient review articles exist on inductive short-range wireless power transfer(WPT),long-haul microwave WPT(MWPT)for solar power satellites,and ambient microwave wireless energy harvesting(MWEH)in urban areas,few studies focus on the fundamental modeling and related design automation of receiver systems.This article reviews the development of MWPT and MWEH receivers,with a focus on rectenna design automation.A novel rectifier model capable of accurately modeling the rectification process under both high and low input power is presented.The model reveals the theoretical boundary of radio frequency-to-direct current(dc)power conversion efficiency and,most importantly,enables an automated system design.The automated rectenna design flow is sequential,with the minimal engagement of iterative optimization.It covers the design automation of every module(i.e.,rectifiers,matching circuits,antennae,and dc–dc converters).Scaling-up of the technique to large rectenna arrays is also possible,where the challenges in array partitioning and power combining are briefly discussed.In addition,several cutting-edge rectenna techniques for MWPT and MWEH are reviewed,including the dynamic range extension technique,the harmonics-based retro-directive technique,and the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer technique,which can be good complements to the presented automated design methodology.

AUTOMATIC APPROACH TO PRODUCT CONCEPTUAL DESIGN BASED ON CONSTRAINT NETWORK

Product design is considered as the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP),and a new design approach basedon constraint network is proposed and applied to make designautomatic partially. By means of constraint extraction, constraint network construction andoperation, constraint chains are acquired, and then the conceptual design scheme can be got bydecoding the information stored in the design constraint chains, which provides a novelty method formechanical product design automation. Shearing mechanism of shearing machine has been designed bythis way.

Electromagnetic Simulation with 3D FEM for Design Automation in 5G Era

Electromagnetic simulation and electronic design automation(EDA)play an important role in the design of 5G antennas and radio chips.The simulation challenges include electromagnetic effects and long simulation time and this paper focuses on simulation software based on finite-element method(FEM).The state-of-the-art EDA software using novel computational techniques based on FEM can not only accelerate numerical analysis,but also enable optimization,sensitivity analysis and interactive design tuning based on rigorous electromagnetic model of a device.Several new techniques that help to mitigate the most challenging issues related to FEM based simulation are highlighted.In particular,methods for fast frequency sweep,mesh morphing and surrogate models for efficient optimization and manual design tuning are briefly described,and their efficiency is illustrated on examples involving a 5G multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO)antenna and filter.It is demonstrated that these new computational techniques enable significant reduction of time needed for design closure with the acceleration rates as large as tens or even over one hundred.

Automatic Virtual Entity Simulation of Conceptual Design Results—Part Ⅱ:Symbolic Scheme Simulation

The development of new products of high quality, low unit cost, and short lead time to market are the key elements required for any enterprise to obtain a competitive advantage. This part of the paper presents a methodology to automatically simulate the conceptual design results in the virtual entity form. To the identified basic mechanisms, their kinematic analysis is carried out by matching basic Barranov trusses, and their virtual entities are modeled based on feature-based technique and encapsulated as one design object. Based on the structures of the basic mechanisms and their connections, a space layout to the mechanical system corresponding to the symbolic scheme is then fulfilled. With the preset-assembly approach, all parts in the mechanical system are put onto proper positions where the constraint equations are met according to the space layout results. In this way, the virtual entity assembly model of the mechanical system relative to the symbolic scheme is set up. The approach presented in this paper can not only obtain innovative conceptual conceptual design results, but also can evaluate their performances under 3-D enviroment efficently.

Automatic Virtual Entity Simulation of Conceptual Design Results—Part Ⅰ:Symbolic Scheme Generation and Identification

The development of new products of high quality, low unit cost, and short lead time to market are the key elements required for any enterprise to obtain a competitive advantage. For shorting the lead time to market and improving the creativity and performances of the product, a rule-based conceptual design approach and a methodology to simulate the conceptual design results generated in conceptual design process in automatical virtual entity form are presented in this paper. This part of paper presents a rule-based conceptual design method for generating creative conceptual design schemes of mechanisms based on Yan＇s kinematic chain regeneration creative design method. The design rules are adopted to describe the design requirements of the functional characteristics, the connection relationships and topological characteristics among mechanisms. Through the graphs-based reasoning process, the conceptual design space is expanded extremely, and the potential creative conceptual design results are then dug out. By refining the design rules, the solution exploration problem is avioded, and the tendentious conceptual design schemes are generated. Since mechanical, electrical and hydraulic subsystems can be transformed into general mechansims, the conceptual design method presented in this paper can also be applied in the conceptual design problem of complex mechatronic systems. And then the method to identify conceptual design schemes is given.

Improvement of the Life Cycle Costing Method in DesignStage Using KBIMS Library

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution,the construction industry has undergone a paradigm shift.The smart construction technology market is expected to grow 12%annually in developed countries due to advanced technology investments.It is expected that businesses requiring highly sophisticated technology,for instance companies that need their old facilities upgraded,will become the main focus of the market.As building information modeling(BIM)design is becoming mandatory,such as in the Korea Public Procurement Service,researches regarding building automation,construction,and operation integration management systems based on BIM are conducted.In addition,for construction projects of over 10 billion won,design value engineering(Design VE)implementation,including life cycle cost(LCC)analysis,is mandatory at the design stage to improve quality and reduce the lifetime costs of buildings.In this study,we propose an improvement plan for LCC analysis at the design stage using the KBIMS library,which is an open BIM library developed by the Korean government and research groups.We analyze the existing LCC method,KBIMS library,and attribute information,and model the process that is applied in the LCC analysis system.This is expected to complement the LCC analysis system and improve work productivity.

Research on Theory of Green Product DesignAutomation

Facing with the design activihes of low efficacy and low standard on design automationdue to the probabilishc, non-rational and non-standard product design. This Paper puts forward thetheory of generalized mapping, which is proved to be effective in the enhancemed of the creativity ofproduct design automation. It further explores the applicahon and progress in the creative greenproduct conceptual and detail design.

Analysis of Efficient 32 Bit Adder Using Tree Grafting Technique

Adder with high efficiency and accuracy is the major requirement for electronic circuit design.Here the optical logic gate based adder circuit is designed for better performance analysis of optical input signals varied with the wavelength.Efficiency of the adder can be improved by increasing the speed of operation,reducing the complexity and power consumption.To maintain the high efficiency with accuracy,a new combination of adder has been proposed and tested in this work.A new adder by combining the logics of Brent Kung,Sklansky and Kogge Stone adders by Tree Grafting Technique(BSKTGT)has been tested along with individual Brent Kung,Sklansky,Kogge Stone,Knowles,Han Carlson and Ladner Fischer adders.All the existing and proposed adders have been designed and tested for efficiency with the help of Cadence platform with 45 nm technology.Efficiency in terms of Size reduction,Power reduction,Power Delay Product(PDP)and accuracy in adding 8 bit,16 bit and 32 bit values had been tested for all the adders and found that the 32 bit BSKTGT adder performed well in all aspects and have produced better efficiency with the power consumption of 52.512426μW with 3.16%of power saving over Brent Kung adder,utilised an area of 631.191 with 8.55%reduction over Kogge Stone Adder,has the cell count of 132 which is 10.61%reduction over Brent Kung Adder and PDP value of 122.6695 J,which is 0.46%less than that of the Han Carlson Adder.

Automated Layout Design of Stiffened Container Structures Based on the Morphology of Plant Ramifications

This study proposes a new topology optimization solution providing designers with choices for feasible stiffener layouts inside large-scale containers of garbage trucks. Firstly, the mathematical expressions of loading conditions inside garbage containers are derived. Then, a growth-based layout optimization framework is built, taking inspiration from the morphology of plant ramifications. The principles of the highly effective but individual design rules of existent leaf venation layout problems are explored and transferred into analytical laws. Based on this, an evolutionary algorithm is developed to simulate the load-adapted growth of stiffener layouts, which provides an approximately homogeneous stress distribution along the surface of self-optimizing structures, Unlike the conventional methods, the new approach needs neither the densest ground structure nor the modification of the existing finite element programs, it is fast, easy to apply and nearly constraint free. Finally, a case study is provided showing how a large-scale container structure can be designed by this extremely intelligent CAD approach.

AN ANT COLONY ALGORITHM FOR MINIMUM UNSATISFIABLE CORE EXTRACTION

Explaining the causes of infeasibility of Boolean formulas has many practical applications in electronic design automation and formal verification of hardware.Furthermore,a minimum explanation of infeasibility that excludes all irrelevant information is generally of interest.A smallest-cardinality unsatisfiable subset called a minimum unsatisfiable core can provide a succinct explanation of infea-sibility and is valuable for applications.However,little attention has been concentrated on extraction of minimum unsatisfiable core.In this paper,the relationship between maximal satisfiability and mini-mum unsatisfiability is presented and proved,then an efficient ant colony algorithm is proposed to derive an exact or nearly exact minimum unsatisfiable core based on the relationship.Finally,ex-perimental results on practical benchmarks compared with the best known approach are reported,and the results show that the ant colony algorithm strongly outperforms the best previous algorithm.

DYNAMIC LABELING BASED FPGA DELAY OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

DAG-MAP is an FPGA technology mapping algorithm for delay optimization and the labeling phase is the algorithm’s kernel. This paper studied the labeling phase and presented an improved labeling method. It is shown through the experimental results on MCNC benchmarks that the improved method is more effective than the original method while the computation time is almost the same.

Collaborative Simulation Method with Spatiotemporal Synchronization Process Control

When designing a complex mechatronics system, such as high speed trains, it is relatively difficult to effectively simulate the entire system＇s dynamic behaviors because it involves multi-disciplinary subsystems. Currently, a most practical approach for multi-disciplinary simulation is interface based coupling simulation method, but it faces a twofold challenge： spatial and time unsynchronizations among multi-directional coupling simulation of subsystems. A new collaborative simulation method with spatiotemporal synchronization process control is proposed for coupling simulating a given complex mechatronics system across multiple subsystems on different platforms. The method consists of 1） a coupler-based coupling mechanisms to define the interfacing and interaction mechanisms among subsystems, and 2） a simulation process control algorithm to realize the coupling simulation in a spatiotemporal synchronized manner. The test results from a case study show that the proposed method 1） can certainly be used to simulate the sub-systems interactions under different simulation conditions in an engineering system, and 2） effectively supports multi-directional coupling simulation among multi-disciplinary subsystems. This method has been successfully applied in China high speed train design and development processes, demonstrating that it can be applied in a wide range of engineering systems design and simulation with improved efficiency and effectiveness.

A Wireframe Model-Based Method for Automated Internal Design

This paper proposes a wireframe model-based method for automated internal design. The method is used to extract geometric structure of an internal wireframe model and find out all loop structures of furniture models. The wireframe models are classified as the multiple independent sub-models according to the geometric structure by statistical analysis. The corresponding models are selected from a 3D model database to build an internal scene based on characteristic points of furniture wireframe models. In the experiments 3D database via manually selected 268 3D furniture models from Google 3D warehouse is built up. The experiments show that the method can construct 3D scenes in 1.1×103 ms. This method costs less time compared with traditional hierarchical method and depth-sensing camera method in the same experimental conditions. The method can be also used for 3D visualization either with complex backgrounds.

Buffer planning for application-specific networks-on-chip design

Networks-on-chip （NoC） is a promising communication architecture for next generation SoC. The size of buffer used in on-chip routers impacts the silicon area and power consumption of NoC dominantly. It is important to plan the total buffer-size and each router buffer-allocation carefully for an efficient NoC design. In this paper, we propose two buffer planning algorithms for application-specific NoC design. More precisely, given the traffic parameters and performance constraints of target application, the proposed algorithms automatically determine minimal buffer budget and assign the buffer depth for each input channel in different routers. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can significantly reduce total buffer usage and guarantee the performance requirements.

Design Rationale for a Wide Spectrum Specification Language FGSPEC

FGSPEC is a wide spectrum specification language intended to facilitate the software specification and the expression of transformation process from the functional specification which describes“what to do”to the corresponding design(operational)specification which describes“how to do”.The design emphasizes the coherence of multi-level specification mechanisms and a tree structure model is provided which unifies the wide spectrum specification styles from“what”to“how”.

A Brief Review of Design and Simulation Methodology in Silicon Photonics

Powerful electronic design automation tools have enabled the rapid development of electronic Integrated Circuits(ICs). Similar to electronic ICs, silicon photonics technology has sufficiently matured, and large-scale photonic circuits can now be implanted into a single chip. Design tools have also evolved from primary devices to complex photonic circuits. In this paper, we review the current state of photonic design automation in terms of device modeling methods and circuit simulation methodologies, and compare the photonics design flow with mature electronic design automation design flows. Key challenges and opportunities are also discussed.

Technological Exploration of RRAM Crossbar Array for Matrix-Vector Multiplication

Matrix-vector multiplication is the key operation for many computationally intensive algorithms. The emerging metal oxide resistive switching random access memory （RRAM） device and RRAM crossbar array have demonstrated a promising hardware realization of the analog matrix-vector multiplication with ultra-high energy efficiency. In this paper, we analyze the impact of both device level and circuit level non-ideal factors, including the nonlinear current-voltage relationship of RRAM devices, the variation of device fabrication and write operation, and the interconnect resistance as well as other crossbar array parameters. On top of that, we propose a technological exploration flow for device parameter configuration to overcome the impact of non-ideal factors and achieve a better trade-off among performance, energy, and reliability for each specific application. Our simulation results of a support vector machine （SVM） and Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology （MNIST） pattern recognition dataset show that RRAM crossbar array based SVM is robust to input signal fluctuation but sensitive to tunneling gap deviation. A further resistance resolution test presents that a 6-bit RRAM device is able to realize a recognition accuracy around 90%, indicating the physical feasibility of RRAM crossbar array based SVM. In addition, the proposed technological exploration flow is able to achieve 10.98% improvement of recognition accuracy on the MNIST dataset and 26.4% energy savings compared with previous work. Experimental results also show that more than 84.4% power saving can be achieved at the cost of little accuracy reduction.

Integrating advanced reasoning into a SAT solver

In this paper, we present a SAT solver based on the combination of DPLL (Davis Putnam Logemann and Loveland) algorithm and Failed Literal Detection (FLD), one of the advanced reasoning techniques. We propose a Dynamic Filtering method that consists of two restriction rules for FLD: internal and external filtering. The method reduces the number of tested literals in FLD and its computational time while maintaining the ability to find most of the failed literals in each decision level. Unlike the pre-defined criteria, literals are removed dynamically in our approach. In this way, our FLD can adapt itself to different real-life benchmarks. Many useless tests are therefore avoided and as a consequence it makes FLD fast. Some other static restrictions are also added to further improve the efficiency of FLD. Experiments show that our optimized FLD is much more efficient than other advanced reasoning techniques.