This paper explores the concept of micro-architectural loops and discusses their impact on processor pipelines. In particular, we establish the relationship between loose loops and pipeline length and configuration, and show their impact on performance. We then evaluate the load resolution loop in detail and propose the distributed register algorithm (DRA) as a way of reducing this loop. It dec...

.......This issue features articles on the resurgence and many implications of big chips—from cache-core tradeoffs to power to on-chip networks to clock networks and more. Guest Editors Andrew Kahng and Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan have done an excellent job of pulling together key work related to big chips. However, after a period of some consolidation in microarchitecture, big chips are but one o...

In this research the automatic classification of commercial potato chips by computer vision was studied. The general objective was to design a tool that would be able to classify objectively potato chips according to their color in different categories. For this purpose, sensory measurements of color in 100 potato chips were correlated with the corresponding objective measurements obtained by c...

Chip firing is a one-player game where piles start with an initial number of chips and any pile with at least two chips can send one chip to the piles on either side of it. When all of the piles have no more than a single chip, the game ends. In this paper we review fundamental theorems related to this game on a two dimensional number line, including the fact that termination and final configur...

The high residual stress in a resin-molded electronic package sometimes makes the electronic functions unstable. Therefore the residual stress in electronic packages, especially on the top surfaces of semiconductor chips, should be evaluated. The objective of this study is to present a simple method for evaluating residual stress in resin-molded semiconductor chips using a combination of experi...

To close, let's estimate the overall chip count required to add the multicast capability to a point-to-point network with 256 inputs and outputs. We will assume that for the chips that have little internal memory, we are constrained only by pin count, that each chip has 128 pins available for inputs and outputs and that the data paths are one bit wide. For the example con guration then, 32 chip...

The high residual stress in a resin-molded electronic package sometimes makes the electronic functions unstable. Therefore the residual stress in electronic packages, especially on the top surfaces of semiconductor chips, should be evaluated. The objective of this study is to present a simple method for evaluating residual stress in resin-molded semiconductor chips using a combination of experi...

Bags of Pinus strobus wood chips with moisture contents of 38, 92, 164, and 217% (oven dry weight) were inoculated with Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and incubated at 30 C in order to determine the effect of wood moisture on nematode population development. Nematodes were extracted after 2, 4, 8, and 12 weeks. Population levels were greatest in wood chips with a moisture content of 38% and decreas...

This paper presents a review of experiments performed by IBM to investigate the causes of soft errors in semiconductor memory chips under field test conditions. The effects of alphaparticles and cosmic rays are separated by comparing multiple measurements of the softerror rate (SER) of samples of memory chips deep underground and at various altitudes above the earth. The results of case studies...