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Progress in electronic design automation (EDA) has enabled us to manage the exponential growth of complexity in integrated circuits (ICs) allowed by Moore’s Law, and translate it into performance improvements. Furthermore, as Moore’s law slows down and with the collapse of Dennard scaling over the past decade, EDA tools become increasingly important in addressing inefficiencies in ICs. As new proposals and techniques are put forward to address the current and future issues of IC design, a concrete set of contemporary benchmarks needs to be used for their evaluation. Traditionally, EDA researchers have mainly relied on industry provided design benchmarks in evaluating the performance of their tools. However, due to their effort to maintain their competitive advantage, industry releases include older designs with limited information about the details of each design. This means that in multiple cases, new proposals are evaluated with significantly dated designs, often more than a decade old, especially in terms of scale. In this work, we describe OPDB: a scalable, modular, heterogeneous, and extensible design benchmark for the EDA community. OPDB leverages and extends the OpenPiton open-source, tile-based research infrastructure to create a surplus of design benchmarks that target different components. Due to the tiled nature of this architecture, OPDB benchmarks can be made arbitrarily large in order to evaluate the efficiency of EDA tools across different design scales and configurations. OPDB contains several accelerators enabling full SoC designs to be used as benchmarks for EDA tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing greenhouse decision support systems only consider external environmental factors, such as soil and atmosphere, rather than plant response. A conceptual plant-response-based strategy for irrigation and environmental controls for tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) seedling cultivation in greenhouse operations was proposed. Because stomatal conductance (gsw) is a comprehensive indicator of plants, soil moisture, and atmospheric conditions, this study used gsw to design a conceptual system by employing factors affecting gsw as the key for decision-making. Logistic regression was performed with independent variables (i.e., temperature (Tair), vapor pressure deficit (VPD), and leaf–air temperature difference) to predict the gsw status. When the gsw status was "low," the system entered into the environmental control component, which examined whether the VPD and the photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) were in the normal range. If the VPD and the PPFD were not in the normal range, the system would offer a suggestion for environmental control. Conversely, when both parameters were in the normal range, the system would determine that irrigation should be performed and the irrigation amount could be estimated by the evapotranspiration model. Thus, the strategy only considered leaf temperature, Tair, VPD, and PPFD, and the overall error rate to characterize gsw was below 13.36%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For five years, OpenPiton has provided hardware designs, build and verification scripts, and other infrastructure to enable efficient, detailed research into manycores and systems-on-chip. It enables open-source hardware development through its open design and support of a plethora of open simulators and CAD tools. OpenPiton was first designed to perform cutting-edge computer architecture research at Princeton University and opening it up to the public has led to thousands of downloads and numerous academic publications spanning many subfields within computing. In this article, we share some of the lessons learned during the development of OpenPiton, provide examples of how OpenPiton has been used to efficiently test novel research ideas, and discuss how OpenPiton has evolved due to its open development and feedback from the open-source community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are a promising technology for large-area electronics; choosing an appropriate circuit style is critical to enhancing OTFT circuit functionality and reliability. Here, we design and evaluate different types of static and dynamic logic based on complementary and p-type only technology styles, benchmarking their performance under equivalent processing and testing conditions. We find that differences in off characteristics between n-type and p-type OTFTs to be the primary factor for the choice of logic style. For complementary technology, we conclude that static logic is preferred over dynamic logic considering limited n-type transistor off characteristics, integration density, and delay. In the case of p-type transistors, pre-discharge dynamic logic is preferred over static logic, primarily due to the static power efficiency from good p-type transistor off characteristics. We expect this evaluation to be helpful for assisting design style decisions as these technologies continue to mature and develop. [Display omitted] • Benchmarking static and dynamic logic based on OTFT under equivalent processing and testing conditions. • The difference in off characteristics between n-type and p-type OTFTs is the primary factor for the choice of logic style. • For p-type only logic, pre-discharge dynamic logic is preferred due to better off characteristics from the p-type transistors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]