Search

This paper presents a novel multichannel time to digital converter (TDC) specifically designed for the digitization of photon time of flight (TOF) and energy in positron emission tomography (PET) scanners. A coarse-fine architecture based on a counter combined with a delay locked loop (DLL) is implemented using a fully synchronous approach exploiting the pipeline principle and dynamic logic. This makes the design particularly compact and suitable for multichannel applications. The converter is also able to reject the events generated by the dark noise of the photodetectors used in the PET modules. This significantly reduces the communication bandwidth required for reading the TDC outputs. The TDC has been designed in a 65 nm CMOS process and features 8 channels that provide the arrival time information of an event with an LSB of 102 ps. The core occupies an active area of $0.3~\hbox{mm}^2$ and consumes 230 mW.

The e-commerce has become a point of strength for the companies that desire to increase their billing enlarging their clients park and reducing the management costs. Therefore the demand has been born to use platforms able to support the interoperability between heterogeneous systems and the multi-channelling with variegated devices to access different services in reliable manner and to allow, so, a spread of the market toward partner with particular needs. Furthermore, many available services have been typically designed for a single channel the web one. In a real world scenario, an ever-growing number of users take advantage of different kind of communication channel and devices. In this paper we propose a B2B oriented framework able to support the interoperability among heterogeneous systems developed according to the ebXML reference model for the business messages interchange suitable to any B2B marketplace that foresees the commercial interaction among partners with different roles and profiles (including channel and device). Such framework has been developed and experimented for the TRAME research project that has as objective to create a room of district compensation of the peaks of productive ability demands within the Textile/Clothing sector and to give the needed infrastructure for the business messages exchange among the partners of the productive spinneret.

The number and the diffusion of non traditional devices able to provide every-where and any time access to the Web is increasing day by day. These devices include not only cellular phones, PDAs, and terminals for disabled people, but also new kind of devices, possibly embedded into tools such as household appliances, or vehicle dashboards. The characteristics of the various devices are so different that the issues related to the delivering of information and services on the Web do not involve only the presentation aspects, but structural and navigational aspects as well. As an example consider a cellular phone: its limited computing capabilities require that information is filtered and organized as a collection of atomic units whose dimensions depend closely on specific features of the device. It turns out that a novel and fundamental requirement in this scenario is the ability of the system to adapt and personalize content delivery according to the context of the client (a human being or an application). There is no accepted definition of context, but the term is a usually adopted to indicate “a set of attributes that characterizes the capabilities of the access mechanism, the preferences of the user and other aspects of the context into which a Web page is to be delivered”. These may include the access device (even in presence of strong heterogeneity of devices), the network QoS, the user preferences, the location, the time, the language, and so on. Therefore adaptiveness usually concerns several independent coordinates. In this chapter we present models, methods and techniques for the design and the development of Web-based information systems, which are adaptive with respect to context information.