MIPS Architecture

The case study processor used in this work is based in the Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages (MIPS) architecture. It has a standard processor architecture based on the Reduced Instraction Set Computing (RISC) instmction set. The basic idea behind RISC is to use simple instructions, which enable easier pipelining and larger caches, while increasing its performance. The MIPS architecture can be seen since 1985 in commercial applications, from workstations to Windows CE devices, routers, gateways and PlayStation gaming devices. 

Thickness of the barrier layer, optimized at 220 nm [133], played a crucial role with respect to the chemosensor sensitivity, selectivity and LOD. So, eventually, the chemosensor architecture comprised a gold-film electrode, sputtered onto a 10-MHz resonator, coated with the poly(bithiophene) barrier layer, which was then overlaid with the MIP film. This architecture enabled selective determination of the amine at the nanomole concentration level. LOD for histamine was 5 nM and the determined stability constant of the MIP-histamine complex, XMn> = 57.0 M 1 [131], compared well with the values obtained with other methods [53, 136, 137]. Moreover, due to the adopted architecture, the dopamine chemosensor could determine this amine with the stability constant for the MIP-dopamine complex, XMip = (44.6 4.0) x 106 M-1 and LOD of 5 nM [133], which is as low as that reached by electroanalytical techniques [138]. The MIP-QCM chemosensor for adenine [132] also featured low, namely 5 nM, LOD and the stability constant determined for the MIP-adenine complex, XMIP = (18 2.4) x 104 M, was as high as that of the MIP-adenine complex prepared by thermo-induced co-polymer-ization [139]. The linear concentration range for determination of these amines extended to at least 100 mM. 

A wide variety of polymeric membranes with different barrier properties is already available, many of them in various formats and with various dedicated specifications. The ongoing development in the field is very dynamic and focused on further increasing barrier selectivities (if possible at maximum transmembrane fluxes) and/ or improving membrane stability in order to broaden the applicability. This tailoring of membrane performance is done via various routes controlled macro-molecular synthesis (with a focus on functional polymeric architectures), development of advanced polymer blends or mixed-matrix materials, preparation of novel composite membranes and selective surface modification are the most important trends. Advanced functional polymer membranes such as stimuli-responsive [54] or molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) membranes [55] are examples of the development of another dimension in that field. On that basis, it is expected that polymeric membranes will play a major role in process intensification in many different fields. 

The mid-range workstations offer 10 to 15 MIPS performance, with numeric processing at 1 to 2 MFLOPS, drawing rates of 200,000 to 400,0(X) v/s and 20,000 p/s. Their higher performance arises from so-call RISC architecture (Reduced Instruction Set CPU), which allow the computer to perform fewer tasks per CPU instruction. They also utilize faster, proprietary graphics display processors and larger display memory, which allows more colors and multiple windows. These units cost between 30,000 and 70,000, and they probably make up the bulk of recent CAMD woikstation purchases. They are suitable for solid model display and manipulation of small molecules, and wireframe and dot-surface display of macromolecules. Molecular mechanics and dynamics calcinations on small molecules and ensembles can be run in batch mode on these machines, and the results can be displayed and manipulated interactively. 

Figure 1 shows the hardware architecture of TOPFIT. There is one master processor which communicates with N slave processors through dual-ported RAM. The dual-ported RAM can be addressed by both the master bus and the slave bus. Each slave is an independent microcomputer with its own processor, memory, bus and operating system. Its computing power is close to 1 MIPS. 

What are the chemistries needed to adopt successfully a step-wise assembly approach For example, should a bio-inspired combination of covalent and non-covalent bonds be used where covalently linked linear chains are folded into the desired architecture by noncovalent interactions Or should covalent chemistries be employed throughout to ensure the resultant materials are as robust as conventional MIPs ... 

The chosen embedded system was composed of a MIPS microprocessor hardened with HETA, an unhardened SRAM memory embedded in the FPGA, two SpW links (TARRILLO 2011) and the FPGA embedded Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) clock module. The system has some fault tolerant capabilities that are able to detect transient faults, but not necessary TID effects as radiation results will show. Figure 7.1 shows the architecture of the embedded system. 

HelenOS uses a preemptive priority-feedback scheduler, it supports SMP hardware and it is designed to be highly portable. Currently it runs on 7 distinct hardware architectures, including the most common IA-32, x86-64 (AMD64), IA-64, SPARC v9 and PowerPC. It also runs on ARMv7 and MIPS, but currently only in simulators and not on physical hardware. 

The major development efforts for RISC processors were led by the University of California at Berkeley and the Stanford University designs. Sun Microsystems developed the Berkeley version of the RISC processor [scalable processor architecture (SPARC)] for their high-speed workstations. This, however, was not the first RISC processor. It was preceeded by the MIPS R2000 (based on the Stanford University design), the Hewlett Packard PA-RISC CPU, and the AMD 29000. 

MIPS (originally an acronym for microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages) is a RISC instmction set architecture (ISA) developed by MIPS Technologies (formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.) (Definition from Wikipedia). MPIS in FPGA has been covered in Clause 3.2. 

In FPGA applications, MIPS has been utilized to improve performance of the system. MIPS has RISC (see Clause 3.0.1) microprocessor architecture and defines large numbers of 32-bit GPRs. The CPU uses byte addressing for word and a byte boundary divisible by four. There are three types of instructions listed as follows, and each instruction has different format as shown in Fig. APV/3.2.4-1A. 

I-type-load and stores instmctions As MIPS is based on RISC processor it is load/store type architecture, meaning that all operations are performed on operands in the processor registers. The main memory is only accessed through the load/store instmctions which are used to load a value in to register from memory or store a value from register to memory respectively. 

V.P. Rubio, ]. Cook. A FPGA Implementation of a MIPS RISC Processor for Computer Architecture Education New Mexico State University, July 2004. http //www.ece.nmsu.edu/ jecook/thesis/Victor thesis.pdf. 

Hattori and coworkers exploited both the living characteristics and photoactivation mechanism of STIMP to create MIPs consisting of methacrylic acid (MAA) and ethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (EDMA) synthesized from iniferter-modified cellulose membranes in the presence of theophylline, which served as the template molecule [76]. In addition to the ability to control polymer architecture, they observed that the STIMP photoactivation mechanism avoids template-monomer complexation, which is highly undesirable but usually observed in MIPs synthesized by thermally activated polymerization methods [76]. The MAA and EDMA comonomer system has also been used to synthesize MIPs from iniferter-modified carbon nanotubes... 

Since a soft error will affect a single-bit cell, we do analysis at the level of assembly code. This paper adopts the PISA instruction set [13], a 32-bit architecture, which is a MIPS-like instruction set. 

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