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This paper presents a fully innovative supply system, mixing remote (230 VAC) and local (-48 VDC) powering, where solutions based, up to now, on fully standard products were rejected because they did not meet the key requirements, and where a new system was specifically designed and it is currently being used by cable operators. The analysis and specification was carried out taking into account criteria such as modularity according to network growth, long autonomies (also modular), very high redundancy, high efficiency, optional power conditioning for industrial environments, small footprint, hot-swap, all fully controlled and monitored by a management system.

The US Army Medical Research and Material Command together with the US Marine Corps Combat Development Command sponsored the design and production of a far-forward, lightweight, small footprint, reconfigurable, highly mobile Advanced Surgical Suite for Trauma Casualties (ASSTC) to reduce combat casualties and morbidity. The KIA fraction has remained relatively constant over major wars and conflicts since the early 1900s. One third of the KIA perish after 10 minutes. ASSTC has the potential to dramatically lower this fraction by providing resuscitative care within a short period of wound infliction and not requiring long transport times to the caregivers. ASSTC is also unique in its capability to serve in multiple missions including humanitarian aid, infectious disease control, and disaster relief. Adding field sensor to ASSTC greatly enhances the capability of this highly mobile system to operate in many areas.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Siemens Primus is a small footprint, klystron driven medicallinear accelerator incorporating a compact solid state modulator. A double focused multileaf collimator(MLC) replaces the lower jaw. The first Primus in the world was installed at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in early 1997 with x-ray energies of 6 and 15 MV and electron energies of 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, and 21 MeV. The 10 cm depth dose for a 100 cm SSD 10×10 cm 2 beam is 68% and 77% for 6 and 15 MV x rays, respectively. For both x-ray energies, beam flatness is slightly better than the manufacturers specification of 3% and beam symmetry is considerably better than 1%. The double focus design of the MLC produces a sharp penumbra (5–7 mm at 6 MV and 6–8 mm at 15 MV), increasing modestly with beam size. MLC leaf leakage is less than 1.25%. The depths of the 80% depth dose for the six electron energies of 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, and 21 MeV are 2.6, 3.2, 4.0, 4.9, 6.0, and 7.4 cm, respectively. Beam flatness is typically 2%–3% for all electron energies except 21 MeV, where it reaches 4% for a 25×25 cm2 cone. Electron beam symmetry is better than 1% for all energies except 21 MeV, where it is equal to 1%. The results are stored electronically and may be retrieved using anonymous ftp from the American Institute of Physics, Physics Auxiliary Publication Service.

The increasing demand for high-throughput workflows in life science research is accommodated by several large robotic platforms. A new manual benchtop system from Rainin, Liquidator 96, provides an economical approach to high-throughput pipetting without the need for any programming. With a small footprint, the instrument easily fits inside a laminar flow hood for sterile applications.

Locating oil in marine and terrestrial environments is a daunting task. There are commercially available off the shelf (COTS) sensors with a wide field-of-view (FOV) which can be used to map the overall extent of the spill. These generic sensors, however, lack the specificity required to positively identify oil and related products. The problem is exacerbated along beach and shoreline environments where a variety of organic and inorganic substrates are present. One sensor that can detect and classify oil in these environments is the laser fluorosensor. Laser fluorosensors have been under development by several agencies around the world for the past two decades. Environment Canada has been involved with laser fluorosensor development since the early 1990s. The prototype system was known as the Laser Environmental Airborne Fluorosensor (LEAF). The LEAF has recently been modified to provide real-time oil spill detection and classification. Fluorescence spectra are collected and analyzed at the rate of 100 Hz. Geo-referenced maps showing the locations of oil contamination are produced in real-time onboard the aircraft. While the LEAF has proven to be an excellent prototype sensor and a good operational tool, it has some deficiencies when it comes to oil spill response operations. A consortium including Environment Canada and the Minerals Management Service has recently funded the development of a new fluorosensor, called the Scanning Laser Environmental Airborne Fluorosensor (SLEAF). The SLEAF was designed to detect and map oil in shoreline environments where other non-specific sensors experience difficulty. Oil tends to pile up in narrow bands along the high tide line on beaches. A nadir-looking, small footprint sensor such as the LEAF would have difficulty locating oil in this situation. The SLEAF employs a pair of conical scanning mirrors to direct the laser beam in a circular pattern below the aircraft. With a sampling rate of 400 Hz and real-time spectral analysis, the SLEAF will detect and map oil contamination in marine and coastal environments. The SLEAF will confirm or reject suspected oil contamination sites that have been targeted by the generic sensors. This confirmation will release response crews from the time-consuming task of physically inspecting each site and instead direct crews to sites that require remediation.© (1999) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

While many of the government funded research communities over the years have put their faith and money into increasingly larger synchrotrons, such as Spring8 in Japan, and the APS in the United States, a viable market appears to exist for smaller scale, research and commercial grade, compact synchrotrons. These smaller, and less expensive machines, provide the research and industrial communities with synchrotron radiation beamline access at a portion of the cost of their larger and more powerful counterparts. A compact synchrotron, such as the Aurora-2D, designed and built by Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd. of japan (SHI), is a small footprint synchrotron capable of sustaining 20 beamlines. Coupled with a Microtron injector, with 150 MeV of injection energy, an entire facility fits within a 27 meter [88.5 ft] square floorplan. The system, controlled by 2 personal computers, is capable of producing 700 MeV electron energy and 300 mA stored current. Recently, an Aurora-2D synchrotron was purchased from SHI by the University of Hiroshima. The Rocketdyne Albuquerque Operations Beamline Optics Group was approached by SHI with a request to supply a group of 16 beamline mirrors for this machine. These mirrors were sufficient to supply 3 beamlines for the Hiroshima machine. This paper will address engineering issues which arose during the design and manufacturing of these mirrors.© (1997) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Conducting polymer actuators are biocompatible with a small footprint, and operate in air or liquid media under low actuation voltages. This makes them excellent actuators for macroand micro-manipulation devices, however, their positioning ability or accuracy is adversely affected by their hysteresis non-linearity under open-loop control strategies. In this paper, we establish a hysteresis model for conducting polymer actuators, based on a rate-independent hysteresis model known as the Duhem model. The hysteresis model is experimentally identified and integrated with the linear dynamics of the actuator. This combined model is inverted to control the displacement of the tri-layer actuators considered in this study, without using any external feedback. The inversion requires an inverse hysteresis model which was experimentally identified using an inverse neural network model. Experimental results show that the position tracking errors are reduced by more than 50% when the hysteresis inverse model is incorporated into an inversion-based feedforward controller, indicating the potential of the proposed method in enabling wider use of such smart actuators.

Nanoscale control of the metal-insulator transition of the LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface with a conductive-atomic force microscope (c-AFM) technique has enabled a variety of electrical and photonic device concepts. While previous devices have demonstrated sub-10 nm critical features, information processing applications also require high operating speeds. Here we show that a “sketched” nanoscale transistor (“SketchFET”) can operate at frequencies in excess of 2 GHz. The combination of high speed and high conductance with a small footprint make these devices and this platform attractive for sub-10 nm computing and storage architectures.

A graded base SiGe HBT optical modulator has high-speed, high optical modulation efficiency, small footprint. In this paper, we present our work in the design and modeling of an HBT optical modulator, its driver circuit and fabrication and integration. A high-efficient HBT electro-optical (EO) modulator with π phase-shift length of 22.6 μm is investigated. The speed of this modulator is calculated to be 30 Gb/s. To verify the functionality of HBT structure as an EO modulator, an 80 Gb/s serializer and driver with an HBT modulator is fabricated by the IBM 8HP BiCMOS process, which has much higher speed but lower modulation efficiency.

Here the integration of a tube-shaped Pirani gauge with a SiN thin-film encapsulation process is presented. The tube geometry gives the sensor a very low detection limit with a small footprint, since the tube is buried under the silicon surface. The Pirani tube is very suitable for in situ evaluation of MEMS vacuum packaging. Moreover, since the Pirani gap is all around the tube and deep below the silicon surface, the deflection of the encapsulation shell is not a concern and wafer-level measurement of the device is possible. Pirani tubes with different lengths are encapsulated inside SiN micropackages in order to measure the resulting vacuum level achieved after the encapsulation step. The longest tube shows a detection limit of 0.1 Pa for a noise level of 50 μV and it has a footprint of only 0.006 mm2. The pressure inside the sealed micropackage was extracted to be 0.7 kPa. Furthermore, the pressure is monitored over time to evaluate the hermeticity of the packages. A leak rate of 8× 10−18 Pa m3 s−1 was measured over four months time.

We present an algorithm for designing high efficiency (∼98%), small-footprint (1.5-4 square vacuum wavelengths) couplers between arbitrary nanophotonic waveguide modes in two dimensions. Our "objective-first" method is computationally fast (15 minutes on a single-core personal computer), requires no trial-and-error, and does not require guessing a good starting design. We demonstrate designs for various coupling problems which suggest that our method allows for the design of any single-mode, linear optical device.

A technique for reducing the electromagnetic coupling between planar inverted-F antennas (PIFAs), built on a compact ground plane for typical handheld devices, is presented. Novel miniaturised convoluted slits are inserted in the ground plane between two PIFAs introducing a transmission minimum in the coupling path between them and producing a significant reduction of the mutual coupling within the operating band of the antennas. The proposed slits have a small footprint and are positioned close to the edges of the ground plane, thereby occupying very little space. Simulated results as well as measurements of a fabricated prototype are presented.

Water electrolysis using proton exchange membrane (PEM) technology is a promising pathway to generate hydrogen for energy applications because of the lack of corrosive electrolytes, small footprint, and ability to generate at differential pressure, requiring only deionized water and an energy source. Using a renewable energy source as the input power enables a carbon-free cycle. In 2008, Proton created a cell stack roadmap to leverage the material advancements made in fuel cells as well as address new design requirements. The overall impact of this research to date has been considerable. Efficiency improvements of 20% have been demonstrated for membrane and catalyst configurations that have been tested to over 1000 hours. Cost reductions of over 15% of the total stack cost have also been proven to be feasible. Additional pathways for the next 3-5 years are expected to continue to make progress in reducing the cost of hydrogen from water electrolysis.

Quantaurus-QY was developed as a compact, easy-to-use system with a small footprint based on Hamamatsu's established C9920-02/03 systems for measuring absolute photoluminescence quantum yields. Operating this system is simple: load a sample and press the start button to measure the photoluminescence quantum yields, excitation wavelength dependence, photoluminescence excitation spectrum and other properties in a short period of time.

We briefly review the published advances which have been made in the fruit packing process and present two innovations; firstly, a novel packing line for kiwifruit and secondly, an automated apple packing system. The underlying principle of the novel packing line is to run it slowly enough that each stage of the packing process can operate optimally while minimising damage to the fruit. Adequate throughput is achieved by designing the packing line around a small footprint. The automated apple packing system comprises computer vision to manage the flow of apples and to orient the apples ‘sunny side’ up and two custom-built robots capable of packing 3,600 apples per hour. The robots have soft suction cups to hold the apples and the apples are packed with their axes aligned in the tray. The robotic packing system fits on a standard tray conveyor on an existing packing line conveyor and replaces manual packing.

The present letter concerns the reduction of the size of a patch antenna by combining two techniques. Inserting slots as inductive loading and making some short points in the middle of a patch excited originally in the TM001 mode permits us to obtain an overall reduction of 75%. This enables the development of antennas for several applications, especially in portable communication systems requiring small footprint devices. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 30: 385–386, 2001.

An 80×80 port free space crossconnect that uses individual collimators and beam steering micromirrors is presented. The switch uses a design with beams converging on the micromirrors, which leads to a small footprint of 50×40×20 mm3, and an optimal use of the tilt angle range of the micromirrors. The switch exhibits a mean insertion loss of 2.5 dB, and a crosstalk rejection better than 60 dB.

Experimental results for a gigabit Ethernet-compatible photo-receiver circuit generating CMOS logic level are presented. A single-ended preamplifier is combined with a multi-stage differential postamplifier with inverse scaling to increase bandwidth. Circuits are realised in 0.25 µm CMOS, dissipating 26 mW or less. The analogue portion of the receiver operates at 2 µA average input current at 1.25 Gbit/s, increasing to ~10 µm when CMOS levels are generated. A maximum speed of 2.1 Gbit/s is reported for the analogue portion.

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems typically employ neural network acoustic models. However, compared to Gaussian mixture models, deep neural network (DNN) based acoustic models often have many more model parameters, making it challenging for them to be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, such as mobile devices. In this paper, we study the application of the recently proposed highway deep neural network (HDNN) for training small-footprint acoustic models. HDNNs are a depth-gated feedforward neural network, which include two types of gate functions to facilitate the information flow through different layers. Our study demonstrates that HDNNs are more compact than regular DNNs for acoustic modeling, i.e., they can achieve comparable recognition accuracy with many fewer model parameters. Furthermore, HDNNs are more controllable than DNNs: the gate functions of an HDNN can control the behavior of the whole network using a very small number of model parameters. Finally, we show that HDNNs are more adaptable than DNNs. For example, simply updating the gate functions using adaptation data can result in considerable gains in accuracy. We demonstrate these aspects by experiments using the publicly available AMI corpus, which has around 80 hours of training data., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1608.00892, arXiv:1607.01963

This paper presents an open-source canopy height profile (CHP) toolkit designed for processing small-footprint full-waveform LiDAR data to obtain the estimates of effective leaf area index (LAIe) and CHPs. The use of the toolkit is presented with a case study of LAIe estimation in discontinuous-canopy fruit plantations. The experiments are carried out in two study areas, namely, orange and almond plantations, with different percentages of canopy cover (48% and 40%, respectively). For comparison, two commonly used discrete-point LAIe estimation methods are also tested. The LiDAR LAIe values are first computed for each of the sites and each method as a whole, providing “apparent” site-level LAIe, which disregards the discontinuity of the plantations' canopies. Since the toolkit allows for the calculation of the study area LAIe at different spatial scales, between-tree-level clumping can be easily accounted for and is then used to illustrate the impact of the discontinuity of canopy cover on LAIe retrieval. The LiDAR LAIe estimates are therefore computed at smaller scales as a mean of LAIe in various grid-cell sizes, providing estimates of “actual” site-level LAIe. Subsequently, the LiDAR LAIe results are compared with theoretical models of “apparent” LAIe versus “actual” LAIe, based on known percent canopy cover in each site. The comparison of those models to LiDAR LAIe derived from the smallest grid-cell sizes against the estimates of LAIe for the whole site has shown that the LAIe estimates obtained from the CHP toolkit provided values that are closest to those of theoretical models.

Results from measurements of wave slope statistics during the R/V Meteor M91 cruise in the coastal upwelling regions off the coast of Peru are reported. Wave slope probability distributions were measured with an instrument based on the reflection of light at the water surface and a method very similar to the Cox and Munk (1954b) sun glitter technique. During the cruise, the mean square slope (mss) of the waves was found to be very variable, despite the limited range of encountered wind speeds. The Cox and Munk (1954b) parameterization for clean water is found to overestimate mss, but most measurements fall in the range spanned by their clean water and slick parameterizations. The observed variability of mss is attributed to the wave damping effect of surface films, generated by increased biological production in the upwelling zones. The small footprint and high temporal resolution of the measurement allows for tracking abrupt changes in conditions caused by the often patchy structure of the surface films.

The trend is towards having smaller and smaller mobile devices, also called small-footprint devices, allowing nomadic users to access the same services as with the static computers from virtually anywhere and at any time. The idea of having software agents running on small-footprint mobile devices sounds an attractive way of delivering services for nomadic users. One of the biggest problems is that the current agent platforms are designed to run on computers with a lot of resources, e.g., CPU power and memory. This paper discusses the problem area of having a FIPA-OS agent platform running on a small-footprint devices. Our views are based on experiences of running a FIPA-OS agent platform on Java-enabled small-footprint devices. The experiments were conducted using Casio Cassiopeia E-115, Psion Series 5mx and Compaq iPAQ H3630. Our results clearly show that without any optimizations FIPA-OS is not suited to run on small-footprint devices.

Public transportation (PT) systems suffer from disutility compared to private transportation due to the inability to provide passengers with a door-to-door service, referred to as the first/last mile problem. Personal mobility devices (PMDs) are thought to improve PT service quality by closing this first/last mile gap. However, current PMDs are generally driven manually by the rider and require a learning phase for safe vehicle operation. Additionally, most PMDs require a standing riding position and are not easily accessible to elderly people or persons with disabilities. In this paper, the concept of an autonomously operating mobility device is introduced. The visionary concept is designed as an on-demand transportation service which transports people for short to medium distances and increases the accessibility to public transport. The device is envisioned to be operated as a larger fleet and does not belong to an individual person. The vehicle features an electric powertrain and a one-axle self-balancing design with a small footprint. It provides one seat for a passenger and a tilt mechanism that is designed to improve the ride comfort and safety at horizontal curves. An affordable 3D-camera system is used for autonomous localization and navigation. For the evaluation and demonstration of the concept, a functional prototype is implemented.

We propose a highly sensitive optical sensor which is built from silicon nanowires. The silicon nanowires are arranged to form a ring resonator. The silicon nanowires cladding and voids are filled with the analyte. The sensor has a small footprint of 16 μm × 16.5 μm. The insertion loss of the sensor is only 0.4 dB, while it is characterized by its high sensitivity of 430 nm/RIU. As a biosensor, our device showed a 100 nm/RIU sensitivity when a thin biolayer of 10 nm thickness is attached to the silicon nanowire structures.

Radiographic imaging with x-rays and protons is an omnipresent tool in basic research and applications in industry, material science and medical diagnostics. The information contained in both modalities can often be valuable in principle, but difficult to access simultaneously. Laser-driven solid-density plasma-sources deliver both kinds of radiation, but mostly single modalities have been explored for applications. Their potential for bi-modal radiographic imaging has never been fully realized, due to problems in generating appropriate sources and separating image modalities. Here, we report on the generation of proton and x-ray micro-sources in laser-plasma interactions of the focused Texas Petawatt laser with solid-density, micrometer-sized tungsten needles. We apply them for bi-modal radiographic imaging of biological and technological objects in a single laser shot. Thereby, advantages of laser-driven sources could be enriched beyond their small footprint by embracing their additional unique properties, including the spectral bandwidth, small source size and multi-mode emission.

Cleaning or defluxing of populated printed circuit boards has become a very difficult problem as component stand‐off clearances have become smaller, line spacings tighter, and solvents limited because of the CFC/ozone issue. This paper discusses the new technology of Centrifugal cleaning where ACCEL Energy™ is harnessed inside an enclosed chamber to provide significant cleaning benefits. Among these benefits are: superior washing, effective rinsing, superior drying, reduced solvent consumption by orders of magnitude, small footprint, and compatibility with H2O, saponifiers, chlorocarbons, fluorocarbons and terpenes.

Very little information exists as to the tracks of the smaller reptilia of the Trias, although several types of footprints have been described from isolated examples. Four types of tracks which occur on the slab of sandstone from Weston Point, described in 1840 by Dr. Black, are discussed in this paper. They belong to forms generally included in the Rhynchosauroid types and to the footprint I, Beasley. Both pes and manus are impressed in three of the cases, the other being so small that it is doubtful whether the manus would have made a recognizable impression if it did touch the ground. Footprint A 2, Beasley, has a manus very similar to the pes, but showing some traces of the palm. Footprint A 8, spec. nov., has five toes in the pes connected by a web. The manus is also five-toed, but corresponds to some extent to I, Beasley. There is a well-marked tail-streak in the track. E, Beasley, which is very similar to I, really has five digits, the fifth being directed backwards and only just touching the ground. A very small footprint is described as A 9. It is suggested that some of these prints may quite well belong to such Thecodonts as Ornithosuchus .

Background Machine Learning (ML) has a number of demonstrated applications in protein prediction tasks such as protein structure prediction. To speed further development of machine learning based tools and their release to the community, we have developed a package which characterizes several aspects of a protein commonly used for protein prediction tasks with machine learning. Findings A number of software libraries and modules exist for handling protein related data. The package we present in this work, PCP-ML, is unique in its small footprint and emphasis on machine learning. Its primary focus is on characterizing various aspects of a protein through sets of numerical data. The generated data can then be used with machine learning tools and/or techniques. PCP-ML is very flexible in how the generated data is formatted and as a result is compatible with a variety of existing machine learning packages. Given its small size, it can be directly packaged and distributed with community developed tools for protein prediction tasks. Conclusions Source code and example programs are available under a BSD license at http://mlid.cps.cmich.edu/eickh1jl/tools/PCPML/. The package is implemented in C++ and accessible as a Python module. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-810) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.