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Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad platform where various technologies help everyday devices to become smarter, more informative, communicative and intelligent. IoT devices need batteries to be powered and the lifetime of batteries is limited. Due to which there is a huge demand for energy sources that are competent enough to power IoT devices. Energy harvesting, accumulating and converting surrounding energy into usable energy, has emerged as a strong alternative to power devices. This paper discusses the need for harvesting the energy that arose in IoT devices. The methodology of different architectures and technology used in energy harvesting systems can be improved by understanding the survey on energy harvesting sources and techniques. The paper compiled various energy harvesting sources and techniques in tabular form which will act as a major input for researchers prior art pursuing in this field.

There has been a continuous surge in the research around the concept of circular economy (CE). In today's world, for the organizations to be effective, economic growth with minimum disruption of the environment has become essential. To address this issue, various organizations around the globe are switching to the CE, wherein the natural resources are judiciously utilized and the wastage is minimized. In the CE literature, the ‘human side of organizations' has seldom converged with the adoption of CE. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the manner in which human resource management can contribute toward the adoption of CE. The relationship between human resources and CE focuses on the economic, social as well as the environmental dimensions, integrating the concepts of eco-innovation, leadership, top-management commitment, Green HRM practices and the supremacy of communication in the adoption of CE. The pivotal role of human resources in transition toward the CE can be largely attributed to the stakeholders' theory and the resource-based view. The role of human resource management leads in the development of a conceptual framework positioning the CE as a precursor to organizational sustainability. The recommendations for future research on the CE and the contribution of HRM toward the smooth transition to the CE are suggested.

The Phenomenal scaling of MOSFET helps in sustaining of Moore’s law and also helped in improving the performance. As per the 2009 ITRS projection document the channel length will go down to 12nm approximately by 2020 and moving beyond the 50nm technology conventional MOSFET technology needs advancement to overcome the restrictions imposed by fundamental Physics [1] such as tunnelling of charge carriers through gate oxide, increased leakage current. Reduction in leakage current and short channel effects can be achieved using high K dielectric material. Double gate MOSFET is another possible solution as multiple gates devices improves the circuit performance like improvement in the short channel effects because of better charge control, faster circuit speed because of increased current. Improvement of short channel effects in Double gate MOSFET allows additional gate length scaling.

This paper has proposed an integrated healthcare monitoring solution for the soldiers deployed in adverse environmental conditions, using the internet of things (IoT) with distributed computing. For these soldiers, the health parameters of every individual need to be monitored on a real-time basis and subsequent analysis of the dataset to be made for initiating appropriate medical support with the lowest possible delay. In this paper, a three-layer service-oriented IoT architecture has been proposed where the computational functionalities are distributed among all the layers. The proposed distributed computing mechanism has implemented two levels of filtration of redundant information that belongs to safe soldiers. The first level of filtering is done at the end-node using the Fuzzy classification approach and the second level of filtering is done at the intermediate node using the time-series pattern analysis approach. This layer-wise filtration process results in a reduction in data flooding and computational burden on the cloud due to which system response time improves to suit emergency applications. A prototype has been developed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Test power dissipation is way higher than normal mode power dissipation due to extensive switching activity, which affects the reliability of the device. Switching activity can be reduced by reordering of test vectors without modification in the circuit under test. In this work, a genetic algorithm with simulated annealing is proposed for reordering of test patterns and thereby finding optimum orders of test vectors to reduce overall switching activity at the time of application of test vectors. Hamming distance among consecutive test patterns is minimized in this work for reordering the sequence. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement of 16.5% in the reduction of switching activity on ISCAS’89 benchmark circuits.

Switching activity is much higher in test mode as compared to normal mode of operation which causes higher power dissipation, and this leads to several reliability issues. Output gating is proposed as a very effective low-power test technique, which is used to eliminate redundant switching activity in the combinational logic of circuit under test (CUT) during the shifting of test vectors in a scan chain. This method reduces the average power significantly, but it introduces performance overhead in normal mode of operation. In this work, a new output gating technique is proposed which eliminates redundant switching activity in combinational logic of CUT during shifting of test vectors without any negative impact on performance as compared to earlier proposed output gating techniques. The proposed design also improves the performance of the scan flop in functional mode with negligible area overhead incurred due to extra transistors. Experimental results show that our design has a more robust performance ove...

Scan based diagnosis plays a critical role in failure mode analysis for yield improvement. However, as the logic circuitry associated with scan chains constitute a significant fraction of a chip’s total area the scan chain itself can be subject to defects. In some cases, it has been observed that scan chain failures may account up to \(50\%\) of total chip failures. Hence, scan chain testing and diagnosis have become very crucial in recent years. This paper proposes a hardware-assisted low complexity and area efficient scan chain diagnosis technique. The proposed technique is simple to implement and provides maximum diagnostic resolution for stuck-at faults. The proposed technique can be further extended to diagnose scan chain’s timing faults.

The Scan based testing is used for delay testing in sequential circuits and in general it is implemented by using launch-on-capture (LoC) delay tests. Launch-on-shift (LoS) delay tests are usually more efficient to obtain high fault coverage with appreciably lesser number of test vectors, but it requires a fast scan enable, which is not supported by majority of designs. The architecture of scan design limits the two pattern delay tests that can be applied to circuit under test which results in degradation of delay test coverage. The use of enhanced scan flip-flops can improve this problem by facilitating arbitrary delay test vector pairs, at the cost of high area overhead and also requires fast hold signal. This paper presents a new enhanced scan methodology implemented with the slow hold signal. Experimental results on ISCAS'89 benchmark circuit shows improvement in TDF fault coverage for this methodology.

Electroless based Ni-Co-P alloy thin films were deposited using sodium hypophosphite as a reducing agent and sodium citrate as a complexing agent in an alkaline plating bath. The effect of solution pH and temperature on the plating rate was examined. The decrease in activation energy (81.35 − 73.54 kJ mole−1) for the Ni-Co-P thin films deposited on corning glass was observed with the increase in pH (8.5–9.38) of the plating bath. There is a significant decrease in sheet resistance of alloy thin films as the post deposition annealing temperature approaches 400 °C. The presence of nickel as well as nickel phosphide peaks and transition from metastable Ni12P5, Ni8P5 and Ni5P2 phases into thermodynamically stable NiP, NiP2, Ni3P phases after annealing at 600 °C was observed in XRD spectra, indicating the crystallization of the thin films. Surface topography analysis shows the variation of grain size in the range 20–40 nm.

Excessive switching activity in test mode results in higher power dissipation than normal mode of operation and becoming a serious issue, in order to avoid reliability problems. Scanning of test vectors in test mode causes unnecessary switching in combinational block which can be reduced by gating methods. Gating the outputs of scan cells is a recently proposed very efficient low power test technique, which reduces the scan shift power significantly. However, the output gating techniques impacts the performance severely. In this paper, we propose a modified transistor level design of a scan flip-flop for critical paths, which eliminates the unnecessary switching in combinational circuit during shift phase of a scan-based test, without the impact on performance as in earlier scan flip-flop output gating schemes (Khatri and Ganeshan, 2008). The new scan flop design not only eliminates the performance overhead of output gating but also improves the performance of the scan flop by 32.84% (Khatri and Ganeshan, 2008) and 11.5% (Yang et al., 2008). The new flip-flop disables the output and uses an alternate path for shifting the test vectors. This approach have area overhead of six extra transistors but improves the overall performance of scan flip-flop, so this approach is better suited for critical paths. This also allows us to increase the shift frequency in designs where shift power dissipation puts upper bound on the frequency, and hence reduces test application time.

PurposeThe explosion of the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to an unprecedented crisis lately, which has adversely affected the performance level of professionals in the educational sector worldwide because of numerous constraints, imposition of the lockdown being one of those. Organizational resilience (OReg) and emotional intelligence (EI) discretely have been identified as indicators of employee performance (EP) over the years, but during the period of crisis, it has scarcely been analysed. Therefore, this study aims to examine the mediating role of EI on the relationship between OReg and EP in such a global pandemic.Design/methodology/approachIn total, 390 samples including teaching and non-teaching professionals working in higher educational institutions (HEIs) were collected from different HEIs located in India through online survey questionnaires. The collected data was further analysed using regression analysis, factor analysis, structural equation modelling along with bootstrapping technique, reliability and validity analysis, mediation analysis and model fit indices analysis.FindingsThe results of the study confirmed the partial mediation effect of EI on the OReg-EP relationship, and further results also exhibited that employees with a higher level of EI, contribute more positively to the OReg level, which further enhances the performance level at the workplace.Research limitations/implicationsThe samples collected for the current study pertain to the HEIs only, and therefore the present study results have limited general applicability. Furthermore, the study does not investigate the influence of time.Practical implicationsThis study would assist practitioners of HEIs in improving the resilience capabilities of the organization. EP can be improved by enhancing the levels of OReg and individual emotional intelligence, which is in line with the findings of the current study.Social implicationsIn the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide the students are affected due to the transition to online teaching. This study will help HEI’s to cope up with the student’s loss by being flexible in approach for the retention of performance of employees by taking care of their emotional needs and focusing on their skill development by providing a learning culture in a depressing time of the pandemic so that students will not suffer due to this rapid change without any preparation or previous experience in a pandemic.Originality/valueThe current study examines the mediating effect of EI on the OReg and EP relationship for the first time in HEIs in India.