Digital Commons Network^™

Communicating Conceptual Design Of Mechatronic Systems, Muir Lee Harding

Dissertations and Theses

Today's engineering designers must adapt to a changing model of product development. In the past, a single engineer could design, develop and deploy competitive systems --this is often no longer the case. Designing a mechanical system with integrated microprocessor control requires the collaboration of a cross-disciplinary team of engineers and, in many cases, no single member of the team understands the workings of the entire system. Consequently, as systems become increasingly complex, the ability to collaborate and reliably communicate design information becomes more and more crucial. Effective communication 1s particularly critical in conceptual design, where a poor decision has the …

Patterns Of Time, Place, And Culture: Land Use Zoning In Portland, Oregon, 1918-1924, Meg Merrick

Dissertations and Theses

Until recently, few have questioned the notion that the separation of uses in land use zoning is inherently correct. Many observers of the city are now suggesting that zoning, as it has been practiced in this country over the last 80 years, has created cities that are fractured and function poorly. Others propose that zoning should be reconsidered as a remedy for urban dysfunction. They suggest that the whole notion of zoning be rethought.

The purpose of this study is to uncover some of the underlying rationales and methodologies that set the model for zoning. This study examines the rationales …

Few-Cycle Pulses In Two-Level Media, Lee W. Casperson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Techniques for producing, measuring, and applying ever shorter electromagnetic pulses are being developed for incorporation in a variety of modern high-speed systems. In many cases these pulses are at most a few cycles in length, and so-called half-cycle electromagnetic pulses are also widely employed. The interaction of such pulses with two-level media is considered here in detail, and these media are basic to many of the absorbing and amplifying configurations of optics and laser studies. Significant delays and distortion of the resulting polarization and population pulses can occur, and nonlinear optical effects are also revealed. The limitations of the parity, …

Exact Graph Coloring For Functional Decomposition: Do We Need It?, Marek Perkowski, Rahul Malvi, Lech Jozwiak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Finding column multiplicity index is one of important component processes in functional decomposition of discrete functions for circuit design and especially Data Mining applications. How important it is to solve this problem exactly from the point of view of the minimum complexity of decomposition, and related to it error in Machine Learning type of applications? In order to investigate this problem we wrote two graph coloring programs: exact program EXOC and approximate program DOM (DOM cab give provably exact results on some types of graphs). These programs were next incorporated into the multi-valued decomposer of functions and relations NVGUD. Extensive …

Multi-Level Programmable Arrays For Sub-Micron Technology Based On Symmetries, Marek Perkowski, Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske, Yang Xu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Regular layout is a fundamental concept in VLSI design which can have application in custom design for submicron technologies, designing new architectures for fine-grain Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Electrically Programmable logic Devices (EPLDs), and minimization of logic functions for existing FPGAs. PLAs are well known examples of regular layouts. Lattice diagrams are another type of regular layouts that have been recently introduced for layout-driven logic synthesis. In this paper we extend and combine theses two ideas, by introducing the multi-level PLA-like structures, composed from multi-output (pseudo) symmetrical lattice planes and other planes (multi-input, multi-output regular blocks). The main …

Effect Of Environmental Structure On Evolutionary Adaptation, Jeffrey Alan Fletcher, Mark A. Bedau, Martin Zwick

Complex Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper investigates how environmental structure, given the innate properties of a population, affects the degree to which this population can adapt to the environment. The model we explore involves simple agents in a 2-d world which can sense a local food distribution and, as specified by their genomes, move to a new location and ingest the food there. Adaptation in this model consists of improving the genomic sensorimotor mapping so as to maximally exploit the environmental resources. We vary environmental structure to see its specific effect on adaptive success. In our investigation, two properties of environmental structure, conditioned by …

Optimal Block Encoding And Optimal Entropy For Lossless Image Compression, Larry Ray Dennis

Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis, a novel approach is designed using a quad-tree stack structure to encode the image to determine the optimal block size at the optimal and effective entropy in the lossless image compression method. Proof is given through encoding of the predictor and randomly constructed planes. There is a high degree of relationship between the placement of bits in the planes. Clearly results shows that use of the optimal entropy and encoding block sizes will increase the compression ratio using the lossless method. The cost of using the block size methods to encoding and entropy is discussed and proven. …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet December 1997, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The December 1997 Monthly packet includes the December agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held November 1997.

The Role Of Skill Upgrading In Manufacturing Performance, Melissa M. Appleyard

Business Faculty Publications and Presentations

This section examines the industry-wide trend of upgrading the skills of production workers in the semiconductor industry. This analysis discusses the industry characteristics driving this trend, the human resource policies that support skill upgrades, and the payoffs associated with such upgrades. To provide a deeper understanding of the process of skill upgrading, two fabs from our sample are analyzed in detail. One fab is located in Japan (pseudonym Jfab) and the other fab is located in the U.S. (pseudonym USfab).

As a central part of their manufacturing strategy, these fabs have emphasized the upskilling of operators particularly for equipment maintenance …

Flow And Congestion Control For Internet Streaming Applications, Shanwei Cen, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The emergence of streaming multimedia players provides users with low latency audio and video content over the Internet. Providing high-quality, best-effort, real-time multimedia content requires adaptive delivery schemes that fairly share the available network bandwidth with reliable data protocols such as TCP. This paper proposes a new flow and congestion control scheme, SCP (Streaming Control Protocol) , for real-time streaming of continuous multimedia data across the Internet. The design of SCP arose from several years of experience in building and using adaptive real-time streaming video players. SCP addresses two issues associated with real-time streaming. First, it uses a congestion control …

Pressure Impulses During Microsecond Laser Ablation, Hanqun Shangguan, Lee W. Casperson, Scott A. Prahl

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The collapse of laser-induced cavitation bubbles creates acoustic transients within the surrounding medium and also pressure impulses to the ablation target and light-delivery fiber during microsecond laser ablation. The impulses are investigated here with time-resolved flash photography, and they are found to occur whether or not the light-delivery fiber is in contact with the target. We demonstrate that the impulses depend primarily on the energy stored in the cavitation bubble. They are not directly dependent on the mode of light delivery (contact versus noncontact), and they are also not directly correlated to the other acoustic transients. The pressure impulses do …

Sinusoidal-Gaussian Beams In Complex Optical Systems, Lee W. Casperson, Dennis G. Hall, Anthony A. Tovar

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Sinusoidal-Gaussian beam solutions are derived for the propagation of electromagnetic waves in free space and in media having at most quadratic transverse variations of the index of refraction and the gain or loss. The resulting expressions are also valid for propagation through other real and complex lens elements and systems that can be represented in terms of complex beam matrices. The solutions are in the form of sinusoidal functions of complex argument times a conventional Gaussian beam factor. In the limit of large Gaussian beam size, the sine and cosine factors of the beams are dominant and reduce to the …

Meeting Notes 1997-11-13 [Part A] , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.

Meeting Notes 1997-11-13 [Part B] , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.

Complete-Range Activity-Based Rtl Power Estimation, Nur Kurt-Karsilayan

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, power consumption has become a major concern in the electronic industry. Power reduction can be accelerated in the design cycle by fast and accurate power estimation tools. Since the units of lower-levels of design abstraction are transistors or gates, power estimation becomes a slow process at these levels. Therefore designers need to have tools for fast and accurate power estimation at the higher levels of design abstraction such as register transfer level (RTL).

A novel RTL power estimation technique called CRAB-RPE will be presented in this thesis. The CRAB power model is built upon four important properties …

Lincoln C. Andrews And The Enforcement Of National Prohibition, 1925 To 1927, Philip Earle Metcalfe

Dissertations and Theses

Using newspaper accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified personnel files, this thesis traces the institutional history of the Treasury Department's Prohibition Unit in the years 1925 to 1927. From its inception in 1920, the Prohibition Unit functioned as a constitutional morals police, signally extending federal authority into the area of states' rights, with consequent scandal and public criticism. In an attempt at reform, the Treasury Department in 1925 placed Customs, the Coast Guard, and Prohibition enforcement under a single commander: Brigadier General Lincoln C. Andrews, an efficiency expert and West Point graduate. Andrews' plan was to wage a two-front war …

Routing, Driven Placement For Atmel 6000 Architecture Fpgas, Songhua Zhang

Dissertations and Theses

Based on the concept of Cell Binary Tree (CBT), a new technique for mapping combination circuits into ATMEL 6000 Architecture FPGAs is presented in this thesis. Cell Binary Tree (CBT) is a net-list representation of combinational circuits. For each node of CBT there is a distinguished variable associated with it, the node itself represents a certain logic function, which is selected according to target FPGA architecture. The proposed CBT placement algorithms preserve local connectivity and allow better mapping into ATMEL FPGA. Experiments reveal that the new mapping technique achieved reduction in a number buses used for routing comparing with previously …

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet November 1997, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The November 1997 Monthly packet includes the November agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held October 1997.

Waterfall Lasers, Lee W. Casperson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Laser concepts can be applied to a broad range of physical phenomena. One of the closest parallels occurs with the fluttering oscillations that are sometimes observed in the falling sheets of water associated with fountains, dams, and natural waterfalls. In many respects these fluid feedback oscillations are similar to the electromagnetic modes of typical lasers, and recognition of this similarity led to the interpretation of the waterfall behavior. Gain profiles for the waterfall oscillations are developed, and the relationship of experimental waterfall data to the laser-like models is considered in detail.

Meeting Notes 1997-10-09 [Part A] , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.

A Player For Adaptive Mpeg Video Streaming Over The Internet, Jonathan Walpole, Rainer Koster, Shanwei Cen, Crispin Cowan, David Maier, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, David Steere, Liujin Yu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time, streaming, Internet video and audio player. The player has a number of advanced features including dynamic adaptation to changes in available bandwidth, latency and latency variation; a multi-dimensional media scaling capability driven by user-specified quality of service (QoS) requirements; and support for complex content comprising multiple synchronized video and audio streams. The player was developed as part of the QUASAR t project at Oregon Graduate Institute, is freely available, and serves as a testbed for research in adaptive resource management and QoS control.

Faculty Senate Monthly Packet October 1997, Portland State University Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Monthly Packets

The October 1997 Monthly packet includes the October agenda and appendices and the Faculty Senate minutes and attachments from the meeting held June 1997.

Ernie Bonner's Planning Journal, Ernest Bonner

Ernie Bonner Collection

No abstract provided.

Meeting Notes 1997-08-14 , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.

Ernie Bonner Family, Ernest Bonner

Ernie Bonner Collection

No abstract provided.

Urban Traffic Arterials And The Sale Price Of Single Family Houses In Portland: A Hedonic Analysis Of Impacts, Philip Wuest

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the hypothesis that the prices of single family houses are negatively influenced by proximity to urban arterial roadways. A hedonic price model is developed that tests the effects of traffic volumes and proximity on sale price.

Using a data set of sale records from Portland Oregon in 1994, a traditional hedonic model is developed based on housing and neighborhood characteristics. Using a geographic information system, each sale record is associated with the nearest arterial roadway, and the data on distance to the roadway and level of traffic is returned to the sale record. These data are then …

Modeling Improvements For Water Supply Forecasting In The Columbia River Basin, Daniel Albert Buller

Dissertations and Theses

The purposes of this study were twofold. The first was to explore possible improvements that could be made over existing methods by applying alternative modeling approaches, including the one developed by Garen to forecast runoff volumes in the Columbia River at The Dalles, Oregon. The second was to use the Southern Oscillation as one of the variables to forecast spring and summer runoff and to evaluate whether this variable adds significant information early in the season before any snow has accumulated. The Columbia River basin's mountainous topography and northern latitude are ideally suited for water supply forecasting because much of …

Cheetahs Are Fast, But Nearly Irrelevant, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Consel

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

A brief paper submitted to the NSF Workshop on New Challenges and Directions for Systems Research, held in St. Louis, Mo., July 31-August 1, 1997. Outlines the case for more cooperation among software system architects, and a less reductionistic approach to software development.

Meeting Notes 1997-07-16 [Part A] , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.

Meeting Notes 1997-07-10 [Part A] , Joint Policy Advisory Committee On Transportation

Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation

No abstract provided.