Barcodes systems

Most automated systems are designed to utilize either barcodes or optical character recognition imprints (OCR). The majority used barcodes but a number of systems can also accept OCRs and other identifiers as well.

A barcode is a machine readable code consisting of a series of bars and spaces printed in defined ratios.  It is formed by combinations of high and low reflectance regions of the surface of an object, which are converted to ‘I’s and ‘0’s.

Barcodes are easier to scan than OCRs in that scanning equipment must be able to read each entire OCR symbol, while barcodes are scanned by reading any path across the label which touches all bars.
Barcode symbologies are essentially alphabets in which different width of bars and spaces are combined to form characters and ultimately a message.

‘Bar Codes’ are graphical patterns whose principle function is to convey data, and ‘symbologies’ are sets of rules that relate those patterns to their encoded message.

Barcodes are used for a number of purposes other than product identification. Delivery services used barcodes to track packers, and student card may well have a barcode representing student number.

The barcode technology has been developed with the creation of 2D barcodes to increase the data capacity of ID barcodes. With the integration of cameras, mobile phones act as scanners, barcode readers and portable data storages and maintaining network connectivity.
Barcodes systems

Search engine technology in history

In the past many search engines have been created to help users find desired information on the web.

Search engines existed even before the invention of the World Wide Web. The roots of web search engine technology are in information retrieval (IR) systems, which can be traced back to the work of Luhn at IBM during the late 1950s.

Search tools such as Archie and Veronica searched using FTP and gopher protocols long before HTTP came into play.

Search technology was very primitive. With Archie one could search for file names, while with Veronica, one could search for text files and file names.

The 1990s was the decade of the World Wide Web, built over the physical infrastructure of the internet, radically changing the availability of information and making possible the rapid dissemination of digital information across the globe.

By the mid-1990s, many thousands of pages were being added to the World Wide Web each day.

The availability of graphical browsing programs such as Mosaic, Netscape, and Microsoft Internet Explorer made it easy for ordinary PC users to view web pages and to navigate from one page to another.
Search engine technology in history

Using Hardware-Assisted Technology to Speed Up the Verification Process

By Charles W Taylor 
Chip designers are under constant pressure to enhance performance of chips while simultaneously minimizing cost. One way to achieve this is by speeding up the verification process - as verification constitutes more than 70% of the entire chip design process, embracing tools and technologies that result in faster verification is the need of the hour.

The Need for Hardware Assisted Verification Models
In order to meet the demands of shortened development cycles, it is essential for hardware and software on a chip to be verified at the same time. Since software development cannot wait till the hardware aspects of the chip are developed, design teams need to adopt a fail-safe way to verify chips will work as intended as soon as the embedded software is run. This requires the design team to create a working prototype for software development as early as possible, and much before the end of the hardware design cycle.

Hardware Assisted Technology
Given time-to-market pressures, the process of verification has come a long way. For many digital design engineers, there are some compelling reasons for performing hardware-assisted verification. Since performance is key, it is important for verification systems to deliver the highest performance models and environment for SoC verification.

• Hardware acceleration techniques help overcome the challenge of meeting the performance requirements for SoC verification.

• Writing SystemVerilog testbenches for a specific piece of design can be very laborious, especially while testing the interaction between different blocks.

• With hardware-assisted verification, you do not have to write the testbench or worry about how the interfaces will be exercised.

• For example, to check if a peripheral device works as intended, you can take a physical or virtual peripheral device, connect it up to the design and then use the device driver for the controller to perform functions to see if the interface works.

• As the number of vectors that can be run per second is substantial, you can make sure that the interaction between hardware and software is as expected in shorten span of time

• Hardware accelerators allow you to use components like FPGAs to build the hardware platform.

• Using embedded test benches, you can perform hardware-assisted verification and virtualize the environment to speed up the verification process.

Emulation Systems
With increases in the size and complexity of today's SoC devices, verification requires you to conduct massive tests spanning billions of cycles. Using advanced verification technologies like hardware-assisted emulation systems, you can accelerate the verification process and deliver the highest performance possible:

• Modern emulation systems encompass a broad portfolio of transactors and memory models that speed up the development of virtual system level verification environments.

• Emulation systems offer comprehensive debug with full signal visibility and support advanced use modes including power management verification and hybrid emulation

• With emulation, the design-under-test (DUT) is usually represented in the emulator, while the chip's environment can be provided by connections outside the emulator.

• By using virtual bridges in conjunction with virtual test environments, you can connect the DUT through protocol-specific transactors to real devices

• In addition, system-level debug components can also be used to understand the high-level behaviour of SoCs.

Prototyping
Another way to improve the verification process is to use physical prototyping to meet time-to-market requirements.

• By leveraging a hardware assisted system environment, prototyping enables early embedded software development, allowing hardware and software to co-exist well ahead of chip fabrication.

• You can shorten design schedules and avoid costly device re-spins through the use of tightly integrated and easy-to-use hardware and tools, and accelerate the process of software development

• Hardware-assisted prototyping enables you to eliminate redundant IP prototyping tasks by using pre-tested components and maximize ROI by applying modular systems across multiple projects

• You can make your products immediately available using the latest generation of FPGA devices, bypassing the effort and expense of custom-built systems

Reduce Verification Effort
Although as a designer, you may choose different methods for verification, the fact remains that hardware-assisted technology can help you speed the overall verification effort. Hardware-assisted verification reduces the amount of effort - in developing the model as well as in writing the test benches. You not only speed up the verification of the hardware, but also quicken the process of debugging, and ensure faster time-to-market.

Charles Taylor is an avid business writer and technology evangelist with nearly eight years of rich experience in writing for diverse domains and industries. He is fond of exploring the upcoming updates and news on the engineering development, design in ASIC(FPGA)-SoC services. He explores the ideas and follow aviation consulting services to derive insight to present in a good way. A spiritualist by heart, Charles is a cinephile, well versed with film criticism, metaphysics, and philosophy. He has also dabbled in the arts, notably photography, multi-cuisine food preparation, film direction, dance and poetry.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Charles_W_Taylor/2230749

E-Learning and digital learning

E-learning or electronic learning - has been referred to as ‘technology-enhanced learning’ and more recently as ‘digital learning’.

E-learning describes as set of technology-mediated methods that can be applied to support student learning and can induced elements of assessment, tutoring and instruction. Electronic means including text, audio, motion video, still graphics, animation, live interaction with a facilitator and/or other students, exercises and tests.

From the student point of view, e-learning is interactive, ubiquitous, easily accessible, and inexpensive, allowing learning at one’s own pace with full flexibility in terms of time avaiabilty and scheduling.

E-learning is a great tool for repetitive training. Even of users were trained at some point in time. Chances are that they did not frequently use all the features of the software and they will forget certain parts of it.

With all the course modules residing on a web site, the users can log on and retake specific course modules at any time.

Most e-learning providers will offer courses on a per- time basis or on a subscription basis. The processes involve six major activities crucial to e-learning: content creation, content support, content packaging and wrapping, content distribution, support services and delivering to end users. These processes then form a value chain.
E-Learning and digital learning

How to define supercomputers?

The fastest and most expensive computers available at any given time are generally called supercomputers. What makes these machines the fastest is usually their adoption of a new technology or computer architecture that later finds its way into standard computers.

Supercomputers have the most processing power of computers available. They are designed to perform large amounts of numeric computation quickly. They are a class of computers designed for extremely high performance.

Initially, the term supercomputer only applied to the larger mainframe machines, today, the term also includes parallel processing machines.

Technologies that are vital to supercomputers include thermodynamics, surface analysis, mathematics, material science, device physics, very large scale integrated circuits, sophisticated manufacturing technology, robotics, computer-aided design software and etc.

In other worlds, the supercomputer is the result of a vast spectrum of interdisciplinary research and advanced development work.

They are primarily designed for high speed computation, especially for scientific research or the defense industry, but their use is growing rapidly in business as supercomputer prices decrease.

Some applications require extraordinary speed, accuracy and processing capabilities - such as sending astronaut into space, controlling missile guidance systems and satellites, forecasting the weather, exploring for oil, and assisting with some kinds of scientific research.

The first supercomputer is generally considered to be the Control Data CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray in 1964.  From CDC 66000, to a wave of new machines by Cray Research in the 1970s, and early 1980s, supercomputing expanded possibilities for modeling the Department of Defends nuclear war scenario, weather forecasting and other areas requiring extensive processing power.
How to define supercomputers?