In recent years, the most powerful supercomputers have already reached megawatt power consumption levels, an important issue that challenges sustainability and shows the impossibility of maintaining this trend. To this date, the prevalent approach to super-computing is dominated by CPUs and GPUs. Given their fixed architectures with generic instruction sets, they have been favored with lots of tools and mature workflows which led to mass adoption and further growth. However, reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs has repeatedly proven that it offers substantial advantages over this super-computing approach concerning performance and power consumption. In this survey, we review the most relevant works that advanced the field of heterogeneous super-computing using FPGAs focusing on their architectural characteristics. Each work was divided into three main parts: network, hardware, and software tools. All implementations face challenges that involve all three parts. These dependencies result in compromises that designers must take into account. The advantages and limitations of each approach are discussed and compared in detail. The classification and study of the architectures illustrate the trade-offs of the solutions and help identify open problems and research lines.

Musculoskeletal diseases and disorders (MSDs) have a significant negative impact on personal health and the worldwide economy. Leveraging the advancement of wearable sensing technology to provide electromyography (EMG) measurement capability can improve the efficiency of the public healthcare strategy to combat MSDs. Integrating conventional EMG contact electrodes into a wearable device is proven to be a challenge because it requires direct electrical contact with the body and has a dependency on the conductive gel. Existing prototypes of capacitive electromyography (cEMG) sensors are typically large and designed with a hybrid printed circuit board. This research paper presents a fully flexible cEMG biomedical sensor with integrated front-end analog circuitry in only a medical plaster size. An efficient moving average squared (MASq) technique is presented to effectively suppress the noise floor and improve the signal quality. The experimental results of measuring EMG signals from flexor carpi radialis, extensor carpi radialis, and biceps brachii using the flexible cEMG biomedical sensor are presented. The post-process data recorded signal-to-noise ratios ranging from 1.8 – 5.7 while achieving practically 100% sensitivity in measuring muscle contractions. Its miniature, rugged, and flexible characteristics allow it to operate as a standalone adhesive plaster sensor or integrate into wearable applications.

The COMPASS Collaboration performed measurements of the Drell-Yan process in 2015 and 2018 using a $190\mathrm{GeV}/c$ ${\pi }^{-}$ beam impinging on a transversely polarized ammonia target. Combining the data of both years, we present final results on the amplitudes of five azimuthal modulations, which correspond to transverse-spin-dependent azimuthal asymmetries (TSAs) in the dimuon production cross section. Three of them probe the nucleon leading-twist Sivers, transversity, and pretzelosity transverse-momentum dependent (TMD) parton distribution functions (PDFs). The other two are induced by subleading effects. These TSAs provide unique new inputs for the study of the nucleon TMD PDFs and their universality properties. In particular, the Sivers TSA observed in this measurement is consistent with the fundamental QCD prediction of a sign change of naive time-reversal-odd TMD PDFs when comparing the Drell-Yan process with deep inelastic scattering. Also, within the context of model predictions, the observed transversity TSA is consistent with the expectation of a sign change for the Boer-Mulders function.

Power amplifiers (PAs) are among the most crucial functional blocks in the radio frequency (RF) frontend for reliable wireless communication. PAs amplify and boost the input signal to the required output power. The signal is amplified to make it sufficiently high for the transmitter to propagate the required distance to the receiver. Attempted advancements of PA have focused on attaining high-performance RF signals for transmitters. Such PAs are expected to require low power consumption while producing a relatively high output power with a high efficiency. However, current PA designs in nanometer and micrometer complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology present inevitable drawbacks, such as oxide breakdown and hot electron effect. A well-defined architecture, including a linear and simple functional block synthesis, is critical in designing CMOS PA for various applications. This article describes the different state-of-the art design architectures of CMOS PA, including their circuit operations, and analyzes the performance of PAs for 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) band applications.