Drilling tools currently used in surgery depends only on the surgeon's manual skills to stop the penetration when completing a hole. This paper presents a modular mechatronic system for automatic bone drilling in surgery. The development of a “modular system” that is compatible with motor-driven drills that are commercially available, rather than developing a new surgical drill, is emphasized. A fuzzy controller analyzes the electric current consumed by the DC motor of the drill. When break-through is detected, the power will be cut and stops drilling in order to prevent excessive protrusion of the drill bit. In extensive drilling tests on real human skulls, there were no unexpected failure, and the overshoots of all tests were well less than 2mm.
Hybrid scrambling technique is proposed for NROM-based ROMs in order to enhance the fabrication yield and reliability. Besides the traditional hardware redundancy techniques, fault masking features are also exploited to further improve the fabrication yield and reduce the amount of extra spare rows/columns. The hybrid scrambling technique basically consists of the row scrambling and the column scrambling techniques. Therefore, instead of scrambling a memory row/column, a logical memory cell can be scrambled into any of the logical memory cell address. This greatly improves the flexibility of scrambling. A hybrid scrambling control word is used for the control of the scrambling. Since the codes to be programmed into the NROM chips are known before programming, selecting a suitable code for programming a faulty NROM chip is helpful to further mask the faulty effects. Based on the proposed technique, possibilities of fault masking can be maximized. The proposed test and repair techniques can be easily incorporated into the ROM BIST architectures. According to experimental results, the fabrication yield can be improved significantly. Moreover, the incurred hardware overhead is almost negligible.
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