Over the last 20 years, there has been rapid growth in the amount of installed wind power in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in the Columbia River Gorge. The variable and non-dispatchable nature of this resource requires that it be balanced in some form by other sources on the grid. In...
The proliferation of body worn autometric devices has been enabled by advances in low-power electronics and fueled by the quantified-self movement. These devices range in complexity from pedometers to clinical vital sign measurement. They all share the same drawback, typically the most expensive and heaviest component, the battery. The future...
Incremental ADCs (IADCs) have many advantages for low-frequency high-accuracy data conversion—they are easy to multiplex between channels, need simpler digital decimation filter, and allow extended counting with a Nyquist-rate ADC. A single-loop incremental ADC was designed and fabricated in 90 nm for a biosensor interface circuit. It incorporates one integrator,...
High Definition video streaming over WLANs faces many challenges because video data requires not only data integrity but also frames have strict playout deadline. Traditional streaming methods that rely solely on either UDP or TCP have difficulties meeting both requirements because UDP incurs packet loss while TCP incurs delay. This...
Linear wireless sensor networks (LWSN) are special class of wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are deployed in a straight line. Monitoring industrial pipelines, railroads, tunnels, power lines, and borders are applications of LWSNs. Wireless sensors are tiny devices with limited energy resources; therefore, efficient energy routing in LWSNs is...
Ocean wave energy converter technology continues to advance and new developers continue to emerge, leading to the need for a general design, modeling, and testing methodology. This work presents a development of the process of taking a wave energy converter from a concept to the prototype stage. A two body...
Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel devices have been proposed for high speed applications such as hot electron transistors, IR detectors, optical rectennas for IR energy harvesting, and backplanes for LCDs. The majority of these applications require highly asymmetric and non-linear current versus voltage (I-V) behavior at low applied voltages and ultra-high frequencies....
With each generation of technology, computers become even more capable of rendering objects with an ever increasing number of polygons. As a result, the desire to add more details to a 3D model increases as well. Among the many tools provided by computer graphics software that an artist has at...
As the growth of renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and ocean wave, increases, their impact on the electrical grid has been rapidly escalating. Although renewable resources have been able to offset some traditional generation, they have also brought a need for increasing reserve capacity due to their non-dispatchable,...
Phase Locked Loops(PLLs) are an integral part of almost every electronic system. Systems involving low frequency clocks often require PLLs with low bandwidth. The area occupied by the large loop filter capacitor and resistor in a low bandwidth PLL design makes the realization of traditional charge-pump PLL architecture impractical on...