This dissertation presents an incremental analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with digital digital-to-analog converter (DAC) mismatch correction. A theoretical time-domain analysis technique was developed to predict the noise performance of the incremental ADC, and a new optimization technique was proposed to minimize the output noise.
In the calibration mode, the incremental ADC...
The objective of this thesis is to provide an initial demonstration of two-terminal and three-terminal electronic devices employing amorphous multi-component metallic film
(AMMF) electrodes. Such a demonstration is successfully achieved in the fabrication of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diode and hot electron transistor (HETs) structures employing ZrCuAlNi AMMF electrodes. The ultra-smooth surface...
Modern day digital systems employ frequency
synthesizers to provide a common clock to the system.
They are undergoing large scale integration due to which, mitigation
of the effect of noise on power supply has become a major design consideration
in clocking circuits. Rapid scaling of CMOS technology mandates the
design...
A relatively new model of error control is the limited magnitude error over high radix channels. In this error model, the error magnitude does not exceed a certain limit known beforehand. In this dissertation, we study systematic error control codes for common channels under the assumption that the maximum error...
This paper provides a measurement-based performance evaluation of the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol. Two versions of OLSR, OLSR-ETX and OLSR-ETT, are implemented and evaluated on a mesh network that we built from off-the-shelf commercial components. OLSR-ETX uses the Expected Transmission Count (ETX) metric whereas, OLSR-ETT uses the Expected...
Various applications like wireless UWB communication, fast data acquisition systems and digital storage oscilloscopes needs ADCs with instantaneous input signal bandwidth from 0.1-40 GigaHertz range with 6-10 bits of resolution -- a challenging task and an impressive goal to achieve. Flash ADCs have been conventionally employed to achieve these goals...
Magnetically programmable surface acoustic wave (MP SAW) devices were designed, fabricated and characterized in this thesis using integrated giant magnetoresistive (GMR) bits with interdigital reflectors. This provides a proof of concept of a novel storage element on radio frequency identification tags. Interdigital transducers (IDTs) on a piezoelectric substrate are used...
Work on individually constructed devices has demonstrated that nanowires (NWs) offer great promise for applications such as sensing and optoelectronics. Despite this work, reliable large scale alignment and integration of these individual nanostructures into a lithographically defined process remains a challenge.
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a promising alignment method in which...
In recent years quantum random walks have garnered much interest among quantum information researchers. Part of the reason is the prospect that many hard problems can be solved efficiently by employing algorithms based on quantum random walks, in the same way that classical random walks have played a central role...
This thesis presents two new approaches for the broadband, time-domain modeling of lossy transmission lines. Each approach is based on an alternative derivation of delay extraction in order to separate the line's linear phase from its
attenuation and dispersion. Augmentation networks represent the derived attenuation networks as rational function approximations....
Error correction codes (ECCs) have been widely used in communication systems and storage devices. Nowadays, the rapid development of integrated circuit technologies makes feasible the implementation of powerful ECCs such as turbo code and low-density parity-check (LDPC) code. However, these high-performance codes require complex decoding algorithms, resulting in large hardware...
Recent advances in wireless technologies have helped the proliferation of wireless devices, ranging from hand-held devices such as cellular phones to more powerful mobile computing platforms as such laptops [1]. Along with that, the end users’
applications running on these devices, ranging from text message to multimedia applications such as...
Asymmetric tensor fields are useful for understanding fluid flow and solid deformation. They present new challenges, however, for traditional tensor field visualization techniques such as hyperstreamline placement and glyph packing. This is because the physical behavior of tensors inside real domains where eigenvalues are real is fundamentally different from the...
In wireless sensor network applications, low-power operation of the wireless receiver is critical. To address this need an ultra-low power Binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) receiver using the super-regenerative architecture is developed.
A prototype receiver is built and tested for operation in the 900 MHz ISM band. Lab measurements show...
Multiple-input multiple-output wireless systems promise significant capacity gain
and/or diversity gain over single antenna systems. If channel state information (CSI)
is available at both the transmitter and the receiver, the performance can be further
improved. In this thesis, first, we study binary index feedback problem in beamforming
systems when the...
Visual information presented in diagrams promotes information processing both in an individual and in collaborative work. Previous literature has identified the role of diagrams in
understanding information processing in a variety of disciplines. In software engineering, diagrams are a prevalent method involved in process development: diagrams are used for system...
This research explores the viability and effectiveness of using an inertial navigation system (INS) to control a beamforming array of microstrip patch antennas with the aim of reducing users' exposure to electromagnetic radiation. The system reduces radiated power directed toward a cellular phone user to below 10% of the total...
This thesis describes the transport properties observed in thermally treated graphite oxide (GO), which holds promise as an economical route to obtaining graphene. Graphene is a material consisting of a single atomic plane of carbon atoms and was first isolated as recently as 2004. Several isolation techniques have been investigated,...
With increasing transistor operating frequencies, interconnects and passive devices are becoming performance limiters in integrated circuit (IC) designs. To combat this, the interconnect layers above the active silicon are trending toward low-κ dielectrics and Cu metallization. The use of these new materials has popularized chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) to planarize...
Monte-Carlo planning algorithms such as UCT make decisions at each step by
intelligently expanding a single search tree given the available time and then
selecting the best root action. Recent work has provided evidence that it can be
advantageous to instead construct an ensemble of search trees and make a...