The ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) phenomenon serves as a sensitive probe of the effective internal fields in a magnetic material. FMR spectroscopy has consequently become a well-established technique, extensively employed in assessing material properties such as magnetic anisotropy, Landé g-factor, damping parameter, and the magnetoelastic constants of magnetic materials. Determining these...
Low-power receivers (RX) with 100$\mu W$-scale power consumption can enable several power/energy-constrained IoT applications. However, achieving sensitivity, interferer tolerance and wide operating range with low power presents a challenge for existing architectures, particularly those constrained to highly integrated solutions without high-Q off-chip components. Existing solutions rely heavily on high quality...
Rapid and sensitive detection of stress hormones, such as cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), can benefit the diagnosis of diseases related to adrenal gland disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, and more. Stress hormones fluctuate in a circadian rhythm, the highest in the early morning and the lowest at night;...
Motivation: Many robots such as legged robots and prosthetic hands/arms are designed to interact with uncertain and time-varying environments to accomplish their tasks.
Observations on humans and animals during their daily tasks suggest that they adapt their leg compliance while traversing with different velocities on different grounds and adjust their...
Additive manufacturing has become a promising method for the fabrication of inexpensive, green, flexible sensors and electronics. Printed electronics on low- temperature substrates are very appealing for the flexible hybrid electronics market for their use in disposable and biocompatible electronic applications and in areas like packaging, wearables, and consumer electronics....
Generating abundant, renewable energy from Earth’s oceans is an attractive option for meeting increasing energy demand. Marine renewable energy also comes with the variability of renewable sources, which impact the reliability and power quality of the electrical grid. On a transmission-level, this dissertation looks at ensuring reliability of the power...
Machine learning applied to computer architecture has rapidly transitioned from a theoretical novelty to being a driving force behind design, control, and simulation in practically all components. These machine-learning-based methodologies are further notable for their scalability to increasingly complex design challenges, which has allowed these methodologies to surpass the prior...
As the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G) is being deployed, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) serves as one of its enabling technologies where reliable and ultra low latency communications are achieved while being power and spectrum efficient. This thesis studies the security aspect of massive MIMO system from the...
Radio frequency (RF) sensing arises as a promising option for enabling the internet of things (IoT) applications that transform our life into a world of smart homes, smart cities, and smart industries. The innovation of IoT reveals the benefits of RF sensing across cost, pervasiveness, unobtrusiveness, and privacy. However, challenges...
Global Positioning Systems have allowed for precise timing of power system measurements over wide areas. This newly found capability has the potential to provide much greater insight into the operation of the power system and its response to contingencies, but few analytical techniques currently exist that provide enough robustness and...
Ring Amplifier serves as a great candidate both for precision amplification and fast integration in the discrete time system. It can be utilized in high-performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In high-speed ADC utilizing pipelined architectures with residue amplification, Successive-Approximation Register (SAR) ADCs as the sub-ADC and power efficient Ring Amplifier based...
This work – in which three peer-reviewed academic papers are presented – addresses the ap-plication of Bayesian Reinforcement Learning to the control of a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems. The first paper presents a comparison of a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) based wave energy converter controller against standard Reactive Damping...
Multiple wave energy converter (WEC) archetypes exist with varying power take-off (PTO) designs in the attempt to maximize ocean energy harnessed and converted into useful energy. The pendulum PTO is popular for its simple, yet robust functionality due to its internally located components and simple operation. Additionally, this PTO does...
Wind turbines serve an increasing proportion of total energy generation, with expanded onshore and offshore installations proceeding worldwide. Continued construction, expansion, and operation of wind energy installations must be managed in conjunction with effects on local and migratory wildlife, specifically bird and bat species that may be affected by wind...
Despite near unanimous opinion on the consequences of climate change by scientific community, the rate at which carbon is emitted into the atmosphere continues to increase. The need for a clean and sustainable source of energy is therefore one of humankind's most urgent challenges. Solar energy is the most abundant...
Modern sensors are complex systems comprising multiple sub-systems such as transducers, analog and mixed-signal interface circuits, digital processing circuits, and packaging. Over the last few decades, innovations in these sub-systems combined with their increased integration in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes have led to the rapid growth in sensors for...
There has been tremendous growth in using data analytic and machine learning algorithms to make critical decisions, such as in the national power grid, healthcare operations, and autonomous vehicles. Employing data analytic for decision-making allows cyber attackers to manipulate the decisions of these algorithms through data falsification. Hence, the trustworthiness...
Nowadays, wireless communication systems use high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) together with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to increase the link capacity and robustness. These signals always have large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and require power amplifiers (PAs) achieve both high efficiency and linearity simultaneously. For the efficiency, the complementary metal...
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is an enabling technique for many new micro- and nanoscale technologies. The self-limiting surface chemical reactions by which ALD fundamentally operates give rise to uniquely high precision (atomic) control over deposited film thickness, uniformity over large areas, and conformality over complex and extreme topographies. One such...
This work addresses the application of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems in which the cost functional is not in a standard quadratic form, and the WEC model includes the nonlinear effects, such as the hydrodynamic viscous drag. The NMPC implementation is...
Dense electrical recording of biosignals has been developed to provide spatial resolution and precise temporal information for health monitoring, diagnostics, and clinical research. However, more electrodes require more wires, and wiring density quickly becomes a limiting factor. To break this bottleneck, we proposed a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) based architecture for...
Deep learning is becoming the latest trend in sensitive applications, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance. As these new applications emerge, adversaries are circumventing them.
Further, there have been concerns about the possibility of bias and discrimination in predictive applications.
In order to address these issues, we propose an...
Unlike other biosensing, electrochemical biosensor has the advantages of robustness, easy miniaturization, excellent detection limits, and capability in handling small analyte volumes. The detection selectivity of the electrochemical biosensors is mainly supported by bioreceptors. However, these receptors always suffer from the performance variation caused by the environment and the thermal-...
Switched capacitor (SC) circuits are the main building blocks in many structures such as filters, data converters, sampling circuits and sampled-data amplifiers. The key challenge is to design such circuits which are the prime components of any IoT system with low power consumption without compromising on the performance. In this...
In recent years, the research community's interest in fully integrated mm-Wave wireless communication systems has increased significantly. With the standards for 5G NR now in place, the focus has shifted to actual deployment. Mm-Wave systems provide wider bandwidths, higher capacity, and lower latency than existing systems such as 4G. Higher...
This work gives some theory and efficient design of binary block codes capable of controlling the deletions of the symbol “0” (referred to as 0-deletions) and/or the insertions of the symbol “0” (referred to as 0-insertions). This problem of controlling 0-deletions and/or 0-insertions (referred to as symmetric 0-errors) is shown...
Increasing threats of terrorism and contraband smuggling have led to a growing interest in millimeter wave/ THz security sensors. Recently, systems combining active and passive sensing into one unit have been proposed where the active mode provides information on range and reflectivity, and the passive mode complements the active by...
Converting energy from ocean waves is a challenging area for control theory application because of the nonlinear dynamics in various time scales. Generally, wave energy converter (WEC) control is applied in order to maximize power absorption, in the most common wave conditions, and subject to the devices’ physical constraints. Commonly,...
This work presents a high-resolution Delta-Sigma ADC which combines the use of the pseudo-pseudo-differential noise filtering technique with single-ended ring amplifier based integrators. The pseudo-pseudo-differential noise filtering technique utilizes single-ended circuits while maintaining the even-order rejection found in fully-differential structures which alleviates, in the active analog blocks, the need for...
Sensor system plays an important role in connecting everything including human body to the electrical information systems that we have built and that we are going to build, to make the world more intelligent and efficient. One of the key propulsive forces behind these emerging techniques is CMOS scaling that...
There are five main contributions of this dissertation. The first contribution is new closed-form expressions for channel capacity of a new class of channel matrices. The second contribution is the discovery of the structure for optimal binary quantizer and the associated methods for finding an optimal quantizer that maximizes mutual...
Spectrum overcrowding, ever increasing demand for high data rate and increased mobility requirements are three major challenges 5G-technology is trying to address. In this thesis I start with a RF front-end technique that deals with blocker interference arising from spectrum overcrowding both across frequency bands and within the same frequency...
Impedance measurements are increasingly demanded in modern CMOS sensing systems as impedance is the most common electrical signal obtained from sensors, delivering physical, chemical and biomedical quantity changes. Impedance sensing for wide interested frequency, broad dynamic range, and various sensor interfaces has numerous challenges, especially targeted in CMOS miniaturization with...
Throughput-oriented processors, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), have been increasingly used to accelerate general purpose computing, including machine learning models that are being utilized in numerous disciplines. Thousands of concurrently running threads in a GPU demand a highly efficient memory subsystem for data supply in GPUs. In this dissertation,...
The sensors in real time data processing IoT devices require high resolution and sub-MHz data converters, usually implemented as Incremental ADCs due to the advantages of oversampling technique and low latency. In discrete time incremental (IDT) ADCs, the sampling switch non-linearity, charge injection degrade the resolution, and power hungry OPAMPs...
The need for sustainably powering unobtrusive internet-of-things applications has led to an interest in energy harvesting. Particularly, the proliferation of wireless communication and devices in the 2.4 GHz Industrial Scientificc Medical (ISM) band creates an opportunity to leverage commonly used devices for RF powering. This dissertation presents a low-quiescent-power...
Silicon photonics has become the most promising platform for future large-scale optical interconnect and optical computing systems due to its inherent CMOS compatibility, which brings exclusive advantages in bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Parallel optical interconnects based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the capacity to meet the...
We study joint nonlinear state estimation with multi-period measurement vectors that are potentially corrupted by sparse gross errors. The identifiability-aware approach is proposed to leverage common characteristics of fundamentally identifiable gross errors to enhance error correction performance. First, we derive a necessary rank condition that the sparsity pattern of any...
Ever increasing global internet data traffic has driven up the demand for cutting-edge high-speed wireline communication systems including SerDes PHY for various interfaces, interconnects, data centers servers and switches in optical systems. Operating wireline communications at higher data rates leads to signals suffering from greater channel loss and exponential increase...
Emerging fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G communication networks are stimulating the design of radio-frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) integrated circuits for wireless transceivers systems. While co-integration of active circuits and diverse passive components becomes feasible at these high operating frequencies, circuit design is faced with significant challenges due to...
The electrical grid is a key component of the Nation's critical infrastructure. Its continuous and reliable operation is of vital importance; any system-wide disruption would have a debilitating impact on crucial services, public health and safety, the economy, and the national security of the United States.
High-impact low-frequency events pose...
Due to the limitation of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, it is increasingly more difficult to support billions of wireless devices in the age of Internet-of-Things. Consequently, many recent wireless indoor communication systems have been developed using free space optical (FSO) communication technologies that exploit the extremely large light spectrum...
This dissertation proposes the use of advanced time-varying approaches for modeling the dynamics of the multipath channel in wireless communication networks. These advanced time-varying approaches include linear Kalman innovation models in observable block companion form, and neural network-based models. The e˙ectiveness of these type of models is evaluated through three...
This work presents a novel CCRW receiver that utilizes a window of variable width, for e˙ectively mitigating multipath and ambiguity in both civil and military positioning applica-tions using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This CCRW receiver incorporates a single stroboscopic window, whose width is iteratively reduced until the e˙ect of...
An accurate state estimation plays an essential role in power system operation and planning in energy management systems. However, existing multi-area state estimation researches have not focused on the importance of system clustering. The clustering mechanism divides or partitions a system according to user-defined criteria. Few published research works have...
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm brought an ever-increasing dependence on low-power devices to collect sensor data and transmit that information to the cloud, placing greater demand on connectivity and lifespan. In response, rapid worldwide innovation demonstrates the trade-offs in processing, communication, and energy consumption with diverse approaches to low-power...
Generation resources are shifting from centralized, high inertial, fossil fuel based to decentralized, no inertia, and variable renewable resources. The evolution of generation resources in electrical grids requires the transformation of the electrical grid infrastructure, and operation and planning procedures and standards. This dissertation takes four investigations into how to...
The ubiquity of high quality video and proliferation of mobile devices has contributed to an unprecedented rise in video consumption. HTTP, in conjunction with adaptive streaming, has become the de facto mechanism for delivering the vast majority of video as it readily caters to heterogeneous networks and devices. This dissertation...
In this dissertation, we explored multiple coding techniques to reduce energy consumption, improve performance, and secure wireless sensor networks specifically and ad-hoc networks in general. With the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, wireless sensor networks are quickly emerging as an important and key technology in the...
This dissertation focuses on the application of diatom frustules, the biosilica shell of an algae possessing physical and photonic properties capable of enhancing optical signals, for the enhancement of optical sensing. In this work, we incorporate diatom frustules into biosensors for signal enhancement and improved target molecule detection. The potential...