Recently, delta-sigma modulation has become a widely applied technique for high-performance analog-to-digital conversion of narrow-band signals. Most of the early designs used discrete-time structure for good accuracy and good linearity. The transfer functions are independent of the clock frequency. However, high unity-gain bandwidths of the opamps are required to satisfy...
Harvesting energy from the environment for powering micro-power devices have been increasing in popularity. These types of devices can be used in embedded applications or in sensor networks where battery replacement is impractical. In this dissertation, different methods of energy harvesting from the environment are explored as alternative sources of...
Forward Error Correction and retransmission are two approaches used to reliably broadcast data in a network with poor quality of service. Taking some assumptions, it has been suggested that a retransmission based reliable broadcasting scheme using network coding should in theory provide an increase in bandwidth efficiency by combining packets...
An automated method, requiring the fabrication of a small set of test structures, efficiently extracts the coefficients of Z-parameter based macromodels. The extraction approach has been validated for both heavily and lightly doped substrates and can be applied to a variety of technologies. After the parameters of a macromodel have...
Web applications are popular attack targets. Misuse detection systems use signature databases to detect known attacks. However, it is difficult to keep the database up to date with the rate of discovery of vulnerabilities. They also cannot detect zero-day attacks. By contrast, anomaly detection systems learn the normal behavior of...
Although the digital revolution can realize many of past analog components in the digital forms, our world is surrounded with analog signals such as voice, temperature, etc. The bridge between these two worlds is one of key performance limitations among overall systems and it includes analog filters and data converters....
Active participation and collaboration of community members are crucial to the continuation and expansion of open source software projects. Researchers have recognized the value of community in open source development and studied various aspects of it including structure of communities, motivations for participation, and collaboration among members. However, the majority...
The world’s energy consumption is growing at an alarming rate and the need for renewable energy is apparent now more than ever. Estimates have shown that optimization of the extraction of energy from the ocean could significantly aid the world’s quest for sustainable and affordable energy services for all. From...
Building intelligent computer assistants has been a long-cherished goal of AI. Many intelligent assistant systems were built and fine-tuned to specific application domains. In this work, we develop a general model of assistance that combines three powerful ideas: decision theory, hierarchical task models and probabilistic relational languages. We use the...
Analog-to-Digital Data Converters (ADCs) used in instrumentation and measurements often require high absolute accuracy, including excellent linearity and negligible dc offset. Incremental data converters (IDCs) provide a solution for such measurement applications. Since IDCs are essentially delta-sigma converters with reset operation before each conversion, they retain most of the advantages...