This thesis presents a novel algorithmic A/D converter to be used in a biosensor. The converter is capable of a conversion rate of 1.5 bits/phase and hence the required conversion time is reduced. The proposed architecture is analyzed for non-ideal effects and compared with existing algorithmic A/D architectures. The converter...
This research focused on the use of classical and modern two-dimensional spectral estimation techniques for enhancing inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imagery. 2-D Classical spectral estimation methods and 2-D modern parametric and non-parametric spectral estimation methods are applied to simulated and real data sets in order to achieve both range...
In recent years, there has been growing interest in both industry and academia to use continuous-time (CT) Δ-Σ A/D converters for wideband wireless and wireline communication applications.
So far no reported CT Δ-Σ A/D modulator achieves 14-bit or higher dynamic range (DR) with more than 2MHz signal bandwidth (equivalently 4MS/s)....
ZnO nanowires (NWs) are good candidates for chemical sensing because of their high surface-to-volume ratio. In this work, ZnO nanobridge sensors were fabricated utilizing a novel method which uses carbonized photoresist (C-PR) as a nucleation layer. The use of C-PR allows simultaneous growth and integration of NWs to lithographically-defined features....
The electrical grid of the Western Interconnection is vulnerable to earthquake damage, especially large-magnitude megathrust events, due to the unique seismic profile of the region. However, the size of the Western Interconnection makes it difficult to model seismic failure in electrical substations to the level of detail necessary to improve...
Building software systems that adapt to the changing environment is challenging. Developers cannot anticipate all the changes in advance, and even if they could, the effort required to handle such situations is too onerous for practical purposes. Self Adaptive Software (SAS) adapts itself as per changing environment. The area of...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
The atomic solid state energy (SSE) scale is introduced as a tool for inorganic materials design. The SSE scale is obtained by assessing an average electron affinity (EA) (for a cation) or an average ionization potential (IP) (for an anion) for each atom using data from compounds having that specific...
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...
As scaling of silicon (Si) based devices approaches fundamental limits, thin film metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel diodes are attracting interest due to their potential for high speed operation. Because operation of these devices is based on tunneling, electrode / interfacial roughness is critical. Recently, it was shown that combining ultra-smooth bottom...