The focus of this thesis involves developing general fabrication processes relevant to the manufacture of two new devices for the Microscale technology Energy and Chemical Systems (MECS) program at Oregon State University. The two MECS devices developed, capture dots and transparent thin-film heaters (TTFHs), require unique process development for successful...
Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology’s SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag), an emerging inspection method...
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...
This work presents a new data encoding scheme: Integrated Pulse Width Modulation (iPWM) for equalizing lossy wireline channels with the aim of achieving energy efficient wireline communication. The proposed scheme is able to overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by Manchester and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) encoding on high data rate...
General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) have become a critical component in high-performance computing (HPC) systems in executing modern computational workloads. The high thread level parallelism (TLP) and programmable shader cores allow thousands of threads to execute in Parallel. The fast-scaling of GPGPUs have increased the demand for performance optimizations on...
This work presents the design and implementation of a low power phased-array receiver frontend at 28 GHz in 65 nm CMOS. The frontend incorporates a low- power low-noise amplifier(LNA) and a passive reflection-type phase shifter (RTPS) capable of providing 360° phase shift with 5-bit phase resolution and low loss variation....
Sensors find a variety of applications in portable electronics, automotive and biomedical solutions. The demand for low power and high dynamic range makes the design of digital sensor readout circuits quite challenging. Traditionally, these circuits are realized using amplifiers with passive feedback or precision analog comparators which are power hungry...
Software engineers often need help with discovering and learning how to use APIs. For example, software engineers who are starting to learn Java, and they want to implement a certain feature in a program, they might want to reuse existing APIs in order to save time versus rewriting it themselves...
VCO-based ADCs have recently emerged as attractive alternative to conventional DeltaSigma (ΔΣ) modulator architectures. Few salient features of a VCObased ADC are: 1) the quantization noise is 1st order noise shaped, 2) it is an open loop architecture, and, 3) its implementation is mostly digital in nature. Hence, they are...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...