This work describes the development of an accurate, low-cost, expandable and wearable health and activity monitoring platform. Wearable monitors used to track physical activity are becoming an increasingly popular and effective way to combat our dangerously sedentary lifestyles. Unfortunately most existing wearable solutions are either costly, inaccurate or cumbersome. The...
The complexity of designing and testing today's system on chip (SOC) is increasing due to greater integrated circuit (IC) density and higher IO and memory frequencies. SOCs for the mobile phone and tablet market have the unique challenge of short product development windows, at times less than six months, and...
Multi-Gigahertz sampling rate Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) with 5-8 bits resolution are used in many signal communication applications. Unfortunately, the performance of the high speed ADC is limited by the timing accuracy of the sampling clock. A small sampling uncertainty can cause a large error in the sampled voltage and result...
This work presents improvements to a multi-core performance/power simulator. The improvements which include updated power models, voltage scaling aware models, and an application specific benchmark, are done to increase the accuracy of power models under voltage and frequency scaling. Improvements to the simulator enable more accurate design space exploration for...
The proliferation of body worn autometric devices has been enabled by advances in low-power electronics and fueled by the quantified-self movement. These devices range in complexity from pedometers to clinical vital sign measurement. They all share the same drawback, typically the most expensive and heaviest component, the battery. The future...
A method for improving performance/watt of an embedded single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture using application-guided a priori scheduling of hardware resources is presented. A multi-core architectural simulator is adopted that accurately estimates power, performance, and utilization of various processor components (logic, interconnect and memory). A greedy search is then performed on...
Energy consumption is one of the primary bottlenecks to both large and small scale modern compute platforms. Reducing the operating voltage of digital circuits to voltages where the supply voltage is near or below the threshold of the transistors has recently gained attention as a method to reduce the energy...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio has become an attractive alternative for wireless communications due to the robustness to multipath fading, low power transmission, mostly-digital implementation, and low cost. Furthermore, short-range, high data-rates applications are possible with UWB radios due to the wide spectral
allocations at 3.1 - 10.6 GHz.
This thesis presents...
Short-range wireless communications continually attract interest from both industry and academia, and it is changing our life in every aspect in the last decade. The design of wireless transceivers is the bottleneck for variety applications, due to RF modeling inaccuracy, stringent FCC regulations over the transmitted power spectrum, interference, multi-path...
The rapid scaling of network bandwidth and data center throughput has motivated the wide adoption of high speed transceivers. Silicon photonics (Si-Photonic) is one of the most promising techniques to realize tightly integrated optical transceivers for next-generation high speed I O standards. This dissertation focuses on the design techniques of...