With increasing operating frequencies in CMOS RF/microwave integrated circuits,
the performance of on-chip interconnects is becoming significantly affected by the lossy
substrate. It is the purpose of the first part of this thesis to develop a rigorous field
theoretic analysis approach for efficient characterization of single and multiple coupled
interconnects...
During the last few years we have seen formidable advances in digital and mobile
communication technologies such as cordless and cellular telephones, personal
communication systems, Internet connection expansion, etc. The vast majority
of digital information used in all these applications is stored and also processed
within a computer system, and...
In recent years, the elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) have received attention
due to their increased security with smaller key size which brings the advantage of less
storage area and less bandwidth. Elliptic curve cryptography provides a methodology
for obtaining high-speed, efficient, and scalable implementations of network security
protocols. In addition...
As the information-processing and telecommunications revolutions now underway will continue to change our life styles in the rest of the 21st century, our personal and economic lives rely more and more on our ability to transact over the electronic medium in a secure way. The privacy, authenticity, and integrity of...
Power quality has become an important concern to both electric utilities and
end users due to the increased use of non-linear loads in modem power systems
over the past decade. Nonlinear loads inject harmonics into the power system and
thus may lead to poor power quality and lower power factor....
This thesis presents a design-oriented model for lightly doped CMOS substrates. The model predicts the substrate noise coupling between noisy digital and sensitive analog blocks in the early stages of the design. The model scales with the size and separation of these blocks and it is validated with device simulations...
Current superscalar microprocessors' performance depends on its frequency and the
number of useful instructions that can be processed per cycle (IPC). Higher frequency
is achieved with process advancement, new circuit techniques, and microarchitectural
improvement. Number of instructions processed per cycle depends mainly on
microarchitecture techniques that exploit parallelism both spatially...
The objective of the research presented in this thesis is to develop, implement, and demonstrate the utility of an n-sheet, state-space alternating-current thin-film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) device model. In this model, the phosphor layer is discretized into n + 1 layers, with band-to-band impact ionization, space charge creation/ annihilation, and luminescent...
The design of mixed-signal integrated circuits has evolved from simple analog and digital circuits operating on the same silicon substrate to the point that now we have complete system on a chip solutions for communication systems. The levels of integration needed to remain cost effective in today's integrated circuit (IC)...
The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is one of the most popular algorithms to digitally sign streams or blocks of data. In this thesis we concentrate on porting and optimizing the ECDSA on the ARM7 processor for a particular NIST curve over GF(2[superscript m]). The selected curve is a...
A computationally efficient and accurate substrate noise coupling model for multiple contacts in heavily doped CMOS processes is presented and validated with simulations and experimental data. The model is based on Z parameters that are scalable with contact separation and size. This results in fast extraction of substrate resistances for...
The design of two 2.4GHz CMOS LC balanced oscillators in the 0.25μm National BiCMOS process for Bluetooth specifications is presented. These oscillators achieve low phase noise with low power consumption. At a frequency offset of 500KHz from the 2.11GHz carrier, the measured phase noise is -101.9dBc/Hz for the NMOS oscillator...
Voltage converters or charge pumps find their use in many circuits. They are extensively used in hand held devices as cell phones, pagers, PDA's and laptops. Some of the important issues relating to design of voltage regulators for handheld devices are size, efficiency and noise. Another important factor to be...
High bandwidth of networks demands high performance communication processors that integrate application processing, network processing, and system support functions into a single, low cost System-On-Chip (SOC) solution. However, conventional processors, when used in network related applications, are beset by the overhead of save/restore of register context, cache misses due to...
With the development of high performance power electronic and semiconductor technologies, Adjustable Speed Drive (ASD) systems are increasingly applied in residential, commercial and industrial applications. Due to the advantages at higher power ratings, the three-level Neutral-Point-Clamped (NPC) Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) is being employed in industrial and traction applications, static...
A comparison and analysis of jitter for five different architectures of ring oscillators using a novel simulation technique developed by Professor Forbes' group is presented. Ring oscillators have become an essential building block in many digital and synchronous communications system due to their integrated nature and are widely used in...
A novel switched-R-MOSFET-C input branch is proposed for low-voltage and high-linearity applications. The tunability is achieved by varying the clock duty cycle using an automatic tuning circuit. This tuning method does not involve a change in gate voltage, and is therefore particularly suitable for low-voltage applications. The advantages of the...
AE32000 microprocessor was developed mainly to address the need for the reduction in the amount of memory accesses in embedded applications. One of the primary goals of a computer architect is the design and construction of machines, that support the efficient execution of the programs that will run on them....
With the current security climate throughout the Internet, a large emphasis is being placed on protecting software systems from attack by a malicious entity. Most successful attacks against software are the result of lazy or misinformed developers and are easily prevented given the correct preparation and instruction. This document provides...
On-line arithmetic modules were proposed as a way to explore parallelism in arithmetic operations at digit level. Using always serial operators that receive inputs and compute the outputs from most-significant to least-significant digits, online arithmetic makes it possible to overlap all arithmetic operations and have a pipelined structure. On-line division...
Systems biology is becoming increasingly important for the study of living organisms. It focuses on the mathematical understanding of biological systems. Cells, the basic units of all living creatures, are biological systems of major interest. Considerable work is being done towards modeling cells as mathematical systems. At the same time,...
Mobile and telecommunication industry has experienced tremendous growth in the recent past. Miniaturization and increased functionality have become necessary for all passive components in the system. Bandpass filters are critical passive components in any communication system and the existing designs in the crucial 1-10 GHz bandwidth suffer many drawbacks. For...
This dissertation investigates the use of a hardware mechanism called Eager Data Transfer (EDT) for achieving the reduction of communication latency for user-level network protocol. To reach the goal, the dissertation addresses the following research issues. First, the development of a communication system performance evaluation tool called Linux/SimOS is presented....
Memory hierarchy design is becoming more important as the speed gap be- tween processor and memory continues to grow. Investigations of memory perfor- mance have typically been conducted using trace-driven emulation, which could take tremendous resources (e.g. long emulation time, large storage requirements for traces, and high overall cost). Recent...
The spread of the internet and communications techniques increases the necessity
for security in applications that involves sharing or exchange of secret or private infor-
mation. Public-key cryptography is widely used in establishing secure communication
channels between the users on the Internet, for E-commerce transactions, and in net-
work security...
Pipeline analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) have long been used in high-speed systems for power-efficient data conversion. Broadband communication and video processing systems are placing high demands on converter accuracy and speed (above 14 bits and in the multiple-MHz range). The increasing converter requirements coupled with lower supply voltages in modern processes...
Preventative motor fault detection is of prime importance for modern plant management. During research into rotor faults, performed at the Motor Systems Resource Facility (MSRF), an optimized rotor fault detection and classification method was proposed. In critical process applications, the suggested method would provide the foundation for continually monitoring a...
This work focusses on the modeling and the development of efficient coupled simulation techniques for MEMS based RF oscillators. High-level models for MEMS based varactors have been discussed and their accuracy issues are identified, based on comparisons with numerical simulations. A faster simulation approach based on the time-domain shooting method...
At frequencies exceeding 1-2 GHz, the substrate network models used in substrate coupling simulation must account for the reactive nature of the substrate. Unlike at low frequencies, where the purely resistive substrate models can be validated through DC resistance measurements, these high-frequency models, comprising reactive components, must be validated through...
The detection of motor faults at their incipient stage is of prime importance to any industrial plant. The introduction of adjustable speed drives has improved the control and the efficiency of induction motors, however, this has changed the nature of motor faults and how they can be detected.
Current signature...
A digital phase locked loop (DPLL) and a statistical time-to-digital converter (STDC) were previously fabricated in a 0.35µm, 3.3V SOI CMOS process. This work summarizes these designs and characterizes the measured performance. Simulations supplement the measurements where applicable.
The DPLL was found to reach a locked state under a limited...
The problem of locating a signal source, or an emitter, has many civilian and military applications, such as communication regulations enforcement, military reconnaissance, and search-and-rescue operations. Many of the most widely used emitter location methods rely on the accurate and robust estimation of the differential time delay,
or time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA),...
Low noise oscillators are universally needed in digital systems for clock generation and synchronization, and in radio-frequency communication front-ends for frequency up- and down-conversion. Noise in oscillators results in timing jitter, and limits the clock frequency of digital systems. In radio-frequency communication systems, phase noise in oscillators lowers the signal-to-noise...