The primary objective of this thesis is to develop a process for fabricating integrated circuits based on thin-film transistors (TFTs) using zinc tin oxide (ZTO) as the channel layer. ZTO, in contrast to indium- or gallium-based amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOS), is perceived to be a more commercially viable AOS choice...
To protect the environment and save human lives, the detection of various hazardous toxins of biological or chemical origin has been a major challenge to the researchers at Oregon State University. Living fish cells can indicate the presence of a wide range of toxins by reactions such as changing color...
With an increasing number of wireless applications at microwave frequencies, the frequency spectrum is becoming quite crowded. Due to this congestion, the current state of technology is leading towards upper microwave and millimeter wave spectra as they also offer other distinct advantages such as larger bandwidth and smaller component footprint....
A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is collection of wireless mobile nodes without a network infrastructure or centralized administration. Although MANETs can be used in many applications, such as mobile Internet, military communication, and disaster relief networks, a number of challenges remain. These include routing, medium access control, security, scalability, energy...
This paper proposes a novel means of using analog correlators to improve upon existing Ultra-Wideband receiver architectures. Current architectures aim for an all-digital design for the sake of ease of implementation and conceptual simplicity. This causes some notable design challenges including an ultra-high sampling rate, and difficulty capturing multipath energy....
Low energy design techniques for digital circuits are examined to determine their suitability for use in a digital logic controller for wireless sensor network nodes. Transistor level simulations are used to evaluate the techniques and those demonstrating an energy reduction are used to implement a digital logic controller. The digital...
In Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) or high frequency digital
ICs, there is a demand to probe the internal nodes for testing. The ultra low
capacitance RFIC probe presented in his work is a flexible tool for these
applications. The probe utilizes the coupling between a tungsten needle and the...
Turbo codes have been used successfully for error correction in digital communications, however, their application to wireless mobile communications is still a fresh research topic. The objective of this thesis is to present a new solution that involves the usage of turbo codes, spatial diversity, and orthogonal complementary codes in...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of transparent electronics, SnO₂ transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) and transparent circuits. Both depletion- and enhancement-mode SnO₂ TTFTs are realized. The maximum effective mobility for the depletion- and enhancement-mode devices are 2 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹ and 0.8 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹, respectively. A variety of techniques to decrease the carrier...
While the performance gap between microprocessors and main memory is ever increasing each year, cache memory has been a bridge to alleviate this discrepancy. In this thesis proposal, we introduce three techniques to tolerate this processor and memory speed imbalance. First, we propose the bloom filter scheme to identify which...
In the first part of this dissertation, low frequency l/f or flicker noise in the frequency range of Hz to kHz has been identified and demonstrated to be described by temperature fluctuations in heat conduction in bipolar transistors operated at higher power densities. This noise phenomenon is not described by...
In recent years, a new class of high-performance thin-film transistors (TFTs) has emerged comprising amorphous oxide channel materials composed of heavy-metal cations (HMCs) with (n-1)d¹⁰ns⁰ (n ≥ 4, where 'n' refers to the row of the periodic table) electronic configuration. This thesis is devoted to the fabrication and characterization of...
General purpose computer systems have seen increased performance potential through the parallel processing capabilities of multicore processors. Yet this potential performance can only be attained through parallel applications, thus forcing software developers to rethink how everyday applications are designed. The most readily form of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) within any...
This dissertation investigates diverse techniques to support multithreading in modern high performance processors. The mechanisms studied expand the architecture of a high performance superscalar processor to control efficiently the interaction between software-controlled and hardware-controlled multithreading. Additionally, dynamic speculative mechanisms are proposed to exploit thread-level-parallelism (TLP) and instruction-level-parallelism (ILP) on a...
The transition from second-generation (2G) to third-generation (3G) wireless cellular and cordless telephone systems requires multi-standard adaptability in a single RF receiver equipment. An important answer to this request is the use of Delta-Sigma modulators for IF-to-baseband conversion, which will satisfy the dynamic range requirements for digital signal processing, and...
Information security is an important concern in today’s communication and business world. To achieve these security functions, cryptography is utilized. RSA and the Diffie Hellman key exchange are some examples of cryptography algorithms that use modular multiplication to compute modular exponentiations. Modular multiplication requires division operations which becomes very time...
At frequencies exceeding 1-2 GHz, the reactive nature of a silicon substrate must be accounted in the substrate network models used in substrate coupling simulation. High-frequency substrate models, containing reactive components, must be validated through high-frequency network analyzer measurements. Prior fabricated test fixtures have been modified to enable high-frequency (up...
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...
Symmetric key block ciphers, such as AES, are well known and frequently used. There are five confidentiality modes of operation that are currently recommended for use with a symmetric key block cipher algorithm: Electronic Codebook (ECB), Cipher Block Chaining (CBC), Cipher Feedback (CFB), Output Feedback (OFB), and Counter (CTR). This...
The integration of renewable energy sources and the associated power electronics to notebook power and thermal management systems was investigated in this work. Both thermoelectric (TE) and photovoltaic (PV) energy extraction techniques were explored with the goal of achieving best sustainability. Semi-realistic usage assumptions were taken into account to evaluate...