In an industrial and consumer electronic marketplace that is increasingly demanding greater real-world interactivity in portable and distributed devices, analog to digital converter efficiency and performance is being carefully examined. The successive approximation (SAR) analog to digital converter (ADC) architecture has become popular for its high efficiency at mid-speed and...
Data can be represented in multiple views. Traditional multi-view learning methods (i.e., co-training, multi-task learning) focus on improving learning performance using information from the auxiliary view, although information from the target view is sufficient for learning task. However, this work addresses a semi-supervised case of multi-view learning, the surrogate supervision...
Multi-instance data, in which each object (e.g., a document) is a collection of instances
(e.g., word), are widespread in machine learning, signal processing, computer vision,
bioinformatic, music, and social sciences. Existing probabilistic models, e.g., latent
Dirichlet allocation (LDA), probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI), and discrete
component analysis (DCA), have been...
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas can be exploited to provide high data rate using a limited bandwidth through multiplexing gain. MIMO combined with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) could potentially provide high data rate and high spectral efficiency in frequency-selective fading channels. MIMO-OFDM technology has been widely employed in modern communication...
The design of high-performance, high-speed clock generation and distribution becomes challenging in terms of phase noise, jitter and power consumption, due to the fast development of communication and computing systems. Injection locking is a promising clocking technique since it can significantly improve the energy efficiency, suppress the phase noise of...
Fabrication techniques and process integration considerations for amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) thin-film transistors (TFTs) constitute the central theme of this dissertation. Within this theme three primary areas of focus are pursued.
The first focus involves formulating a general framework for assessing passivation. Avoiding formation of an undesirable backside accumulation layer...
The increased use of mobile wireless devices that we have recently been witnessing, such as smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and WiFi enabled devices in general, is driving an unprecedented increase in the amount of data traffic. This fast market adoption of the wireless technology along with the tremendous success of multimedia...
Pulsed ultra-wideband (UWB) radio uses extremely short pulses to transmit
information. Such pulses provide very fine timing information, which has led to
technological advances in high-precision localization. This thesis focuses on
techniques and experiments of Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDOA) localization of
a large number of simultaneous sources. First, common localization techniques
such...
Current leading thin-film solar cell technologies, i.e., cadmium telluride (CdTe) and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), employ elements which are either toxic (Cd), or rare and/or expensive (In, Te, Ga, and Cd). The aim of this thesis is to investigate new, abundant, non-toxic p-type semiconductors for potential solar absorber application....
Desire for low-power, high performance computing has been at core of the symbiotic union between digital circuits and CMOS scaling. While digital circuit performance improves with device scaling, analog circuits have not gained these benefits. As a result, it has become necessary to leverage increased digital circuit performance to mitigate...
Variable electrical generation (VG) sources such as wind farms are an increasing percentage of total electrical generation in the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) balancing area and are starting to impact the ability of the regional balancing authority to control the electric grid. Wind farms are not dispatchable and challenge historical...
In the next decade, technology trends--smaller dimension, lower voltage, higher operating frequency--introduce new technical considerations and challenges for radiation effects in integrated circuits. Semiconductor based circuits and traditional dynamic random-access memories will malfunction when exposed to extreme environments, such as space and nuclear reactor. The mechanisms for radiation effect are...
Indoor localization systems have a variety of applications such as tracking of assets, indoor robot navigation, and monitoring of people (e.g. patients) in hospitals or at home. Global positioning system (GPS) offers location accuracy of several meters and is mainly used for outdoor location-based applications as its accuracy degrades significantly...
We consider the problem of strategic adversarial planning in a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. Strategic adversarial planning is the generation of a network of high-level tasks to satisfy goals while anticipating an adversary's actions. In this thesis we describe an abstract state and action space used for planning in an...
MANETs are known to be useful in situations where mobile nodes need to communicate and coordinate in dynamic environments with no access to fixed network infrastructure. However, connectivity problems can occur when sub-groups within a MANET move out of communication range from one another. The increasingly prolific use of UAVs...
Indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO) and zinc-tin oxide (ZTO) are investigated for thin-film transistor (TFT) applications. Negative bias illumination stress (NBIS) is employed for electrical stability assessment. Unpassivated IGZO and ZTO TFTs suffer from severe NBIS instabilities. Zinc-tin-silicon oxide is found to be an effective passivation layer for IGZO and ZTO TFTs,...
Over the last decade, wind penetration in the Pacific Northwest has increased rapidly. The variable nature of this massive new resource has increased stress on the hydropower resource to the point where system limits are currently being reached. In order to cultivate continued growth of the wind energy industry both...
Mobile devices are becoming more prevalent and complex. As a result, the wireless communication aspect of these devices is becoming increasingly significant. At the same time, video demands in terms of availability and quality are also on the uprise. High definition (HD) video is the standard of choice for meeting...
Complex digital circuits such as microprocessors typically require support circuitry that has traditionally been realized using analog or mixed-signal macros. PLL circuits are used in many integrated applications such as frequency synthesizers and inter-chip communication interfaces. As process technologies advance and grow in complexity, the challenge of maintaining required analog...
This thesis describes the design and implementation of a Bluetooth controlled blimp with autonomous capabilities through Dead Reckoning. Reasonable research was conducted on current autonomous systems, wireless communication techniques, and suitable microprocessors that could handle the required processing. Building a remotecontrolled blimp requires a light understanding of mechanics to build...
A comprehensive and scalable solution for high-performance switched capacitor amplification is presented. Central to this discussion is the concept of ring amplification. A ring amplifier is a small modular amplifier derived from a ring oscillator that naturally embodies all the essential elements of scalability. It can amplify with accurate rail-to-rail...
This project examines the results of current-voltage conduction mechanism analysis techniques simulated under assumed conduction conditions. Thermionic emission and Fowler-Nordheim tunneling conditions are simulated and analyzed. The resulting plots show how devices behave under different condition mechanisms. The effects of different conduction mechanisms on the results of various analysis techniques...
Constant and reliable health monitoring can help doctors provide higher quality
health care to meet the growing needs of the medical industry. The advent of
cloud computing has enabled low-cost sensor devices that can process their data
in real-time without powerful onboard hardware. Using an Android smartphone,
medical data can...
This dissertation presents a low-power high-resolution delta-sigma ADC. Two new architectural design techniques are proposed to reduce the power dissipation of the ADC. Compared to the conventional active adder, the direct charge transfer (DCT) adder greatly saves power by keeping the feedback factor of the active adder unity. However, the...
Delta-sigma analog-to-digital converters traditionally have been used for low speed, high resolution applications such as measurements, sensors, voice and audio systems. Through continued device scaling in CMOS technology and architectural and circuit level design innovations, they have even become popular for wideband, high dynamic range applications such as wired and...
Digitally controlled switching DC-DC converters have recently emerged as an attractive alternative to conventional switching converters based on analog control techniques. This research focuses on eliminating the issues associated with the state of the art switching converters by proposing three novel control techniques: (1) a digitally controlled Buck-Boost converter uses...
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...
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...
This work presents a new energy saving technique for modern digital designs. We propose Time Interleaved Multi-Rail (TIMR) - a method for providing two dynamic supply rails to a circuit. This technique uses the first supply rail to mask the transition delay while changing the voltage of the second rail....
The objective of this dissertation is to develop amorphous metal thin films (AMTFs) for two-terminal electrical device and nanolaminate applications. Two AMTFs, ZrCuAlNi and TiAl, are investigated in both two-terminal electrical device and nanolaminate applications. Material properties including composition, atomic order, surface morphology, surface potential, and electrical resistivity are explored....
The stupendous growth in wireless and mobile devices in the recent years has prompted researchers to look at innovative approaches that enable effective use of the available resources. In this thesis, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol, referred to as EM-MAC, that enables wireless devices with multi-channel access...
Physical-Layer Network Coding (PNC) is a promising technique that has great potentials for improving the achievable data rates of end-to-end flows through higher packet transmission rates, thereby increasing the overall network throughput. In this thesis, we study the performance of the PNC transmission techniques for unidirectional end-to-end flows in multi-hop...
In this thesis work, a design of 14-bit, 20MS/s segmented digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is presented. The segmented DAC uses switched-capacitor configuration to implement 8 (LSB) + 6 (MSB) segmented architecture to achieve high performance for minimum area. The implemented LSB DAC is based on quasi-passive pipelined DAC that has been...
Over the last decade the increase in penetration of wind power and its variable nature has begun to add considerable stress to and threatened the stability of the nation's grid. In order to continue growth wind farms will need to have the ability to participate in the same grid frequency...