The amount of instruction level parallelism (ILP) that can be exploited depends
greatly on the size of the instruction window and the number of in-flight instructions
the processor can support. However, this requires a register file with a large set of
physical registers for renaming and multiple ports to provide...
With the growing demand for portable/consumer electronics, such as digital
audio/video (AV), the downscaling of device dimensions, which enables the
integration of an increasing number of transistors in a single chip, is mandatory.
This trend also continuously pushes the power supply voltage down to reduce the
power consumption and improve...
Preventative methods for software reverse engineering have been given greater attention in recent times due to the increase in computational resources and tools available to the public. The inherent security provided by encoding source into machine code (executable form) can no longer be assumed, given the availability of effective automated...
This thesis discusses the design and development of a
viable local area network (LAN) which supports both
communications and control applications. The emphasis was
to develop a practical and cost effective system which
offered high performance while utilizing low cost
components. System cost was kept low by utilizing a
twisted-pair...
The aim of this dissertation is to develop oxide semiconductors by radio-frequency
sputtering for thin-film transistor (TFT) applications. A variety of oxide semiconductors
are used as the TFT channel layer, including indium gallium oxide (IGO), zinc tin
oxide (ZTO), and indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO). The variety of materials used...
Power and timing requirements are becoming more and more stringent as applications move from less mobile devices to more mobile ones. As such, it is important to optimize these applications as much as possible in order to provide the best solution that is low power and low latency. Although there...
This dissertation presents a dual-path 2-0 MASH (Multi-stAge-noise -SHaping) ADC with two verified digital corrections of DAC mismatch error and quantization noise leakage. By using these two techniques, the requirements for the analog circuits are greatly relaxed. The dual-path structure generates two outputs, one only composed of conversion errors, the...
Two methods of electro-optically characterizing alternating-current thin-film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) devices are investigated: photo-induced transferred charge (PIQ) and luminescence (PIL), and subthreshold voltage-induced transferred charge (VIQ) techniques. Both techniques provide information related to traps within the phosphor layer. PIQ/PIL experiments monitor the transport of electrons and holes across the phosphor layer...
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...
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...