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...
Spacecrafts experience radiation in the course of their operation
and all electronic equipment on board these spacecrafts has to
be designed to withstand the effects of this radiation.
This thesis describes the effects of total ionization dose (TID)
and single event transients (SET) in phase-locked loops - an
important circuit...
Circuits operating outside the earth’s atmosphere are more vulnerable to cosmic radiation and require special design consideration. The purpose of this work is to explore methods of mitigating the effect of radiation in phase locked loop (PLL) circuits. Several voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and two complete PLLs are designed and...
The design of a 10-bit pipelined charge redistribution DAC employing MOSCAPs biased in their accumulation mode is presented in this thesis. A switched capacitor filter and output buffer have also been designed for the system. The effect of MOSCAP nonlinearity on the performance of the pipelined charge redistribution DAC has...
Digital phase-locked loops (PLLs) have been receiving increasing attention recently due to their ease of integration, scalability and performance comparable to their analog counterparts. In digital PLLs, increased resolution in time-to-digital conversion is desirable for improved noise performance. This work describes the design and simulation of a stochastic time-to-digital converter...
End-user programmers, because they are human, make mistakes. However, past research has not considered how visual end-user debugging devices could be designed to ameliorate the effects of mistakes. This paper empirically examines oracle mistakes mistakes users make about which values are right and which are wrong to reveal differences in...
Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable...
A large number of sequential decision-making problems in uncertain environments
can be modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In such settings, an agent
can observe at each time step the state of the environment and then executes an
action, causing a stochastic transition to a new state of the environment...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is the transmission of data using an extremely wide bandwidth and very low power spectral density. In this thesis, the mereits and challenges of UWB architectures versus conventional narrowband architectures will be compared. Pulsed UWB systems can be implemented with very simple architectures. These advantages make UWB...
Ferrites have been used for various high frequency applications as bulk
materials. These applications, however, are limited to large dimension devices. In
this thesis, thin film ferrites were deposited from a low temperature solution-based
deposition process that is suitable for micro-scale high frequency applications. The
low temperature nature of this...
With the ever-increasing demand for portable devices used in applications
such as wireless communication, mobile computing, consumer electronics, etc.,
the scaling of the CMOS process to deep submicron dimensions becomes more
important to achieve low-cost, low-power and high-performance digital systems.
However, this downscaling also requires similar shrinking of the supply...
A discrete trap model is developed and employed for elucidation of thin-film transistor (TFT) device physics trends. An attractive feature of this model is that only two model parameters are required, the trap energy depth, E[subscript T], and the trap density, N[subscript T]. The most relevant trends occur when E[subscript...
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) suffer from static and dynamic nonlinearity problems, which degrade their accuracy and performance. Mismatch errors in the analog components restrict the maximum achievable linearity.
This thesis presents various techniques for correcting these errors. It describes a correction process for the nonlinear behavior of DACs, on three different...
Recently, continuous-time ΔΣ modulators are appearing increasingly often in both the literature and the marketplace due to their features of inherent antialiasing and relaxed requirements for opamp and so on. However, several nonideal factors such as clock jitter, excess loop delay, inter-symbol interference and so on, degrade the SNR performance...
This thesis presents a Z-parameter based model to predict the substratenoise coupling between two contacts in a heavily doped substrate for frequenciesless than 2 GHz. The empirical model is scalable with contact size and spacingsbetween the contacts and model parameters can be readily extracted from simu-lated or measured data. The...
Commonly proposed ocean wave energy converters (OWEC) use inefficient and maintenance demanding intermediate hydraulic and pneumatic systems. We propose a novel rotary direct-drive OWEC that eliminates these intermediate stages. The new device employs a contactless force transmission system (CFTS) comprising a “piston” and a “cylinder” and a ball screw to...
There is a large and growing market for portable consumer audio products
with very small size. As the size of these products is reduced, the area occupied
by batteries becomes significant and hence limits the number of batteries to one.
In order to build such small products, high levels of...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore dependency speculation in Dynamic Simultaneous Multi-Threading (DSMT). DSMT is a microprocessor architecture which attempts to extract Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) from single-threaded programs at run-time. This is accomplished by running multiple iterations of program loops in parallel. The DSMT architecture was originally...
Designing spectral efficient, high-speed wireless links that offer high quality-
of-service and range capability has been a critical research and engineering challenge. In this thesis, we mainly address the complexity and performance issues of
channel estimation and data detection in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems over...
This thesis presents a comparison of time-domain and frequency-domain algorithms for phase noise calculation in oscillators. Floquet theory provides the mathematical foundation for these calculations and the numerical methods employ perturbation projection vectors (PPVs). The PPVs are an estimate of an oscillator's sensitivity to noise.
The in-house circuit simulator SPICE3...
Traditionally linear actuator applications are addressed by the use of hydraulic systems. The high maintenance cost and poor reliability will always be the most critical problem in the real applications. Benefited from both the high mechanical advantage of the roll screw and the simple structure of the switched reluctance motor,...
In recent years, there has been growing interest in both industry and academia to use continuous-time (CT) Δ-Σ A/D converters for wideband wireless and wireline communication applications.
So far no reported CT Δ-Σ A/D modulator achieves 14-bit or higher dynamic range (DR) with more than 2MHz signal bandwidth (equivalently 4MS/s)....
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...
This thesis presents new, compact configurations for RF/microwave bandstop and lowpass filters for embedded passive applications. A simple design methodology is presented for designing the folded-transmission line filters on a microstrip platform. Unlike the conventional stub-loaded filter designs, the proposed folded-line filters will have practical dimensions for a wide range...
This thesis presents a channelized digital receiver design for UWB sytems in a multipath indoor environment. The UWB technology has been used for commercial and military purposes due to a number of advantages such as low-power consumption, noise-like and carrier free. The energy of UWB signal is spread over a...
Conventional register files spread porting resources uniformly across all registers. This paper proposes a method called Asymmetric Clustering using a Register Cache (ACRC). ACRC utilizes a fast register cache that concentrates valuable register file ports to the most active registers thereby reducing the total register file area and power consumption....
The demand for portable electronic systems and the continued
down-scaling of device dimensions resulted in rapid improvement in
the performance of integrated systems. Several low-voltage design
techniques have been proposed to operate analog circuits with sub-1V
supply. However, these techniques require higher power consumption
to achieve large dynamic range while...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication has emerged as a very promising
technology for short-range wireless applications, including
high-speed multimedia transmissions and sensor networks. UWB
system designs involve many different aspects covering analog and
digital processing, channel estimation and modeling, and
modulation and demodulation. Although UWB still faces many
challenges, significant progress has...
Accurate scaled modeling and simulation are critical to advancing ocean wave linear generator buoys. A 100th scaled model of ocean wave generator buoy systems is analyzed by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. These equations are numerically solved using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by implementing the front capturing method. In this thesis,...
Achieving sharpened (enhanced detail) features of a multi-dimensional data source using the linear prediction (LP) bandwidth extrapolation (BWE) technique in the transform domain is the main objective of this research. The evolution of sensor technology has provided acquisition scenarios in which the data format is inherently multi-dimensional, including hyperspectral imaging...
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 substrate noise injected by a stepped buffer circuit into two single-ended 1.5GHz low noise amplifiers is examined for a heavily doped 0.25µm CMOS process. The difference in the LNA noise rejection is characterized as a function of the size and placement of substrate contacts. The use of a resistive...
Authentication protocols play important roles in network security. A variety of authentication protocols ranging from complex public-key cryptosystems to simple password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. However, currently there is no fully secure authentication scheme that can resist all known attacks. When a user authentication is performed over an insecure...
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which has been very attractive for future high rate wireless communications, is very robust to channel multipath fading effect while providing high transmission data rate with high spectral efficiency.
Multiple antennas can be combined with OFDM to increase diversity gain and to improve spectral efficiency...
Full dynamic control of physically simulated characters is the holy grail of video
games and other interactive applications. Recent advances in the field have
presented controllers that can handle the balance and fall response after a
collision. This thesis addresses the development of a controller that handles the
response before...
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...
The primary objective of the thesis research is to study novel schemes of on-chip crosstalk suppression employing magnetic films at microwave frequencies. Since extraction of various material properties of the magnetic films is essential for successful application of the proposed method, the research also involves development of a new material...
A Z-parameter based macromodel for characterizing the substrate noise coupling in a lightly doped substrate at low frequencies has been developed. The model is scalable with contact geometries and separation. The cross-coupling impedance between two contacts is modeled using an improved geometric mean distance formulation. This approach obviates the need...
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with wide dynamic range and high
linearity are required for high-end audio applications. A multi-bit delta sigma
audio DAC, using a novel gain-correction technique, is described in this thesis. For
widely varying on-chip RC time constant, the DAC gain can be accurately
controlled by the correction circuitry....
Scaling of CMOS technology has progressed relentlessly for the past several
decades. In order for this unprecedented scaling to benefit the performance of
large digital systems, the communication bandwidth between integrated circuits
(ICs) must scale accordingly. However, interconnect technology does not scale as
aggressively, making communication between chips the major...
Cryptographic devices leak timing and power consumption information that is easily measurable, radiation of various levels, and more. Such devices also have additional inputs, other than plaintext and keys, like voltage, which can be modified to force the device to produce certain faulty outputs that can be used to reveal...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs), contact resistance and instability assessment.
First, determination of the contact resistance of indium tin oxide (ITO) on two wide-band gap semiconductors, zinc oxide (ZnO) and indium gallium oxide (IGO), is attempted and the effects of contact resistance on device...
Delta-Sigma (ΔΣ) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are widely used in wireless transceivers. Recently, continuous-time (CT) ΔΣ ADCs gain growing interest in wireless applications for their lower power consumption and wider input bandwidth as compared with the discrete-time (DT) counterparts.
In this thesis, a wideband low-power CT ΔΣ modulator for next generation...
The main contributions of this thesis are the development and
application of four computationally efficient solutions for
least-squares-based (LS-based) minimum variance spectral estimation
(MVSE). They are: (1) fast computational solution for the 1-D
covariance LS-based MVSE, (2) fast computational solution for the
1-D modified covariance LS-based MVSE, (3) fast computational...
There is a new possibility of generating deep ultraviolet laser radiation from a solid-state source. With recent advances in material development, a new nonlinear optical crystal provides a greater damage threshold than current materials making higher conversion efficiencies possible.
This thesis examines the possibility of using this crystal to generate...
Determining the performance characteristics of various ocean wave energy converters (OWEC) has proven to be difficult due to problems replicating a baseline motion profile in the ocean or wave tank to compare these devices. The linear test bed seeks to mechanically simulate the relative linear motion between the active components...
What are the most effective ways to improve the engineering curriculum? Improvements should result in increased student retention, undergraduates who are more industry-ready and graduates who are better prepared to be leaders. Current research suggests that the best predictor of persistence is a person’s self-efficacy. The focus of this thesis...
Contemporary circuit design involves significant computer-based simulation, calling for a balance between circuit model accuracy and simulation run time. Traditionally, circuit modelers concentrated on producing either (1) physically-based models, where each element in the model correlates to a physically meaningful aspect of the device being modeled or (2) mathematically-based "macromodels,"...
Wave energy conversion devices are a rapidly growing interest worldwide for the potential to harness a sustainable and renewable energy source. Due to the oscillatory nature of ocean waves, the power generated from a permanent magnet linear generator (PMLG) for ocean wave energy conversion is pulsed. Focusing on direct drive...
Ocean wave energy is rapidly becoming a field of great interest in the world of renewable energy. Significant advancements in design and technology are being made to make wave energy a viable alternative for our growing energy demands. The two major hurdles for ocean wave energy to make a significant...
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...
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...
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...
Low-Density Parity-check (LDPC) codes have attracted considerable attention due to their capacity approaching performance over AWGN channel and highly parallelizable decoding schemes. They have been considered in a variety of industry standards for the next generation communication systems. In general, LDPC codes achieve outstanding performance with large codeword lengths (e.g.,...
Transmission over wireless networks presents multiple technical challenges due to
noise, interference, fading, power constraints and bandwidth limitation. Different
solutions have been propposed to overcome these issues and some of them are
treated here. Cooperative diversity has been proposed as an implementation for
networks where terminals are restricted to using...
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,...
The world's oceans contain tremendous renewable energy potentials. It is estimated that if 0.2% of the ocean's untapped energy could be harnessed, it could provide power sufficient for the entire world [1]. This thesis provides a comprehensive description of the state-of-the-art of ocean energy extraction technologies and lessons learned from...
The primary objective of this thesis is to explore new absorber and p-type window layer materials for thin-film solar cell applications. A new thin-film electron beam deposition system has been installed, is now operational, and has been used to deposit several types of solar cell absorber layers. Material investigations include...
A significantly untapped renewable energy source exists in the world's oceans. It is estimated that if 0.2% of the ocean's untapped energy could be harnessed, it could provide power sufficient for the entire world. Ocean energy extraction is an old concept, and it is currently seeing the benefit of advancing...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore methods which can reduce the power dissipation of a mobile system while decoding MPEG video. MPEG decoding is a microprocessor intensive process that makes heavy use of both the L1 and L2 caches as well as main memory. The heavy load placed...
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems have recently been considered as one of the most significant technology breakthroughs for modern wireless communications, due to the higher spectral efficiency and improved link reliability. The sphere decoding algorithm (SDA) has been widely used for maximum likelihood (ML) detection in MIMO systems. It is...
Analog-to-Digital Data Converters (ADCs) used in instrumentation and measurements often require high absolute accuracy, including excellent linearity and negligible dc offset. Incremental data converters (IDCs) provide a solution for such measurement applications. Since IDCs are essentially delta-sigma converters with reset operation before each conversion, they retain most of the advantages...
FISHNET (Facilities Integrated in a Shared Habitat) is a communication subnet architecture utilizing a hybrid application of point-topoint and broadcast communications to achieve a high degree of network performance. This objective is achieved through utilizing a dual bus structure: a data bus and a control bus. The data bus consists...
The world’s energy consumption is growing at an alarming rate and the need for renewable energy is apparent now more than ever. Estimates have shown that optimization of the extraction of energy from the ocean could significantly aid the world’s quest for sustainable and affordable energy services for all. From...
Although the digital revolution can realize many of past analog components in the digital forms, our world is surrounded with analog signals such as voice, temperature, etc. The bridge between these two worlds is one of key performance limitations among overall systems and it includes analog filters and data converters....
An automated method, requiring the fabrication of a small set of test structures, efficiently extracts the coefficients of Z-parameter based macromodels. The extraction approach has been validated for both heavily and lightly doped substrates and can be applied to a variety of technologies. After the parameters of a macromodel have...
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...
Harvesting energy from the environment for powering micro-power devices have been increasing in popularity. These types of devices can be used in embedded applications or in sensor networks where battery replacement is impractical. In this dissertation, different methods of energy harvesting from the environment are explored as alternative sources of...
Recently, delta-sigma modulation has become a widely applied technique for high-performance analog-to-digital conversion of narrow-band signals. Most of the early designs used discrete-time structure for good accuracy and good linearity. The transfer functions are independent of the clock frequency. However, high unity-gain bandwidths of the opamps are required to satisfy...
Enabled by continued device scaling in CMOS technology, more and more functions that were previously realized in separate chips are getting integrated on a single chip nowadays. Integration on silicon has opened the door to new portable wireless applications, and initiated a widespread use of these devices in our common...
DiskGrapher is a graphical visualization tool designed to help users better manage the
space on their hard drives. The main goal of DiskGrapher is to provide a different
visualization technique to display information, with the goal of providing a more intuitive
understanding of the directory structure of the disk than...
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...
Estimating the operating efficiency of an induction machine is of prime importance for modern plant management. An extensive testing program of present efficiency estimation techniques was performed at the Motor Systems Resource Facility (MSRF), during which serious shortcomings of the existing techniques were identified. The objective of the work of...
Wireless Networks have been widely adopted into a major part of today's network infrastructure. They have become a popular technology to not only expand the coverage of wired networks but also to interconnect a large wireless network, i.e., wireless mesh networks. As they allow more flexible communication than traditional wired-networks...
The Advent of multi-cores allows programs to be executed much faster than before. Cryptoalgorithms use long-bit words thus parallelizing these operations on multi-cores will achieve significant performance improvement. However, not all long-bit word operations in cryptosystems are suitable for parallel execution on multi-cores. In particular, long-bit words used in Elliptic...
This research work focuses on the mechanism of 1/f noise in GaAs
resistors on semi-insulating substrates and 1/f noise due to temperature
fluctuations in heat conduction in resistors, diodes, and bipolar transistors. The
goal of this research is to generate accurate models to explain physical origin of 1/f
noise in...
This thesis presents a novel methodology that enables power efficient video decoding
in an embedded system based on MPSoC (Multiprocessor System on Chip). This
methodology is a physical combination of parallel processing which reduces power
consumption of processors by exploiting thread-level parallelism and Dynamic
Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) that allows...
A two-channel data acquisition system for simultaneous detection and discrimination of beta particles and gamma rays has been developed. Each channel measures and analyzes the input pulses resulting from the absorption of radiation in the layers of the detector. The detector is a triple-layer phoswich (phosphor sandwich) scintillation detector followed...
In this thesis, the performance degradation of a phase-locked loop due to substrate noise is examined. A new analytical equivalent circuit model for substrate noise coupling is derived for a heavily doped silicon substrate. The model has been validated with measured data from a 0.35 μm CMOS process. Since the...
The application of systems and control theory to membrane physiology is presented here. Modeling efforts have focused on describing those physiologically realistic mechanisms which govern the regulation of membrane permeability in nerve. The motivation behind identifying such mechanisms lies in understanding the morphology of neural activity on a meaningful and...
The focus of this thesis is the investigation of thin-film transistors (TFTs) based on amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) in two circuit applications. To date, circuits implemented with AOS-based TFTs have been primarily enhancement-enhancement inverters, ring oscillators based on these inverters operating at peak frequencies up to ~400 kHz, and two-transistor...
Magnetically coupled passive transformers are increasingly integrated on-chip for
various analog and radio frequency (RF) applications including direct current
(DC) isolation, impedance transformation/matching, and conversion between
single-ended and differential signals. A primary motivation for the on-chip
integration of transformers is the overall size reduction and reduced cost.
However, the performance...
Retention of engineering students is a problem for many universities, especially during the first year. The problem of introducing students to engineering while increasing retention rates has recently been addressed by many different universities. Implementing novel lab structures, adjusting the lecture to incorporate more effective teaching techniques, and using orientation...
Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) are of great current interest for thin-film transistor (TFT) channel layer applications. In particular, indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) is under intense development for commercial applications because of its demonstrated high performance at low processing temperatures. The objective of the research presented in this thesis is...
A class of inorganic thin-film transistor (TFT) semiconductor materials has emerged involving oxides composed of post-transitional cations with (n-1)d¹⁰ns⁰ (n≥4) electronic configurations. This thesis is devoted to the pursuit of topics involving the development of these materials for TFT applications: Deposition of zinc oxide and zinc tin oxide semiconductor
layers...
Alternating-current thin-film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) devices are metal-insulator-semiconductorinsulator-
metal (MISIM) structures which emit light under high field, pulsed excitation. One aspect of ACTFEL operation that is not well understood is the aging of such devices with operating time. One of the primary goals of
this thesis is to characterize the kinetics...
This paper discusses two main trends in the development of virtual
machine systems: full system virtualization, where an entire hardware
architecture is replicated virtually, and paravirtualization, where an
operating system is modified so that it can be run concurrently with
other operating systems that have also been designed for paravirtualization.
This thesis presents methods to reduce the effects of finite opamp DC gain, output voltage swing limitations in opamps, and component mismatches. The primary contribution of this thesis is a new switched-capacitor method named correlated level shifting (CLS). CLS enables true rail-to-rail operation by storing an estimate of the desired...
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...
A fully integrated CMOS GPS receiver RF front end optimized for low power operation is presented. The system operates with a supply voltage down to 250 mV. A prototype has been fabricated in a 0.13μm CMOS process and includes a low voltage LNA, quadrature oscillators, and quadrature mixers. It exhibits...
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...
Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) convert analog
continuous time signals into discrete time, digital format. One
precondition that must be met for conventional nyquist rate ADCs is
that the input signal must be suitably band-limited to an input
bandwidth less than the nyquist frequency. This mandates expensive
anti-alias filters which contribute to...
An enhanced swing differential Colpitts VCO (ESDC-VCO) dramatically improves
the swing of a Colpitts VCO by allowing the signal to swing below ground and above the
supply voltage. Fabricated in a 1P8M 0.13 um CMOS process, the ESDC-VCO operates
at 4.9GHz with a 0.475-V supply and consumes 2.7mW. The measured...
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...
This thesis proposes a novel technique for the design of pipelined and cyclic ADCs utilizing generalized radix gain stages. Several models have been proposed for the optimization of high performance pipelined ADCs by various researchers. This work builds upon them, using a simple but accurate model to estimate the optimal...
High data rate transmission has become an important challenge in today digital communication systems. One of the most difficult problems faced by engineers is to transmit data at sufficiently high rates through fading channels. This is the main motivation for the research presented herein. In this thesis, we investigate a...
Real world is analog but the processing of signals can best be done in digital domain. So the need for Analog to Digital Converters(ADCs) is ever rising as more and more applications set in. With the advent of mobile technology, power in electronic equipment is being driven down to get...
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), also known as Rijndael, is a symmetric key block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the US government and used extensively in cryptographic applications worldwide. ARM is the most popular processor core used in embedded applications. This thesis surveys the available public implementations of AES...
Hardware cryptography offers a reliable way to provide security for data that is sent over networks. Security processors have taken the stage in the movement for secure computing. Some of the more prominent security processors belong to the S1 family created by Motorola. The primary goal of this thesis is...