Nucleation in atomic layer deposition (ALD) determines how many cycles are required to initiate growth and to form a continuous film. Nucleation has been exploited for the formation of nanoparticles, catalysts, and for area-selective ALD. Although sometimes overlooked or misrepresented in ALD reports, nucleation is also critical for multicomponent ALD...
Modern sensors are complex systems comprising multiple sub-systems such as transducers, analog and mixed-signal interface circuits, digital processing circuits, and packaging. Over the last few decades, innovations in these sub-systems combined with their increased integration in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes have led to the rapid growth in sensors for...
There has been tremendous growth in using data analytic and machine learning algorithms to make critical decisions, such as in the national power grid, healthcare operations, and autonomous vehicles. Employing data analytic for decision-making allows cyber attackers to manipulate the decisions of these algorithms through data falsification. Hence, the trustworthiness...
Radiation is part of our life. Most people may know a radioactive source is very dangerous. But there are very few situations people are exposed to uncontrolled radionuclides above background. A radioactive source can emit gamma rays which are the highest energy type in electromagnetic radiation.[2] Gamma rays are like...
Bird and bat collisions with wind turbines are a problem that needs to be better quantified for its impact to be fully understood. This thesis documents portions of the design of a sensor patch module for use on wind turbines blades to detect impacts caused by birds and bats. This...
Nowadays, wireless communication systems use high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) together with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to increase the link capacity and robustness. These signals always have large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and require power amplifiers (PAs) achieve both high efficiency and linearity simultaneously. For the efficiency, the complementary metal...
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is an enabling technique for many new micro- and nanoscale technologies. The self-limiting surface chemical reactions by which ALD fundamentally operates give rise to uniquely high precision (atomic) control over deposited film thickness, uniformity over large areas, and conformality over complex and extreme topographies. One such...
Locating sources of radio signals can be useful in many applications. From pointing antennas at nearby radio towers to fox hunting, being able to determine the relative location or direction to a radio transmitter can be very useful. Generally, it is necessary to have the current GPS locations of both...
This work addresses the application of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems in which the cost functional is not in a standard quadratic form, and the WEC model includes the nonlinear effects, such as the hydrodynamic viscous drag. The NMPC implementation is...
Traditional localization techniques rely on triangulation or trilateration, where in a set of three or more stationary known locations is used to estimate a “client” position. For inertial navigation, these techniques can estimate client positions merely using the measured data from tri-axial accelerometers and gyroscopes. However, the use of double...
Dense electrical recording of biosignals has been developed to provide spatial resolution and precise temporal information for health monitoring, diagnostics, and clinical research. However, more electrodes require more wires, and wiring density quickly becomes a limiting factor. To break this bottleneck, we proposed a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) based architecture for...
As human-robot interaction becomes more commonplace, roboticists should understand how robot behaviors are perceived by people to avoid misunderstandings. In our lab, we are exploring the use of a Cozmo as an interactive, break-taking aid in workplace settings. Before our interactive aid can be released into the wild, we must...
Deep learning is becoming the latest trend in sensitive applications, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance. As these new applications emerge, adversaries are circumventing them.
Further, there have been concerns about the possibility of bias and discrimination in predictive applications.
In order to address these issues, we propose an...
The passive charge compensation (PCC) technique was introduced for switched capacitor (SC) circuit to increase the slew rate and enhance the linearity performance, as PCC techniques are used on the Delta-Sigma modulator (DSM) in ADC circuitry. The PCC technique of the project was applied to the design of a SC...
The gm/ID-based design of analog integrated circuits introduced in 1996 employs an empirical transistor sizing methodology using SPICE-generated lookup tables that enables good agreement between simulations and specifications. This thesis introduces a new SPICE lookup table that extends the gm/ID approach to the Miller pole-splitting frequency compensation of the classical...
Unlike other biosensing, electrochemical biosensor has the advantages of robustness, easy miniaturization, excellent detection limits, and capability in handling small analyte volumes. The detection selectivity of the electrochemical biosensors is mainly supported by bioreceptors. However, these receptors always suffer from the performance variation caused by the environment and the thermal-...
Renewable energy technology continues to grow in popularity as countries aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Land based and offshore wind turbines are one option for expanding renewable energy sources. However, as wind energy adoption increases, so does the need for enhanced monitoring of wind turbines’ potential effect on local...
Enabling accurate and automated identification of wireless devices is critical for ensuring secure and authenticated data communication in large-scale networks such as IoT networks. In the aim of devising practical identification techniques that are immune to spoofing, hardware-driven RF fingerprinting using deep neural networks, which leverages the inevitable presence of...
This thesis work proposes a low-power 12-bit digital-to-analog converter (DAC) designed in a 130nm process. The DAC to be presented is of a segmented design where the architecture is split into pipelined and thermometer coded segments. This allows for high linearity and low distortion while maintaining high speed and low...
Switched capacitor (SC) circuits are the main building blocks in many structures such as filters, data converters, sampling circuits and sampled-data amplifiers. The key challenge is to design such circuits which are the prime components of any IoT system with low power consumption without compromising on the performance. In this...