This thesis presents a low-energy application specific digital controller for a battery-free 2.4 GHz wireless sensor network (WSN) node. The digital controller has been designed and fabricated in a standard 0.13 μm CMOS and implements a simple protocol for WSNs. Techniques such as supply voltage reduction and power gating have...
Silicon photonics has become the most promising platform for future large-scale optical interconnect and optical computing systems due to its inherent CMOS compatibility, which brings exclusive advantages in bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Parallel optical interconnects based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the capacity to meet the...
The major limiting factor of DRAM access time is the low transconductance of the
MOSFET's which have only limited current drive capability. The bipolar junction
transistor(BJT) has a collector current amplification factor, β, times base current and is
limited mostly by the willingness to supply this base current. This collector...
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...
The low thermal conductivity of gallium arsenide compared to silicon
results in self-heating effects in GaAs MESFETs that limit the electrical
performance of such devices for high power applications. To date, analytical
thermal models of self heating in GaAs MESFETs are based on the assumption
of a uniformly heated channel....
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...
Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) schemes combine packet retransmission with forward error correction to ensure a reliable communications. In multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems, interference cancellation (IC) detection is widely used where the detection and cancellation steps of the simultaneously transmitted data streams occur. In principle, the signal stream estimated...
Increasing threats of terrorism and contraband smuggling have led to a growing interest in millimeter wave/ THz security sensors. Recently, systems combining active and passive sensing into one unit have been proposed where the active mode provides information on range and reflectivity, and the passive mode complements the active by...
In recent years, RF (Radio Frequency) device fingerprinting using deep learning has emerged as a method of identifying devices solely by their RF transmissions. Conventional approaches to this type of device fingerprinting are not portable to different domains. That is, if a model for this purpose is trained on data...
In recent years there have been many improvements in the reliability of critical infrastructure systems. Despite these improvements and despite targeted efforts to improve the operation and control of the electric grid, the power systems industry has seen relatively small advances in this regard. For instance, today's power system is...
The suitability of discrete least-squares optimal (Wiener) filters
for deconvolution of tone-burst waveforms is studied. It is shown
that: (1) such waveforms are not well suited to these filters without
preprocessing, (2) the use of exponential weighting results in a significant
improvement in filter performance and (3) that "phase-unwrapping"
in...
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...
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....
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 this dissertation, time-based signal processing techniques and their applications in oversampling and noise-shaping data converters are examined. These techniques demonstrate the ability to shift the burden of high performance analog circuits from the compressed voltage-domain to the augmented time-domain. First, the potential of high order noise-shaping and phase-domain feedback...
As CMOS processes size continues to shrink, a number of factors limit the ability of analog circuit performance to scale with the process. These issues include smaller transistor intrinsic gains and lower supply voltages. However, scaling continues to increase the speed and decrease the power of digital circuits. In this...
A numerical technique to compute the time domain response of multiconductor lossy
uniform and nonuniform lines terminated in general nonlinear elements is presented. The
technique is based on the generalized method of characteristics. The method transforms the
original system of transmission line equations into a system of ordinary differential
equations....
A numerical method based on the the method of characteristics for hyperbolic systems
of partial differential equations in four independent variables is developed and used
for solving time domain Maxwell's equations. The method uses the characteristic
hypersurfaces and the characteristic conditions to derive a set of independent equations
relating the...