The refresh times of all dynamic charge storage devices, best
characterized by the generation lifetime at roan temperature and the
recombination lifetime at higher device operating temperatures
(T>70°C), strongly influence the efficient and successful operation
of dynamic charge storage devices such as DRAM's and CCD's. Both
recombination and generation lifetime...
Given a video, we would like to recognize group activities, localize video parts where these activities occur, and detect actors involved in them. To this and, we propose a novel, mid-level feature, called control point, for representing group activities. The control points are aimed at summarizing visual cues, lifting from...
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 investigates UWB localization strategies with a focus on receiver synchronization algorithms for time-difference-of-arrival localization to achieve centimeter accuracies in a 3-dimensional...
The U.S. Air Force models many naturally occurring
phenomena. To validate such models, an automated data
collection system is used. Since validation is dependent
upon correct data, an inexpensive method to detect
erroneous data was investigated. The method uses a Wiener
filter to predict values one sample in advance. If...
With the need for higher spectral efficiency and data rates the rise of simultaneous transmit-and-receive (STAR) radios is becoming increasingly valuable. While many systems employ two separate channels for transmit and receive to double the data speed, this comes at the cost of doubling the RF band. This same performance...
Synchronous machines provide a practical way to control reactive power consumption of a plant. One of the main advantages of using synchronous motors in a plant is their ability to generate reactive power for plant loads. A new control scheme for synchronous motor excitation systems is developed to automate reactive...
Modular multiplication is a mathematical operation fundamental to the RSA cryptosystern,
a public-key cryptosystem with many applications in privacy, security, and authenticity.
However, cryptosecurity requires that the numbers involved be extremely large,
typically ranging from 512-1024 bits in length. Calculations on numbers of this magnitude
are cumbersome and lengthy; this...
Synchrophasor technology has gained great momentum with the widely adopted concept of smart grids in power systems at transmission and generation level. This has led to an improved state estimation of a power system with the advent of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU). PMUs contribute in providing real-time information about the...
The variable output of renewables such as wind and solar causes fluctuations of power flow that can adversely affect power system operation, especially at high levels of penetration. The coordination of multiple energy storage solutions can mitigate integration challenges by providing a buffer from variable renewables. This thesis presents the...
Random number generation is important in many fields today. It is particularly important in the field of cryptography when generating nonce values, cryptographic keys, and other data required in many cryptographic applications. The proliferation of small, handheld devices that are typically connected to large networks via a wireless connection requires...
The future of mixed-signal, memory, and microprocessor technologies are dependent on ever increasing analog and digital integration, higher cell densities, and demand for more processing power. As a result MOSFET device dimensions continue to shrink to meet these demands. A side effect of device scaling is increased variability at each...
A Confederate soldier turned cowboy, fresh off the front lines of the Civil War, Cain Bradshaw is a hard man who keeps to himself, content to work the cattle train and bury himself in the oblivion offered by the wilds of the scarcely tamed West. But when dumb chance and...
Modular arithmetic operations (i.e., inversion, multiplication and exponentiation) are used in several cryptography applications, such as decipherment operation of RSA algorithm, Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm, elliptic curve cryptography, and the Digital Signature Standard including the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. The most important of these arithmetic operations is the modular...
The goal of this project is to create a lightweight radioactive isotope identification program for an embedded system using the C programming language to perform isotope matching on a subset of isotopes. First, the physics behind radioactive spectra and their key features are explained. Next, the characteristics of the spectra...
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...
The purpose of this study is to investigate radiation
losses in microstrip circuits. Expressions are derived to
evaluate the radiation resistances (or conductances) for
single terminated, open and short-circuited lines. The
quality factor Q of open and short-circuited stubs is
evaluated. An analytical procedure is formulated to
evaluate the radiation...
Electron and neutron irradiation effects in InGaP/GaAs single heterojunction bipolar transistors are investigated in this thesis. Devices with different emitter sizes and grown by two different growth techniques were examined. Based on the physics of heterojunction bipolar transistors and concepts of radiation damage mechanisms, the irradiation effects were analyzed. The...
The radiation effects in III-V heterojunction devices are investigated in this thesis. Two types of heterojunction devices studied are InGaP/GaAs single heterojunction bipolar transistors (SHBTs) and GaN-based heterojunction light emitting diodes (LEDs). InGaP/GaAS HBTs are investigated for high energy (67 and 105 MeV) proton irradiation effects while GaN heterojunction LEDs...
Radiation studies were performed on compound semiconductor heterostructure devices. The objective was to understand the degradation processes caused by the exposure of these devices to radiation. Preliminary experiments were focussed on studying the degradation phenomenon in single heterojunctions and single quantum wells. It was found that ionizing radiation like gamma...
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...
Static and dynamic numerical techniques which are suited for the
analysis and simulation of various planar microstrip components
encountered in hybrid and monolithic microwave integrated circuits are
presented. The static analysis makes use of an excess source formulation in conjunction with an efficient mathematical treatment to
extract the discontinuity parameter...
Coplanar microstrip structures placed on dielectric substrates
are used as high frequency electro-optic modulators. The method of
lines, a mathematical technique for solving partial differential
equations, has been applied to solve for the propagation
characteristics of such a configuration.
It has been determined that simple transmission line models
are adequate...
We demonstrated a low-cost and high-sensitivity DNA detection method using quantum dot-fullerene based molecular beacons (MBs) and magnetic nanoparticles. The MB tethered magnetic nanoparticles can be well dispersed in analytes for efficient DNA capture and concentrated by an external magnetic field for enhanced fluorescence signal detection. The detection requires only...
The dissertation focuses on the engineering of light-matter interaction using plasmonic nanoparticles and metamaterials to achieve enhanced luminescence and based on which to improve the performance of biosensing and light-emitting technologies. We designed and fabricated a spectrum of nanostructures to exhibit particular dispersion relations capable of controlling the spontaneous emission...
Detection of illicit drug residues from wastewater provides a new route toward community level assessment of drug abuse that is critical to public health. However, traditional chemistry analytical tools such as liquid chromatography in tandem with mass spectrometry cannot meet the large-scale testing requirement in terms of cost, throughput, and...
New video-conference devices based on omnidirectional multi-camera systems have been emerging in the last few years. These devices require innovative and automated video quality assessment in the earlier stages of their design in order to guarantee competitive product development and quality monitoring. Current quality assessment techniques are not adequate since...
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...
Due to the advancement of incredibly low power microcontrollers and small form factor integrated circuits, energy harvesting can be considered as an alternative, low power source for remote ocean sensing and measurements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of harvesting thermoelectric energy contained in the temperature differential between ocean surface water and...
Modular Multiplication is a time-consuming arithmetic operation because it involves multiplication as well as division. Modular exponentiation can be performed as a sequence of modular multiplications. Speeding the modular multiplication increases the speed of modular exponentiation. Modular exponentiation and modular multiplication are heavily used in current cryptographic systems. Well-known cryptographic...
We investigate a number of techniques for increasing throughput and quality of media applications over wireless networks. A typical media communication application such as video streaming imposes strict requirements on the delay and throughout of its packets, which unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed by the underlying wireless network due inherently to...
A new algorithm is proposed which provides a sub-optimum near-far resistant
pattern for correlation with a known signal in a spread-spectrum multiple access
environment with additive white gaussian noise (AWGN). Only the patterns and
respective delays of the K-1 interfering users are required. The technique does not
require the inversion...
The propagation characteristics of a new coupled fin line structure, with
asymetrical, rectangular, top and bottom housings, is evaluated by using the modal
analysis technique. The boundary Green's function of the structure, relating the surface
currents to the electric fields is derived by using this technique. The propagation
characteristics, i.e....
PRONTO is a direct, one-pass heuristic method designed
to shrink the size of reducible programmable logic
arrays. Several people have contributed to the design,
and translation to a computer program, of this attempt to
produce a good solution quickly. This thesis discusses
efforts to improve PRONTO's implementation in order to...
Regular structures such as PLA's are very
important to reduce VLSI design time. Interest in CAD
tools such as a practical reducing PLA generator is high.
This dissertation presents PRONTO as a practical, near-optimal
product term reduction method, whose general
heuristic approach consists of the following four steps.
First, select...
Project Loom is a system of sensors, actuators, processors, and wireless connectivity chips that the user can pick and choose from in order to create an Internet of Things application that fits their desired needs. The modularity of the system and ease of use allows for the user to create...
The dataflow model of computation differs from the traditional control-flow
model of computation in that it does not utilize a program counter to sequence
instructions in a program. Instead, the execution of instructions is based solely on the
availability of their operands. Thus, an instruction is executed in a dataflow...
The motivation of this research is to study different cache designs for on-chip
caches that improve processor performance and at the same time
minimize the degradation to system performance caused by an increase in
the processor memory traffic. As VLSI technology advances we can have
bigger and more complex on-chip...
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 detection of biological and chemical toxins has become one of the main concerns in environmental and military fields. In this framework, the department of Microbiology and Biochemistry at Oregon State University has discovered that fish living cells are promising indicators of the presence of a wide range of toxins....
A class of high-performance thin-film transistor (TFT) channel materials has emerged
involving oxides composed of heavy-metal cations (HMCs) with (n-1)d¹⁰ns⁰ (n≥4)
electronic configurations. This thesis is devoted to the pursuit of three topics involving
the development of these materials for TFT applications: modeling TFT currentvoltage
characteristics, an exploratory method for...
Probabilistic models have been successfully applied for a wide variety of problems, such as but not limited to information retrieval, computer vision, bio-informatics and speech processing. Probabilistic models allow us to encode our assumptions about the data in an elegant fashion and enable us to perform machine learning tasks such...
Inkjet printing offers a cost effective, highly customizable method for rapid manufacturing of functional devices with minimal material waste. Although this method has been used for a variety of composites, little work has been done in the area of 3D printing magnetic composites. Presented here is a process for inkjet...
The thesis focuses on the development of a novel printed resistive humidity sensor and integrated flexible electronics for an RFID-enabled humidity sensing platform. We explored a hybrid nanocomposite material for humidity sensing consisting of carbon nanomaterials, conductive polymer and cellulose polymer that undergoes resistance change in response to humidity change....
The thesis describes the preliminary studies on a
laboratory model of a magnetic elevator intended as part
of a system for circulating magnetic materials in chemical
reactors. A multiple coil laboratory model, controlled by
computer, was designed and constructed. Current measuring
transducers were used to monitor system performance and
study...
This paper investigates the benefit of various parallel processing
architectures for a Command and Control system for the Royal
Thai Air Force. Parallel processing has been shown to be useful
for air defense and air traffic control applications. Its advantages
are examined within the constraint imposed by the available
resources...
This thesis presents an automated methodology to calibrate the substrate profile for accurate prediction of substrate parasitics using Green's function based extractors. The technique requires fabrication of only a few test structures and results in an accurate three layered approximation of a heavily doped epitaxial silicon substrate. The obtained substrate...
Vision is a flexible, non-contact sensor that can be used for position feedback in
closed-loop control of dynamic systems. Current vision systems for industrial
automation provide low sample rates and large sample delays relative to other types of
position sensors. Poor sample rates and sample delays are a result of...
This thesis presents distinctly different methods of accurately predicting phase noise and absolute jitter in ring oscillators. The phase noise prediction methods are the commercially available SpectreRF and isf_tool, a simulator developed in this work from the Hajimiri and Lee theory of phase noise. Absolute jitter due to deterministic supply...
A highly flexible numerical simulation model for the performance
prediction of brushless dc drives is presented, which is capable of
investigating unbalanced and asymmetrical operating conditions as well
as drives with non-ideal parameters. Numerical speed-up procedures
allow for the investigation of pulse-width modulated (PWM) drives using
a personal computer. Experimental...