The focus of this thesis involves developing general fabrication processes relevant to the manufacture of two new devices for the Microscale technology Energy and Chemical Systems (MECS) program at Oregon State University. The two MECS devices developed, capture dots and transparent thin-film heaters (TTFHs), require unique process development for successful...
Motivation: Many robots such as legged robots and prosthetic hands/arms are designed to interact with uncertain and time-varying environments to accomplish their tasks.
Observations on humans and animals during their daily tasks suggest that they adapt their leg compliance while traversing with different velocities on different grounds and adjust their...
This work presents a new data encoding scheme: Integrated Pulse Width Modulation (iPWM) for equalizing lossy wireline channels with the aim of achieving energy efficient wireline communication. The proposed scheme is able to overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by Manchester and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) encoding on high data rate...
This work presents the design and implementation of a low power phased-array receiver frontend at 28 GHz in 65 nm CMOS. The frontend incorporates a low- power low-noise amplifier(LNA) and a passive reflection-type phase shifter (RTPS) capable of providing 360° phase shift with 5-bit phase resolution and low loss variation....
Sensors find a variety of applications in portable electronics, automotive and biomedical solutions. The demand for low power and high dynamic range makes the design of digital sensor readout circuits quite challenging. Traditionally, these circuits are realized using amplifiers with passive feedback or precision analog comparators which are power hungry...
VCO-based ADCs have recently emerged as attractive alternative to conventional DeltaSigma (ΔΣ) modulator architectures. Few salient features of a VCObased ADC are: 1) the quantization noise is 1st order noise shaped, 2) it is an open loop architecture, and, 3) its implementation is mostly digital in nature. Hence, they are...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...
IC designers are continuously facing the challenges from reduced CMOS feature sizes and supply voltages. ADCs that deliver satisfactory resolutions/speeds while utilizing the state-of-the-art technologies to save power are in high demand. The analog circuits are more and more assisted by various digital calibration techniques to get boosted performances. This...
Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a way to transfer power from one device to another without any wire or cable connections. Although the technology has been around for more than 100 years, it is gaining popularity in recent years due to the ever-increasing demand for faster and more frequent charging...
Nowadays, needs for wideband and high accuracy analog-to-digital converter are increasing rapidly in manifold applications such as wireless communication, digital video and other consumer electronics. Besides, low power consumption is required to have longer battery life in portable systems. CMOS technology scaling and innovative modulator topology make the implementation much...