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...
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...
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...
Continuously tunable diode laser sources coupled to single-mode fiber are useful sources for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors. This paper describes the
development and fabrication of such a device. An introduction is given describing
applications of tunable lasers and some of the different methods of creating a tunable
diode...
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,...
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....
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...