Computer Engineering Commons^™

Modeling And Compensating Of Noise In Time-Of-Flight Sensors, Bryan Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Three-dimensional (3D) sensors provide the ability to perform contactless measurements of objects and distances that are within their field of view. Unlike traditional two-dimensional (2D) cameras, which only provide RGB data about objects within a scene, 3D sensors are able to directly provide depth information for objects within a scene. Of these 3D sensing technologies, Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensors are becoming more compact which allows them to be more easily integrated with other devices and to find use in more applications. ToF sensors also provide several benefits over other 3D sensing technologies that increase the types of applications where ToF sensors …

An Animated Introduction To Digital Logic Design, John D. Carpinelli

Open and Affordable Textbooks

This book is designed for use in an introductory course on digital logic design, typically offered in computer engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and other related programs. Such a course is usually offered at the sophomore level. This book makes extensive use of animation to illustrate the flow of data within a digital system and to step through some of the procedures used to design and optimize digital circuits.

All of the animations for this book can be found here: https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/dld-animations/

Towards Multipronged On-Chip Memory And Data Protection From Verification To Design And Test, Senwen Kan, Jennifer Dworak

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Modern System on Chips (SoCs) generally include embedded memories, and these memories may be vulnerable to malicious attacks such as hardware trojan horses (HTHs), test access port exploitation, and malicious software. This dissertation contributes verification as well as design obfuscation solutions aimed at design level detection of memory HTH circuits as well as obfuscation to prevent HTH triggering for embedded memory during functional operation. For malicious attack vectors stemming from test/debug interfaces, this dissertation presents novel solutions that enhance design verification and securitization of an IJTAG based test access interface. Such solutions can enhance SoC protection by preventing memory test …

Faster Multidimensional Data Queries On Infrastructure Monitoring Systems, Yinghua Qin, Gheorghi Guzun

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The analytics in online performance monitoring systems have often been limited due to the query performance of large scale multidimensional data. In this paper, we introduce a faster query approach using the bit-sliced index (BSI). Our study covers multidimensional grouping and preference top-k queries with the BSI, algorithms design, time complexity evaluation, and the query time comparison on a real-time production performance monitoring system. Our research work extended the BSI algorithms to cover attributes filtering and multidimensional grouping. We evaluated the query time with the single attribute, multiple attributes, feature filtering, and multidimensional grouping. To compare with the existing prior …

Enhanced Security Utilizing Side Channel Data Analysis, Michael Taylor

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The physical state of a system is affected by the activities and processes in which it is tasked with carrying out. In the past there have been many instances where such physical changes have been exploited by bad actors in order to gain insight into the operational state and even the data being held on a system. This method of side channel exploitation is very often effective due to the relative difficulty of obfuscating activity on a physical level. However, in order to take advantage of side channel data streams one must have a detailed working knowledge of how a …

A 2.56 Gbps Serial Wireline Transceiver That Supports An Auxiliary Channel And A Hybrid Line Driver To Compensate Large Channel Loss, Xiaoran Wang

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Serial transceiver links are widely used for high-speed point-to-point communications. This dissertation describes two transceiver link designs for two different applications.

In serial wireline communications, security is an increasingly important factor to concern. Securing an information processing system at the application and system software layers is regarded as a necessary but incomplete defense against the cyber security threats. In this dissertation, an asynchronous serial transceiver that is capable of transmitting and receiving an auxiliary data stream concurrently with the primary data stream is described. The transceiver instantiates the auxiliary data stream by modulating the phase of the primary data without …

Heuristic-Based Threat Analysis Of Register-Transfer-Level Hardware Designs, Wesley Layton Ellington

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The development of globalized semiconductor manufacturing processes and supply chains has lead to an increased interest in hardware security as new types of hardware based attacks, called hardware Trojans, are being observed in industrial and military electronics. To combat this, a technique was developed to help analyze hardware designs at the register-transfer-level (RTL) and locate points of interest within a design that might be vulnerable to attack. This method aims to eventually enable the creation of an end-to-end design hardening solution that analyzes existing designs and suggests countermeasures for potential Trojan attacks. The method presented in this work uses a …

Resource Allocation And Task Scheduling Optimization In Cloud-Based Content Delivery Networks With Edge Computing, Yang Peng

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

The extensive growth in adoption of mobile devices pushes global Internet protocol (IP) traffic to grow and content delivery network (CDN) will carry 72 percent of total Internet traffic by 2022, up from 56 percent in 2017. In this praxis, Interconnected Cache Edge (ICE) based on different public cloud infrastructures with multiple edge computing sites is considered to help CDN service providers (SPs) to maximize their operational profit. The problem of resource allocation and performance optimization is studied in order to maximize the cache hit ratio with available CDN capacity.

The considered problem is formulated as a multi-stage stochastic linear …

On Using Ai Bots For Voice Controlled Augmented Reality Applications, Juan Estrella

Publications and Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to benefit society in the realms of medicine, security, manufacturing, entertainment, marketing, and many others. One of the advances of AI is in the field of Natural Language Processing and Speech Recognition; making computers understand what humans say and mean. On the other hand, the term Augmented Reality (AR) refers to the technologies that superimpose digital content generated by computers over the user’s view of the real world. AR technologies enhance the version of the physical environment with computergenerated sensory input such as sound, video, or graphics overlaid on top of the real-world view. …

Using Augmented Reality To Enhance Learning Experiences About Electrical Circuits, Juan Estrella

Publications and Research

The term Augmented Reality (AR) refers to the technologies that superimpose digital content generated by computers over the user’s view of the real world. AR technologies enhance the version of the physical environment with computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, or graphics overlaid on top of the real-world view. In recent years, AR has moved beyond expensive military applications and has now entered a wide variety of domains. In engineering education, AR technologies can serve as a learning aid as well as a basis for innovation. The technology provides 3-D visualizations that allow to: (i) observe flaws in designs …

Investigating The Effect Of Detecting And Mitigating A Ring Oscillator-Based Hardware Trojan, Lakshmi Ramakrishnan

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The outsourcing of the manufacturing process of integrated circuits to fabrications plants all over the world has exposed these chips to several security threats, especially at the hardware level. There have been instances of malicious circuitry, such as backdoors, being added to circuits without the knowledge of the chip designers or vendors. Such threats could be immensely powerful and dangerous against confidentiality, among other vulnerabilities.

Defense mechanisms against such attacks have been probed and defense techniques have been developed. But with the passage of time, attack techniques have improved immensely as well. From directly observing the inputs or outputs, adversaries …

Cryptki: Mobile Hardware Wallet, Derrick Chan, Rowan Decker, William Nguyen, Yuya Oguchi

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Cryptocurrencies are rapidly receiving mainstream attention and adoption. As a result, new technologies are developing to store and transact cryptocurrencies to keep up with a rapidly developing market. We have developed a way to utilize a mobile phone to communicate with the Ethereum blockchain in order to monitor and initiate cryptocurrency transactions. The project allows users to create new Ethereum addresses and to send arbitrary amounts of Ether to existing Ethereum addresses, while maintaining security for the end user. We conclude that this method of communication with the Ethereum blockchain is viable and is an avenue for exploration in the …

Camera-Based Distance Sensor, Kai Schmidt, Evan Holmes

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

While working on a robotics project at the electrical contracting company for which we work, we discovered a gap in the electronic distance sensor market in terms of range, accuracy, precision, and cost. We designed and constructed a prototype for an electronic distance sensing component which utilizes a camera, laser, and image processor to measure distances. The laser is pointed at a surface and an image of the laser dot is captured. An image processing algorithm determines the pixel position of the dot in the image, and this position is compared to a lookup table of known values to determine …

B.O.G.G.L.E.S.: Boundary Optical Geographic Lidar Environment System, Miguel Chapa, Evan Hoerl, Isaac Jorgensen, Carl Maggio

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pseudo X-ray vision system that pairs a Lidar scanner with a visualization device. The system as a whole is referred to as B.O.G.G.L.E.S. There are several key factors that went into the development of this system and the background information and design approach are thoroughly described. B.O.G.G.L.E.S functionality is depicted through the use of design constraints and the analysis of test results. Additionally, many possible developments for B.O.G.G.L.E.S are proposed in the paper. This indicates that there are various avenues of improvement for this project that could be implemented in the …

Halo - A Personal Iot Air Monitor Powered By Harvested Energy, Benjamin Lampe, Taylor Mau, Samantha Morehead, Naeem Turner-Bandele

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Urban air pollution leads to widespread respiratory illness and millions of deaths annually. PM2.5, particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, is the product of many common combustion reactions and poses a particularly serious health risk. Its small size allows it to penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Existing air quality monitors are aimed at scientific research, di↵erentiating between pollutants and providing high accuracy in measurement. These devices are prohibitively expensive and cannot easily be carried around. Due to the highly localized nature of air pollution, and in order to allow individuals and institutions to …

Rf Roaming System Locator: A Modular Omnidirectional Antenna System, George Stathakis, Josh Sullivan, Christian Ayscue

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Drones are increasingly common in everything from entertainment to delivery services. Currently, GPS and wireless triangulation are the two main methods of tracking drones and collision avoidance. The main problem with these two methods are accuracy and mobility. This thesis goes into building a system that is able to solve the two main drawbacks, by using a completely contained antenna system. The system is robust and can work in a variety of environments and situations. While the thesis focuses on drone tracking, the system is built with modularity in mind and can be adapted to track other RF signals with …

Pressure Ulcer Prevention System, Rey-David Palomares, Ojus Rao

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Pressure ulcers, also known as bedsores, are a widespread but often understated problem. A pressure ulcer is an injury that develops with constant pressure on an area of skin for a long time. They range from bruises to open wounds to even exposed bone. These injuries especially impact bedridden and elderly hospital inpatients, since these people must depend on nursing staff for mobility.

Pressure ulcers can seem to be a solved problem. Solutions that completely eliminate pressure ulcers do exist. These solutions, however, are too expensive for widespread use, at thousands of dollars per bed. Other solutions, such as relying …

The Human Keyboard, Derek Char, Thomas Chung, Alexander Mckee, Allen Pai

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Most products that implement features for user interactions utilize buttons or switches for the user to command to select actions to perform. Such designs are typically controlled with direct motions, such as touch or voice and are seldom designed in consideration of those unable to utilize direct control. In this project, we designed technology that reads naturally occuring biosignals from the body, which then can be apply those signals with any interface. For our specific application in this project, we decided to implement a keyboard. Instead of teaching the fingers how to type on a mechanical keyboard, the body can …

A Survey Of Digital Systems Curriculum And Pedagogy In Electrical And Computer Engineering Programs, Hector A. Ochoa, Mukul V. Shirvaikar

Faculty Publications

Digital Systems is one of the basic foundational courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering. One of the challenges in designing and modifying the curriculum for the course is the fast pace of technology change in the area. TTL chips that were in vogue with students building physical circuits, have given way to new paradigms like FPGA based synthesis with hardware description languages such as VHDL. However, updating a course is not as simple as just changing the book, and changing the syllabus. A large amount of work needs to be done in terms of selecting the book that will accommodate …

Real Time And High Fidelity Quadcopter Tracking System, Tyler Mckay Hall

Computer Engineering

This project was conceived as a desired to have an affordable, flexible and physically compact tracking system for high accuracy spatial and orientation tracking. Specifically, this implementation is focused on providing a low cost motion capture system for future research. It is a tool to enable the further creation of systems that would require the use of accurate placement of landing pads, payload acquires and delivery. This system will provide the quadcopter platform a coordinate system that can be used in addition to GPS.

Field research with quadcopter manufacturers, photographers, agriculture and research organizations were contact and interviewed for information …

Low Cost Sms-Enabled Ekg For Use In Developing Countries, Gabriel Christ, Shachi Kakkar, Michael Mcelroy, Augustus Boling

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

According to official estimates, cardiovascular disease will become the leading cause of death in the developing world by 2020 [1]. This makes regular screening and early detection a priority for these regions. At present, such screening relies on stationary electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, but this technology has several drawbacks. Most machines are costly, stationary, and require a physician onsite to collect and interpret the data; as a result many isolated rural communities lack access to basic heart disease screening. In order to better meet the screening needs of these populations, we propose a twopart solution involving a simplified, inexpensive ECG device …

Rf Location Tracking: A Modular Antenna System Implementation, Alan Tao Feng, Razma Mogharrab, Carlos Rivera

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

From the Amazon Prime Air drone delivery service to the usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in military operations, recent years have seen the development of autonomous flight technologies becoming one of the major research topics in the drone industry. Tracking the geographic position of drones is a crucial part of any autonomous flight, but the common methods of drone location tracking either have too large of an error margin or require extensive environmental setup. The aforementioned issues are major roadblocks in the advancement of autonomous flight operations. The proposed solution is a new and improved method to track the …

Curipilot, Gregory Cusack, Karan Daryanani, Nathaniel Tucker

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

The drone industry has rapidly grown over the last three years and many large companies have determined that the phenomenon is worth investing in. Recently, Intel has shown interest in this growing industry. Intel developed a next generation processor to be used in drones in addition to investing in the Chinese drone hardware company, Yuneec. Contracted by Intel, the CuriPilot team laid the foundation for linking the hardware and software layers of Intel's drone technology by designing the stabilization control system for the next generation of processors and drones. The CuriPilot team built a foundation for future drone development and …

Pcb Prototyping, Kasey Chun, Dylan Hack, Ilja Medan, Michael Rudolf, Ryan Sidley

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

In today’s world, Printed Circuit Boards, also known as PCBs, are part of our daily lives. However, it is currently difficult for students in university classes or hobbyists to quickly produce custom made PCBs since no system exists where every step in the production process is on one platform. There are four main steps that go into manufacturing a PCB once it is fully designed which are: milling, solder dispensing, component placement, and a reflow process. The goal will be to create various toolheads and place them onto a single platform allowing the user to perform the aforementioned production processes. …

Pilot-1: Autonomous Fixed-Wing Aircraft Control System, Chris Millsap, Nathan Garvey, Faisal Hayat

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

In the past decade, the personal ownership of unmanned aerial vehicles has exploded in the US and around the world. The rapidly declining size and cost of integrated circuits, sensors and embedded micro-controllers has lead to a flourishing community of hobbyists designing flight controllers with levels of sophistication approaching those for government and military applications. The typical flight assisted controllers integrate data from the user's control system and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) in order to keep the craft level and on course. Deriving mostly from the radio controlled (RC) hobby industry, the flight control technologies for both rotary and …

Rsl Autonomous Rover, Cris Madrigal, Jiachi Zhang, Nicholas Peacock, Brogan O'Hara

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Autonomous vehicles are useful for a variety of applications such as military, urban, and agricultural environments. This paper discusses adding an autonomous navigation system to an all-terrain vehicle by implementing controllers that interface with its current system, installing sensors on the vehicle for obstacle detection, and developing effective safety mechanisms to prevent injury to others. The result is a vehicle capable of waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance. Testing the vehicle showed that the LIDAR and the autonomous navigation system were integrated seamlessly, and that the sensor output signals were successfully translated into vehicle commands the existing system uses. This system …

Uavino, Matthew Belesiu, Aaron Chung, Kirby Linvill, Nathan Carlson, Phillip Coyle, Megan Peekema

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

UAVino is a drone solution that uses aerial imagery to determine the overall plant health and water content of vineyards. In general, the system focuses on automating crop inspection by taking aerial imagery of a vineyard, conducting post-processing, and outputting an easily interpreted map of the vineyard's overall health. The project's key innovation is an auto-docking system that allows the drone to automatically return to its launch point and recharge in order to extend mission duration. Long term, UAVino is envisioned as a multi-year, interdisciplinary project involving both the Santa Clara University Robotics Systems Laboratory and local wineries in order …

Aquasift: Point-Of-Use Microfluidic Detection System, Daniel Beyers, Jasper Tan, Brandon Young

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

AquaSift is a portable, affordable, point-of-use system that performs microfluidic detection of contaminants in drinking water. It comprises four main components: a three-electrode sensor, a potentiostat circuit device, an Android application, and an online database. It utilizes three-electrode voltammetry by applying a voltage stimulus across the electrodes and reading the induced current on the water sample. Testing has shown that our system is able to detect arsenic in solution samples. The Android application serves as the user interface to the system, and the online database allows the mapping of test results on an easy-to-use website.

Distributed Smart Camera Network For Safety And Security, Nathan Fox, Matthew Kelley, Christopher Rapa, Christopher Yarp

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Current CCTV surveillance solutions are generally retrospective tools. Because real time use of CCTV requires human monitors to view a potentially exorbitant number of video feeds, CCTV is usually only useful after an incident has occurred. However, new technologies are making it possible for machines to perform some tasks that previously required a human monitor. The proposed project seeks to augment existing CCTV systems with behavioral analytics. The system uses a series of cameras, FPGAs, and computers to track object movement throughout a facility. This information is used to build a model of normal movement. Object movements are compared against …

Arsenic Detection Project: Electronics, Anthony Clemetson, John Barth

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

This project is a collaboration with a team of bioengineers to adapt the functionality of laboratory equipment onto a platform which could be used in the field to determine the concentration levels of toxins in ground water. To this end, using a set of printed electrodes, a device was designed and fabricated with the constraints of field use in mind: low power, low cost, with a mobile user interface. An Android phone served as the mobile user interface, and also as the power supply for the circuit and microcontroller that performed the test. This circuit applied a stimulus voltage across …