Computer Engineering Commons^™

On The Deployment Of On-Chip Noise Sensors, Tao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"The relentless technology scaling has led to significantly reduced noise margin and complicated functionalities. As such, design time techniques per se are less likely to ensure power integrity, resulting in runtime voltage emergencies. To alleviate the issue, recently several works have shed light on the possibilities of dynamic noise management systems. Most of these works rely on on-chip noise sensors to accurately capture voltage emergencies. However, they all assume that the placement of the sensors is given. It remains an open problem in the literature how to optimally place a given number of noise sensors for best voltage emergency detection. …

Fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory: Applications And Extensions, Clayton Parker Smith

Masters Theses

"Adaptive Resonance Theory, ART, is a powerful clustering tool for learning arbitrary patterns in a self-organizing manner. In this research, two papers are presented that examine the extensibility and applications of ART. The first paper examines a means to boost ART performance by assigning each cluster a vigilance value, instead of a single value for the whole ART module. A Particle Swarm Optimization technique is used to search for desirable vigilance values. In the second paper, it is shown how ART, and clustering in general, can be a useful tool in preprocessing time series data. Clustering quantization attempts to meaningfully …

Cormem Digital Reasoning Architecture Using Cmos Technology, Indira Priyadarshini Dugganapally

Doctoral Dissertations

”This dissertation describes the application of a multi-level, memory-based approach for building digital circuits. To reflect the alternative approach, the basic science is termed digital reasoning and the specific CorMem technology is based on recent patents. CMOS transistors are used in a non-traditional way for multi-level operations and memory manipulation. The combination of multi-level architectures and matrix algebra principles can create flexible, modular systems using standard fabrication methods and can avoid many of the limitations of other multi-valued logic approaches.

Quaternary, memory-based systems are developed to implement logic-gate-type functions, digital adder circuits, a complete arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), quaternary-to-binary …

Common Path Pessimism Removal In Static Timing Analysis, Chunyu Wang

Masters Theses

"Static timing analysis is a key process to guarantee timing closure for modern IC designs. However, additional pessimism can significantly increase the difficulty to achieve timing closure. Common path pessimism removal (CPPR) is a prevalent step to achieve accurate timing signoff. To speed up the existing exhaustive exploration on all paths in a design, this thesis introduces a fast multi-threading timing analysis for removing common path pessimism based on block-based static timing analysis. Experimental results show that the proposed method has faster runtime in removing excess pessimism from clock paths."--Abstract, page iii.

Pipeline Leak Detection, Marcia Golmohamadi

Masters Theses

"In the present research two techniques are applied for leak detection in pipelines. The first method is a hardware-based technique which uses ultrasonic wave's emission for pipeline inspection. Ultrasonic waves are propagated in the pipe walls and reflected signal from leakage will be used for pipe analysis. Several Pipes with various dimensions and characteristics are modeled by finite element method using ANSYS. Second order longitudinal modes of ultrasonic waves are emitted in their walls. For this purpose, excited frequency is calculated such that it excites the second order longitude mode. In order to investigate the behavior of emitted wave in …

Dependability Analysis And Recovery Support For Smart Grids, Isam Abdulmunem Alobaidi

Masters Theses

"The increasing scale and complexity of power grids exacerbate concerns about failure propagation. A single contingency, such as outage of a transmission line due to overload or weather-related damage, can cause cascading failures that manifest as blackouts. One objective of smart grids is to reduce the likelihood of cascading failure through the use of power electronics devices that can prevent, isolate, and mitigate the effects of faults. Given that these devices are themselves prone to failure, we seek to quantify the effects of their use on dependability attributes of smart grid. This thesis articulates analytical methods for analyzing two dependability …

Computing And The Electrical Transport Properties Of Coupled Quantum Networks, Casey Andrew Cain

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation a number of investigations were conducted on ballistic quantum networks in the mesoscopic range. In this regime, the wave nature of electron transport under the influence of transverse magnetic fields leads to interesting applications for digital logic and computing circuits. The work specifically looks at characterizing a few main areas that would be of interest to experimentalists who are working in nanostructure devices, and is organized as a series of papers. The first paper analyzes scaling relations and normal mode charge distributions for such circuits in both isolated and open (terminals attached) form. The second paper compares …

Reliability And Security In Low Power Circuits And Systems, Hui Geng

Doctoral Dissertations

"With the massive deployment of mobile devices in sensitive areas such as healthcare and defense, hardware reliability and security have become hot research topics in recent years. These topics, although different in definition, are usually correlated. This dissertation offers an in-depth treatment on enhancing the reliability and security of low power circuits and systems. The first part of the dissertation deals with the reliability of sub-threshold designs, which use supply voltage lower than the threshold voltage (V_th) of transistors to reduce power. The exponential relationship between delay and V_th significantly jeopardizes their reliability due to process variation …

A Novel Entropy Production Based Full-Chip Tsv Fatigue Analysis, Tianchen Wang

Masters Theses

"Through-silicon vias (TSVs) are subject to thermal fatigue due to stress over time, no matter how small the stress is. Existing works on TSV fatigue all rely on measurement-based parameters to estimate the lifetime, and cannot consider detailed thermal profiles. In this paper, we propose a new method for TSV fatigue prediction using entropy production during thermal cycles. By combining thermodynamics and mechanics laws, the fatigue process can be quantitatively evaluated with detailed thermal profiles. Experimental results show that interestingly, the landing pad possesses the most easy-to-fail region, which generates up to 50% more entropy compared with the TSV body. …

Chemical Quantification With Ubiquitous Optoelectronic Devices, Altamash Mukhtar Fakki

Masters Theses

"Optical sensing in medical diagnosis and chemical analysis using optoelectronic devices is a growing technology since it offers many advantages including real time analysis, remote sensing capability and low cost approach. This thesis demonstrates that an optical sensing platform utilizing optical mouse, the ubiquitous optoelectronic computer peripheral, can be used in quantitative oxygen and pH analysis.

Work in the first paper includes the use of optical mice for fluorescence intensity imaging of commercial oxygen patch. This involves gray color intensity analysis of filtered images to determine the gaseous oxygen level.

In the second paper, the optical mice is used to …

A Sentence-Based Image Search Engine, Weizhi Meng

Masters Theses

"Nowadays people are more interested in searching the relevant images directly through search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing, these image search engines have dedicated extensive research effort to the problem of keyword-based image retrieval. However, the most widely used keyword-based image search engine Google is reported to have a precision of only 39%. And all of these systems have limitation in creating sentence-based queries for images.

This thesis studies a practical image search scenario, where many people feel annoyed by using only keywords to find images for their ideas of speech or presentation through trial and error. This thesis …

Computer Aided Detection Of Oral Lesions On Ct Images, Shaikat Mahmood Galib

Masters Theses

"Oral lesions are important findings on computed tomography images. They are difficult to detect on CT images because of low contrast, arbitrary orientation of objects, complicated topology and lack of clear lines indicating lesions. In this thesis, a fully automatic method to detect oral lesions from dental CT images is proposed to identify (1) Closed boundary lesions and (2) Bone deformation lesions. Two algorithms were developed to recognize these two types of lesions, which cover most of the lesion types that can be found on CT images. The results were validated using a dataset of 52 patients. Using non training …