Signal Processing Commons^™

Design And Fabrication Of A Low Power 7.2 Terabit Transmitter For Exascale Computing, Scott Mcwilliams, Scott Mcwilliams

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Enhanced Coupled Strength (ECS) gratings fabricated into III-V based devices offer high reflected power per unit length and broad band reflectivity as compared to conventional 1st order gratings, desired qualities for short-haul high speed transmitters that can be implemented without the need for chip-level temperature control, contributing to the low power per transmitted bit. For commercial DBR lasers, the grating reflectivity results in an extremely narrow reflectivity spectrum, which is highly desired for most/many applications, but requires a power hungry thermo-electric cooler to maintain a fixed frequency. The proposed LEAM (laser electro-absorption modulator) requires a broad reflectivity spectrum, which, by …

The Development Of A Motion Sensing Device For Use In A Home Setting, Jaspreet K. Kalsi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, with over 10 million individuals diagnosed with PD world-wide. The most common symptom characterized by PD is tremor. Tremor is an involuntary oscillatory motion that most prominently occurs in upper limb, specifically in the hand and wrist that has a measurable frequency and amplitude. This thesis aims to evaluate the usability and functionality of a tremor sensing device designed to collect quantitative data on individuals with PD. The designed device uses 23 commercially-available inertial measuring units (IMUs) located between 21 joints: distal interphalangeal (DIP) joints, proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints, Interphalangeal …

Design & Analysis Of Mixed-Mode Integrated Circuit For Pulse-Shape Discrimination, Bryan Orabutt

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In nuclear science experiments it is usually necessary to determine the type of radiation, its energy and direction with considerable accuracy. The detection of neutrons and discriminating them from gamma rays is particularly difficult. A popular method of doing so is to measure characteristics intrinsic to the pulse shape of each radiation type in order to perform pulse-shape discrimination (PSD).

Historically, PSD capable systems have been designed with two approaches in mind: specialized analog circuitry, or digital signal processing (DSP). In this work we propose a PSD capable circuit topology using techniques from both the analog and DSP domains. We …

Direct Torque Control For Silicon Carbide Motor Drives, Mohammad Hazzaz Mahmud

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Direct torque control (DTC) is an extensively used control method for motor drives due to its unique advantages, e.g., the fast dynamic response and the robustness against motor parameters variations, uncertainties, and external disturbances. Using higher switching frequency is generally required by DTC to reduce the torque ripples and decrease stator current total harmonic distortion (THD), which however can lower the drive efficiency. Through the use of the emerging silicon carbide (SiC) devices, which have lower switching losses compared to their silicon counterparts, it is feasible to achieve high efficiency and low torque ripple simultaneously for DTC drives.

To overcome …

Optoelectronic Valley-Spin Qubits With Ambipolar Quantum Dots, Jeremy Tull

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The current limitations of qubit-based processors are caused by imperfections in quantum gates, leading to a lack of gate fidelity. Gate fidelity can be refined by extending the coherence of qubits and reducing logic operation speed. A potential solution is to develop a hybrid qubit that has the coherence of electrically-controlled quantum dots and the gate speed of their optically-controlled counterparts. Quantum bits that utilize ultrafast optical gating to perform gate operations require precise control of the gating pulse duration. Optical dispersion can cause adverse effects pulse duration, such as pulse broadening, so dispersion-compensation techniques must be employed; by properly …

An Exploratory Study Of Pulse Width And Delta Sigma Modulators, Logan B. Penrod

Master's Theses

This paper explores the noise shaping and noise producing qualities of Delta-Sigma Modulators (DSM) and Pulse-Width Modulators (PWM). DSM has long been dominant in the Delta Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converter (DSADC) as a noise-shaped quantizer and time discretizer, while PWM, with a similar self oscillating structure, has seen use in Class D Power Amplifiers, performing a similar function. It has been shown that the PWM in Class D Amplifiers outperforms the DSM [1], but could this advantage be used in DSADC use-cases? LTSpice simulation and printed circuit board implementation and test are used to present data on four variations of these …

A Silicon Germanium Cmos Linear Voltage Regulator For Wireless Agricultural Applications, Aminta Naidili Castillo Robles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the design, simulation and test results of a silicon germanium (SiGe) complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) linear regulator. The objective of the circuit is to power other analog devices regardless of the load current and input voltage changes. The application of this regulator is to be part of a project developing a miniaturized semiconductor platform that can be inserted into stems of crops in order to measure data inside the plant and then send it wirelessly to the user. The linear regulator was designed on a BiCMOS SiGe 0.13µm which is a GlobalFoundries process. It has been tested at …

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 …

Analog Signal Processing Solutions And Design Of Memristor-Cmos Analog Co-Processor For Acceleration Of High-Performance Computing Applications, Nihar Athreyas

Doctoral Dissertations

Emerging applications in the field of machine vision, deep learning and scientific simulation require high computational speed and are run on platforms that are size, weight and power constrained. With the transistor scaling coming to an end, existing digital hardware architectures will not be able to meet these ever-increasing demands. Analog computation with its rich set of primitives and inherent parallel architecture can be faster, more efficient and compact for some of these applications. The major contribution of this work is to show that analog processing can be a viable solution to this problem. This is demonstrated in the three …

Analog Computing Using 1t1r Crossbar Arrays, Yunning Li

Masters Theses

Memristor is a novel passive electronic device and a promising candidate for new generation non-volatile memory and analog computing. Analog computing based on memristors has been explored in this study. Due to the lack of commercial electrical testing instruments for those emerging devices and crossbar arrays, we have designed and built testing circuits to implement analog and parallel computing operations. With the setup developed in this study, we have successfully demonstrated image processing functions utilizing large memristor crossbar arrays. We further designed and experimentally demonstrated the first memristor based field programmable analog array (FPAA), which was successfully configured for audio …

An Exact Analysis For Four-Order Acousto-Optic Bragg Diffraction Which Incorporates Both Incident Light Angle And Sound Frequency Dependencies, Adeyinka Sunday Ademola

Electrical Engineering Theses

This thesis extends the prior work which produced an exact solution to the four-order acousto-optic (AO) Bragg cell with assumed fixed center frequency and with exact Bragg angle incident light. The extension predicts the model that incorporates the dependencies of both the input angle of light and the sound frequency. Specifically, a generalized 4^th order linear differential equation (DE), is developed from a simultaneous analysis of four coupled AO system of DEs. Through standard methods, the characteristic roots, which requires solving a quartic equation, is produced. Subsequently, a derived system of homogeneous solutions, which absorbs the roots obtained using …

System-Layout-Dependent Thermally Induced Solder Stress & Reliability Implications, Ange C. Iradukunda

Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Electronic flip chip assemblies consist of dissimilar component materials, which exhibit different CTE. Under thermal cyclic operating conditions, this CTE mismatch produces interfacial and interconnect stresses, which are highly dependent on system layout. In this paper, sensitivity analyses are performed using ANSYS FEA to establish how the proximity and arrangement of neighboring devices affect interconnect stress. Flip chip alignment modes ranging from edge-to-edge to corner-to-corner are studied. Results of these FEA studies, demonstrated that closely packing devices together has the effect of making them act as one. This results in a significant increase in the thermomechanical stresses induced on peripheral …

Chipper: Capacitive Bed Occupancy Sensing For An Intelligent Alarm Clock, David Levi

Electrical Engineering

What if your alarm clock knew when you got out—and stayed out—of bed? Current alarm clocks happily let you go back to bed after turning them off. In this project, I build an alarm which only stops ringing when you get out bed, and starts ringing again if you lie back in bed.

This project uses capacitance to detect bed occupancy. A person on or near the bed creates a tiny, picofarads level increase in capacitance, as seen by a sensor placed under the mattress. A microprocessor interprets this signal, and also drives an audio alarm. Shielding of the sensor …

Low Voltage Cmos Sar Adc Design, Ryan Hunt

Electrical Engineering

This project centers on the design of a single ended 10-bit successive approximation register analog to digital converter (SAR ADC for short) that easily interfaces to a micro-controller, such as an Arduino. With micro-controller interfacing in mind, the universal data transfer technique of SPI proved an easy way to communicate between the ADC and the micro-controller. The ADC has a range of 1V (highest code value) to 0V (lowest code value) and operates from a single voltage rail value of 1.8V. Typical SPI clock speeds run on the order of 2MHz and with a 10-bit ADC this means a sampling …

Max Operation In Statistical Static Timing Analysis On The Non-Gaussian Variation Sources For Vlsi Circuits, Abu M. Baker

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As CMOS technology continues to scale down, process variation introduces significant uncertainty in power and performance to VLSI circuits and significantly affects their reliability. If this uncertainty is not properly handled, it may become the bottleneck of CMOS technology improvement. As a result, deterministic analysis is no longer conservative and may result in either overestimation or underestimation of the circuit delay. As we know that Static-Timing Analysis (STA) is a deterministic way of computing the delay imposed by the circuits design and layout. It is based on a predetermined set of possible events of process variations, also called corners of …

Automated Channel Assessment For Single Chip Medradio Transceivers, Mark Alexander Hillig

Dissertations and Theses

Modern implantable and body worn medical devices leverage wireless telemetry to improve patient experience and expand therapeutic options. Wireless medical devices are subject to a unique set of regulations in which monitoring of the available frequency spectrum is a requirement. To this end, implants use software protocols to assess the in-band activity to determine which channel should be used. These software protocols take valuable processing time and possibly degrade the operational lifetime of the battery. Implantable medical devices often take advantage of a single chip transceiver as the physical layer for wireless communications. Embedding the channel assessment task in the …

Multi-Mode Self-Referencing Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors, Jing Guo

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Surface-plasmon-resonance (SPR) sensors are widely used in biological, chemical, medical, and environmental sensing. This dissertation describes the design and development of dual-mode, self-referencing SPR sensors supporting two surface-plasmon modes (long- and short-range) which can differentiate surface binding interactions from bulk index changes at a single sensing location. Dual-mode SPR sensors have been optimized for surface limit of detection (LOD). In a wavelength interrogated optical setup, both surface plasmons are simultaneously excited at the same location and incident angle but at different wavelengths. To improve the sensor performance, a new approach to dual-mode SPR sensing is presented that offers improved differentiation …

Characterization And Implementation Of An Injection Locked Frequency Divider Based On Relaxation Oscillator, Kai Zhu

Doctoral Dissertations

There has been a dramatic increase in wireless awareness among the user community in the past few years. As the wireless communication devices require more integration in terms of both hardware and software, the low-power integrated circuit (IC) solution has gained higher dedication and will dominate in the future radio-frequency IC (RFIC) design. Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process is extremely attractive for such applications because of its low cost and the possibility to integrate baseband and high frequency circuits on the same chip. The transceiver is often the most power-hungry block in a wireless communication system. The frequency divider (prescaler) …

Project 308: Augmented Reality Mario Kart, Joseph Abad, David Allender, Joryl Calizo, Ryan Gaspar, Gavin Lee

Computer Engineering

Mario Kart is a popular go-kart racing game developed by Nintendo. The premise of the game is simple: drive a go-kart along a racetrack and reach the finish line before the other players. What makes this game unique, however, is the inclusion of weapons, traps, and other projectiles that a player can use to gain an advantage in the race. We have taken on the challenge of not only recreating this amazing game, but using the art of Augmented Reality to fully immerse the player in the full experience. Rather than play the game on a television screen with a …

Laser Cursor, Michael Liman

Electrical Engineering

A user controls a cursor on a computer screen using a laser pointer. A camera picks up the laser pointer’s position and sends the data to the computer to move the cursor in the correct position.

Application Of Signal Advance Technology To Electrophysiology, Chris M. Hymel

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Medical instrumentation used in diagnosis and treatment relies on the accurate detection and processing of various physiological events and signals. While signal detection technology has improved greatly in recent years, there remain inherent delays in signal detection/ processing. These delays may have significant negative clinical consequences during various pathophysiological events. Reducing or eliminating such delays would increase the ability to provide successful early intervention in certain disorders thereby increasing the efficacy of treatment.

In recent years, a physical phenomenon referred to as Negative Group Delay (NGD), demonstrated in simple electronic circuits, has been shown to temporally advance the detection of …

The Smart Helmet, Michael Walsh

Theses

This thesis addresses the design, development and testing of a wireless sensor network for a sports helmet. The objective is to monitor an athlete's physiology and also physical impacts using a sensor network. A detailed literature review is presented addressing currently available appropriate wireless technologies, sensors and their operation, packaging, interconnections and applications. It gives a brief introduction to each sensor used in the smart helmet, accelerometers, temperature sensors, heart rate and blood oxygen sensors, along with a review of possible sensors which could be added at a later stage. The specific sensors and other related components for the helmets …