Electronic Devices and Semiconductor Manufacturing Commons^™

Theoretical Analysis Of Laterally Vibrating Hammerhead Microcantilever Sensors In A Viscous Liquid, Jinjin Zhang

Dissertations (1934 -)

Dynamically driven prismatic microcantilevers excited in the in-plane flexural mode have been investigated and used in liquid-phase sensing applications. However, the performance is restricted due to their limited surface sensing area and higher stiffness in shorter and wider prismatic microcantilevers. To increase the surface sensing area, and further improve sensing characteristics, it has been proposed to investigate symmetric hammerhead microcantilevers vibrating laterally in viscous liquid media. In this work, a theoretical model is proposed and the characteristics of the microcantilevers with symmetric shaped hammerheads (isosceles trapezoid, semi-circle, uniform rectangle and composite rectangle) are investigated. In the analysis, the stem of …

Understanding Vehicular Traffic Behavior From Video: A Survey Of Unsupervised Approaches, Brendan Tran Morris, Mohan Manubhai Trivedi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Recent emerging trends for automatic behavior analysis and understanding from infrastructure video are reviewed. Research has shifted from high-resolution estimation of vehicle state and instead, pushed machine learning approaches to extract meaningful patterns in aggregates in an unsupervised fashion. These patterns represent priors on observable motion, which can be utilized to describe a scene, answer behavior questions such as where is a vehicle going, how many vehicles are performing the same action, and to detect an abnormal event. The review focuses on two main methods for scene description, trajectory clustering and topic modeling. Example applications that utilize the behavioral modeling …

Metal-Assisted Etching Of Silicon Molds For Electroforming, Ralu Divan, Dan Rosenthal '14, Karim Ogando, Leonidas E. Ocola, Daniel Rosenmann, Nicolaie Moldovan

Student Publications & Research

Ordered arrays of high-aspect-ratio micro/nanostructures in semiconductors stirred a huge scientific interest due to their unique one-dimensional physical morphology and the associated electrical, mechanical, chemical, optoelectronic, and thermal properties. Metal-assisted chemical etching enables fabrication of such high aspect ratio Si nanostructures with controlled diameter, shape, length, and packing density, but suffers from structure deformation and shape inconsistency due to uncontrolled migration of noble metal structures during etching. Hereby the authors prove that a Ti adhesion layer helps in stabilizing gold structures, preventing their migration on the wafer surface while not impeding the etching. Based on this finding, the authors demonstrate …

Comprehensive Mapping And Benchmarking Of Esaki Diode Performance, David John Pawlik

Theses

The tunneling-FET (TFET) has been identified as a prospective MOSFET replacement technology with the potential to extend geometric and electrostatic scaling of digital integrated circuits. However, experimental demonstrations of the TFET have yet to reliably achieve drive currents necessary to power large scale integrated circuits. Consequentially, much effort has gone into optimizing the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) efficiency of the TFET. In this work, the Esaki tunnel diode (ETD) is used as a short loop element to map and optimize BTBT performance for a large design space. The experimental results and tools developed for this work may be used to (1) …

Low Volume Dispensing With High Speed Dispensers, Sunny Agarwal

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

With the high pace of innovation in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, there has been an increasing demand for more energy efficient and environmental friendly products. This research relates to a complex process of fluid dispensing at low volumes on a printed circuit board. Currently, a more refined non-contact dispensing terminology named “Streaming” is widely used to stream out material at low volumes for various applications. The key solution is to frame a dispensing method that lends itself most closely to the requirements of a specific production process.

This study represents a detailed approach of dispensing low volumes of materials in …

Design And Fabrication Of Inverter And Rectifier Modules For Indirect Matrix Converter Applications, Saikishore Talakokkula

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In power converter applications, silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductor devices are preferred over their silicon counterparts due to many advantages such as wide bandgap, high junction temperatures and low on-state resistance. The SiC devices provide reduced conduction and switching losses. Due to the above mentioned advantages the power conversion efficiency of SiC devices is better compared to that of silicon (Si) devices.

This thesis studies the implementation of 1200V/17A Normally-off SiC JFETs for an indirect matrix converter (IMC) application. A discussion on the parasitic inductance optimization is presented based on the electromagnetic simulation results extracted from the Ansoft Q3D extractor. …

High Voltage Direct Current Energy Transmission Using Modular Multilevel Converters, David Alejandro Guzman Pinzon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focus on high voltage direct current (HVdc) energy transmission using modular multilevel converter (MMC) based terminals. It provides a brief comparison between different HVdc technologies, focusing on voltage source converters (HVdc-VSC) with the MMC-based terminal emerging as the topology of choice for ratings less than 1 GW. The controllers for a two-terminal HVdc-link are analyzed and Matlab/Simulink^TM simulation models are presented. The simplified models and full Matlab/Simulink^TM based model are used to select the gains for the MMC controllers. Simulation results carried out on the full model validated the proposed methodologies. A new control technique that …

Electrical Design Considerations And Packaging Of Power Electronic Modules, Shijie Wang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A modern power electronic module can save significant energy usage in the power electronic systems by improving their switching efficiencies. One way to improve the efficiency of the power electronic module is to reduce its parasitic circuit elements. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the mitigation of parasitic circuit elements in power electronic modules. General methods of mitigating parasitic inductances were analyzed by the Q3D Extractor and verified by the time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements. In most cases, the TDR measurement results closely matched those predicted by the Q3D Extractor. These methods were applied to design and analyze a …

2-Dimensional Personal Motion Energy Harvester For Low Power Electronics, Manuel Gutierrez, Sean Scott, Dimitrios Peroulis

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

In a lab, it becomes crucial to have a way to monitor that lab workers aren’t exposed to too much radiation. Such a device that detects this should have an energy harvester so that batteries aren’t required. The need for an energy harvester that generates power from a user’s movements in 2 dimensions is needed. This energy harvester is needed to power a radiation monitor. An energy harvester that generates power based off movements in 2 dimensions was developed. The energy harvester was created through a series of prototypes. Each prototype was built from a CAD drawing and a stereolithography …

Ferroelectric Batio3/Srtio3 Multilayered Thin Films For Room-Temperature Tunable Microwave Elements, Ming Liu, Chunrui Ma, Gregory Collins, Jian Liu, Chonglin Chen, Andy D. Alemayehu, Guru Subramanyam, Ying Ding, Jianghua Chen, Chao Dai, Yuan Lin, Melanie W. Cole

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Ferroelectric BaTiO3/SrTiO3 with optimized c-axis-oriented multilayered thin films were epitaxially fabricated on (001) MgO substrates. The microstructural studies indicate that the in-plane interface relationships between the films as well as the substrate are determined to be (001)SrTiO3//(001)BaTiO3//(001)MgO and [100]SrTiO3//[100]BaTiO3//[100]MgO. The microwave (5 to 18 GHz) dielectric measurements reveal that the multilayered thin films have excellent dielectric properties with large dielectric constant, low dielectric loss, and high dielectric tunability, which suggests that the as-grown ferroelectric multilayered thin films can be developed for room-temperature tunable microwave elements and related device applications.

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 …

Anatomical Loading On A Uwb Antenna For Shoe Toe Box, Domenico Gaetano, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann, C Brannigan, Louise Keating, Frances Horgan

Conference Papers

A UWB 6.0-8.5 GHz monopole antenna for mounting on the toe­box area of footwear is designed using a detailed model of a running shoe and a foot-shaped phantom. Variation of anatomical features between individual people gives rise to different proximity and permittivity loads on the antenna. To take account of environment, the antenna design optimization considers different proximity distances for impact on the reflection coefficient and on the radiation efficiency.

Lunalight - Bringing Light To The Expanding World, Gabriela M. Igel, Daniel J. Patrick, Kimberley M. Smith

Materials Engineering

The LunaLight, a solar rechargeable light and cell phone charger, addresses the lack of access to electricity faced by 1.4 billion of the world’s population (International Finance Corporation). The LunaTech team has developed a product that is bright, simple, compact, versatile and competitive with existing products. Through a partnership with the non-profit organization One Million Lights, LunaTech has improved a previous team’s design to address user feedback, concerns of durability, and manufacturability.

The LunaLight design includes a 5 component plastic housing held together by 4 screws, a surface mounted PCB, a lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery, one high-brightness LED, a solar panel, …

Fpga Hardware Accelerators - Case Study On Design Methodologies And Trade-Offs, Matthew V. Ryan

Theses

Previous research has shown that the performance of any computation is directly related to the architecture on which it is performed. As a result, the performance of compute intensive applications can be improved using heterogeneous systems. These systems consist of various processor architectures such as CPU, FPGA, DSP, and GPU. Individual computations can be performed in parallel on different processor architecrues within the heterogeneous system. Computations are performed by utilizing existing designs from implementation libraries. There is a lack of FPGA accelerators for use in these libraries and as such additional implementations need to be designed.

Different design methodologies for …

Characterization And Modeling Of An O-Band 1310 Nm Sampled-Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (Sg-Dbr) Laser For Optical Coherence Tomography (Oct) Applications, Desmond Charles Talkington

Master's Theses

In this project, the performance aspects of a new early generation 1310 nm Sampled-Grating Distributed Bragg Reflector (SG-DBR) semiconductor laser are investigated. SG-DBR lasers are ideal for Source Swept Optical Coherence Tomography (SS-OCT), a Fourier-Domain based approach for OCT, necessitating a tunable wavelength source. Three internal sections control the frequency output for tuning, along with two amplifiers for amplitude control. These O-band SG-DBR devices are now being produced in research quantities. SG-DBR lasers have been produced at 1550 and 1600 nm for some times. Fundamental questions regarding the performance of the 1310 nm devices must be quantified. Standard metrics including …

Spice Netlist Generation For Electrical Parasitic Modeling Of Multi-Chip Power Module Designs, Peter Tucker

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Multi-Chip Power Module (MCPM) designs are widely used in the area of power electronics to control multiple power semiconductor devices in a single package. The work described in this thesis is part of a larger ongoing project aimed at designing and implementing a computer aided drafting tool to assist in analysis and optimization of MCPM designs. This thesis work adds to the software tool the ability to export an electrical parasitic model of a power module layout into a SPICE format that can be run through an external SPICE circuit simulator. The code was implemented in python using NetworkX graphs …

Iii-V Bismide Optoelectronic Devices, Dongsheng Fan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores modeling, molecular beam epitaxy growth, and fabrication of III-V bismide optoelectronic devices, which are of great importance in modern applications of telecommunication, gas sensing, environment monitoring, etc. In the current room-temperature continuous-wave operational GaSb-based type-I InGaAsSb/AlGaInAsSb quantum well laser diodes in 3-4 um mid-wavelength range, the lasing wavelength and performance of the devices are limited due to the lack of hole confinement in the active regions. In this dissertation, a novel GaSb-based GaInAsSbBi material is proposed to replace the conventional InGaAsSb material in the quantum well region, which enables the laser diodes achieve up to 4 µm …

Device Characterization And Compact Modeling Of The Sige Hbt In Extreme Temperature Environments, Beth Olivia Woods

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The silicon germanium heterojunction bipolar transistor, SiGe HBT, has very high frequency response but limited voltage range. Commercial communication applications in wireless and system integration have driven the development of the SiGe HBT. However, the device's excellent electrical performance goes beyond the commercial environment. The SiGe HBT performs exceptionally at low temperatures. The device DC current gain and AC small-signal gain significantly increase in the cryogenic temperature range. Applications at low temperatures with expansive temperature range specifications need an HBT compact model to accurately represent the device's performance.

In this work, a compact model referenced at 300K was developed to …

Novel Test Fixture For Characterizing Microcontacts: Performance And Reliability, Benjamin F. Toler

Theses and Dissertations

Engineers have attempted to improve reliability and lifecycle performance using novel micro-contact metals, unique mechanical designs and packaging. Contact resistance can evolve over the lifetime of the micro-switch by increasing until failure. This work shows the fabrication of micro-contact support structures and test fixture which allow for micro-contact testing, with an emphasis on the fixture's design to allow the determination and analysis of the appropriate failure mode. The other effort of this investigation is the development of a micro-contact test fixture which can measure contact force and resistance directly and perform initial micro-contact characterization, and two forms of lifecycle testing …

Digitally Programmable Rf Mems Filters With Mechanically Coupled Resonators, Hengky Chandrahalim, Sunil Ashok Bhave

AFIT Patents

A digitally-tunable RF MEMS filter includes a substrate and a plurality of mechanically coupled resonators, wherein a first and a last resonator of the plurality of mechanically coupled resonators are configured to be electrostatically transduced. One or more of the plurality of mechanically coupled resonators are configured to be biased relative to the substrate such that the one or more biased resonators may be brought substantially in contact with the substrate. In a method of digitally tuning an RF MEMS filter having a mechanically coupled resonator array, a DC bias voltage is applied to at least a first resonator and …