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Electrical and Computer Engineering

Boise State University

2007

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Improved Covariance Model Parameter Estimation Using Rna Thermodynamic Properties, Jennifer A. Smith, Kay C. Wiese Dec 2007

Improved Covariance Model Parameter Estimation Using Rna Thermodynamic Properties, Jennifer A. Smith, Kay C. Wiese

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Covariance models are a powerful description of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) families that can be used to search nucleotide databases for new members of these ncRNA families. Currently, estimation of the parameters of a covariance model (state transition and emission scores) is based only on the observed frequencies of mutations, insertions, and deletions in known ncRNA sequences. For families with very few known members, this can result in rather uninformative models where the consensus sequence has a good score and most deviations from consensus have a fairly uniform poor score. It is proposed here to combine the traditional observed-frequency information with …

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Human Image Preference And Document Degradation Models, Chris Hale, Elisa H. Barney Smith Sep 2007

Human Image Preference And Document Degradation Models, Chris Hale, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Because most degraded documents are created by people, the preferences individuals have in relation to degraded documents are quite important. Their preferences may determine whether or not the documents they created are appropriate for machines. The goal of this study was to find relationships between preference and several parameters of a scanner degradation model. It was found that the difference in binarization threshold and the difference in edge displacement caused by the degradation both had strong linear relationships to preference. The width of the point spread function did not show such a relationship. These relationships were counterintuitive because degraded characters …

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Wireless Valuables Monitoring Device, With Proximity Sensing And Automatic Arming And Disarming, Hani Mehrpouyan, Christopher Mitchell, Matthew T. Brown Jul 2007

Wireless Valuables Monitoring Device, With Proximity Sensing And Automatic Arming And Disarming, Hani Mehrpouyan, Christopher Mitchell, Matthew T. Brown

Hani Mehrpouyan

The invention relates to apparatus and methods for detecting when an object is disturbed and generating an alarm in response thereto. The invention has general application to protecting valuables. Some embodiments of the invention are applied to protect laptop computers or other portable electronic devices.

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Rna Gene Finding With Biased Mutation Operators, Jennifer A. Smith Apr 2007

Rna Gene Finding With Biased Mutation Operators, Jennifer A. Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The use of genetic algorithms for non-coding RNA gene finding has previously been investigated and found to be a potentially viable method for accelerating covariance-model-based database search relative to full dynamic-programming methods. The mutation operators in previous work chose new alignment insertion and deletion locations uniformly over the length of the model consensus sequence. Since the covariance models are estimated from multiple known members of a non-coding RNA family, information is available as to the likelihood of insertions or deletions at the individual model positions. This information is implicit in the state-transition parameters of the estimated covariance models. In the …

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Investigation Of Single Pmosfet Gate Oxide Degradation On Nor Logic Circuit Operability, David Estrada Apr 2007

Investigation Of Single Pmosfet Gate Oxide Degradation On Nor Logic Circuit Operability, David Estrada

McNair Scholars Research Journal

The impact of gate oxide degradation of a single pMOSFET on the performance of the CMOS NOR logic circuit has been examined using a switch matrix technique. A constant voltage stress of -4.0V was used to induce a low level of degradation to the 2.0nm gate oxide of the pMOSFET. Characteristics of the CMOS NOR logic circuit following gate oxide degradation are analyzed in both the DC and V-t domains. The NOR gate rise time increases by approximately 30%, which may lead to timing or logic errors in high frequency digital circuits. Additionally, the voltage switching point of the NOR …

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Electrical Characterization Of A Second-Gate In A Silicon-On-Insulator Transistor, Antonio Oblea Apr 2007

Electrical Characterization Of A Second-Gate In A Silicon-On-Insulator Transistor, Antonio Oblea

McNair Scholars Research Journal

As an independent double-gate, silicon-on-insulator transistor, the FlexfetTM is suited for a wide range of applications in analog and digital circuitry. This study investigates the ability of the JFET bottom-gate to adjust and control several parameters in the FlexfetTM as well as shield against performance degradation due to substrate biasing. The device parameters under investigation include drive current, leakage current, and threshold voltage. The newly assigned F-factor describes the ability of FlexfetTM’s bottomgate to adjust the threshold voltage. FlexfetTM exhibits nearly a 10x and 3.5x increase in drive current for the nMOS and pMOS devices, …

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Recent Progress In The Development Of Incits W1.1, Appearance-Based Image Quality Standards For Printers, Elisa H. Barney Smith Jan 2007

Recent Progress In The Development Of Incits W1.1, Appearance-Based Image Quality Standards For Printers, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In September 2000, INCITS W1 (the U.S. representative of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC28, the standardization committee for office equipment) was chartered to develop an appearance-based image quality standard.(J),(2) The resulting W1.1 project is based on a proposal(4) that perceived image quality can be described by a small set of broad-based attributes. There are currently five ad hoc teams, each working towards the development of standards for evaluation of perceptual image quality of color printers for one or more of these image quality attributes. This paper summarizes the work in progress.

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Arma Synthesis Of Fading Channels: An Application To The Generation Of Dynamic Mimo Channels, Hani Mehrpouyan, Steven D. Blostein Jan 2007

Arma Synthesis Of Fading Channels: An Application To The Generation Of Dynamic Mimo Channels, Hani Mehrpouyan, Steven D. Blostein

Hani Mehrpouyan

Adaptive transceivers play an important role in wireless communications and the design of MIMO systems. Therefore models that enable simulation of dynamic and time varying channels in a computationally scalable fashion are extremely valuable. Previously, the application of autoregressive moving average (ARMA) modeling to fading processes has been complicated by ill-conditioning and nonlinear parameter estimation. This paper presents a numerically stable and accurate method to synthesize ARMA rational approximations of correlated Rayleigh fading processes from more complex higher order representations. The resulting ARMA synthesis is then used in the generation of dynamic MIMO channel realizations with time varying Doppler at …

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Random Antenna Selection & Antenna Swapping Combined With Ostbcs, Hani Mehrpouyan, Steven D. Blostein, Edmund C.Y. Tam Jan 2007

Random Antenna Selection & Antenna Swapping Combined With Ostbcs, Hani Mehrpouyan, Steven D. Blostein, Edmund C.Y. Tam

Hani Mehrpouyan

This paper proposes a novel and efficient iterative antenna selection algorithm based on an SNR selection criterion for a multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system employing orthogonal space time block codes (OSTBCs), specifically Alamouti codes. The proposed algorithm addresses the open problem of finding a suboptimal set of transmit and receive antennas that performs close to the globally optimum configuration selection solution at significantly reduced complexity. Also, the paper is proposing a method to incrementally update the selected set of antennas, so as to enable even greater complexity reduction, and in particular, for the case of channels with temporal or time correlation. To …

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Conditions For Capacitor Voltage Regulation In A Five-Level Cascade Multilevel Inverter: Application To Voltage-Boost In A Pm Drive, John Chiasson, Burak Ozpineci, Zhong Du, Leon M. Tolbert Jan 2007

Conditions For Capacitor Voltage Regulation In A Five-Level Cascade Multilevel Inverter: Application To Voltage-Boost In A Pm Drive, John Chiasson, Burak Ozpineci, Zhong Du, Leon M. Tolbert

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A cascade multilevel inverter is a power electronic device built to synthesize a desired AC voltage from several levels of DC voltages. Such inverters have been the subject of research in the last several years, where the DC levels were considered to be identical in that all of them were either batteries, solar cells, etc. Similar to previous results in the literature, the work here shows how a cascade multilevel inverter can be used to obtain a voltage boost at higher speeds for a three-phase PM drive using only a single DC voltage source. The input of a standard three-leg …

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A Five-Level Three-Phase Hybrid Cascade Multilevel Inverter Using A Single Dc Source For A Pm Synchronous Motor Drive, John N. Chiasson, Burak Ozpineci, Leon M. Tolbert Jan 2007

A Five-Level Three-Phase Hybrid Cascade Multilevel Inverter Using A Single Dc Source For A Pm Synchronous Motor Drive, John N. Chiasson, Burak Ozpineci, Leon M. Tolbert

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The interest here is in using a single DC power source to construct a 3-phase 5-level cascade multilevel inverter to be used as a drive for a PM traction motor. The 5-level inverter consists of a standard 3-leg inverter (one leg for each phase) and an H-bridge in series with each inverter leg, which use a capacitor as a DC source. It is shown that one can simultaneously maintain the regulation of the capacitor voltage while achieving an output voltage waveform which is 25% higher than that obtained using a standard 3-leg inverter by itself.

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Evolvable Reconfigurable Hardware Framework For Edge Detection, Nader I. Rafla Jan 2007

Evolvable Reconfigurable Hardware Framework For Edge Detection, Nader I. Rafla

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Systems on Reconfigurable Chips contain rich resources of logic, memory, and processor cores on the same fabric. This platform is suitable for implementation of Evolvable Reconfigurable Hardware Architectures (ERHA). It is based on the idea of combining reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) along with genetic algorithms (GA) to perform the reconfiguration operation. This architecture is a suitable candidate for implementation of early-processing stage operators of image processing such as filtering and edge detection. However, there are still fundamental issues need to be solved regarding the on-chip reprogramming of the logic. This paper presents a framework for implementing an evolvable …

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