Engineering Commons^™

The Effect Of Intellidrive On The Efficiency Of Highway Transportation Systems, Mohammad Nekoui, Hossein Pishro-Nik, Daiheng Ni

Hossein Pishro-Nik

Recently, the IntelliDrive initiative has been proposed by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) to enhance on-road safety and efficiency. In this study, we provide a mathematical framework which predicts the effect of such technologies on the efficiency of multilane highway systems prior to their real-life deployment. Our study shall encompass mixed traffic conditions in which a variety of assisted, automated and unequipped vehicles coexist. We show that intervehicular communications improves the flow of vehicles by reducing the perception-reaction (P-R) times of drivers and, in some cases, allowing for more efficient lane-changing operations. As we shall see, unlike the latter, …

High Switching Endurance In TaoX Memristive Devices, Jianhua Yang, M Zhang, John Strachan, Feng Miao, Matthew Pickett, Ronald Kelley

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publication Series

We demonstrate over 1×1010 open-loop switching cycles from a simple memristive device stack of Pt/TaO��/Ta. We compare this system to a similar device stack based on titanium oxides to obtain insight into the solid-state thermodynamic and kinetic factors that influence endurance in metal-oxide memristors.

Hole Mobility In Strained Ge And Iii-V P-Channel Inversion Layers With Self-Consistent Valence Subband Structure And High-K Insulators, Yan Zhang

Open Access Dissertations

We present a comprehensive investigation of the low-¯eld hole mobility in strained Ge and III-V (GaAs, GaSb, InSb and In1¡xGaxAs) p-channel inversion layers with both SiO2 and high-· insulators. The valence (sub)band structure of Ge and III-V channels, relaxed and under strain (tensile and compressive) is calculated using an effcient self-consistent method based on the six-band k ¢ p perturbation theory. The hole mobility is then computed using the Kubo-Greenwood formalism accounting for non-polar hole-phonon scattering (acoustic and optical), surface roughness scatter- ing, polar phonon scattering (III-Vs only), alloy scattering (alloys only) and remote phonon scattering, accounting for multi-subband dielectric …

Spectral-Based Propagation Schemes For Time-Dependent Quantum Systems With Applications To Carbon Nanotubes, Eric Polizzi, Zuojing Chen

Eric Polizzi

Effective modeling and numerical spectral-based propagation schemes are proposed for addressing the challenges in time-dependent quantum simulations of systems ranging from atoms, molecules, and nanostructures to emerging nanoelectronic devices. While time-dependent Hamiltonian problems can be formally solved by propagating the solutions along tiny simulation time steps, a direct numerical treatment is often considered too computationally demanding. In this paper, however, we propose to go beyond these limitations by introducing high-performance numerical propagation schemes to compute the solution of the time-ordered evolution operator. In addition to the direct Hamiltonian diagonalizations that can be efficiently performed using the new eigenvalue solver FEAST, …

Diffusion Of Adhesion Layer Metals Controls Nanoscale Memristive Switching, Jianhua Yang, John Strachan, Qiangfei Xia, Douglas Ohlberg, Philip Kuekes, Ronald Kelley, William Stickle, Duncan Stewart, Gilberto Medeiros-Ribeiro,, R Stanley Williams

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publication Series

Thermal diffusion of Ti through Pt electrode forms Ti atom channels of 1 nm diameter along Pt grain boundaries, seeding switching centers and controlling nanoscale memristive switching. The image shows EFTEM maps of Ti overlaid on HRTEM images for a Si/SiO2 100 nm/Ti 5nm/Pt 15 nm sample in-situ annealed in ultrahigh vacuum at 250 °C for 1 hour.

On Detection, Analysis And Characterization Of Transient And Parametric Failures In Nano-Scale Cmos Vlsi, Alodeep Sanyal

Open Access Dissertations

As we move deep into nanometer regime of CMOS VLSI (45nm node and below), the device noise margin gets sharply eroded because of continuous lowering of device threshold voltage together with ever increasing rate of signal transitions driven by the consistent demand for higher performance. Sharp erosion of device noise margin vastly increases the likelihood of intermittent failures (also known as parametric failures) during device operation as opposed to permanent failures caused by physical defects introduced during manufacturing process. The major sources of intermittent failures are capacitive crosstalk between neighbor interconnects, abnormal drop in power supply voltage (also known as …

Diversifying The Internet, Yong Liao

Open Access Dissertations

Diversity is a widely existing and much desired property in many networking systems. This dissertation studies diversity problems in Internet, which is the largest computer networking system in the world. The motivations of diversifying the Internet are two-fold. First, diversifying the Internet improves the Internet routing robustness and reliability. Most problems we have encountered in our daily use of Internet, such as service interruptions and service quality degradation, are rooted in the inter-domain routing system of Internet. Inter-domain routing is policy-based routing, where policies are often based on commercial agreements between ASes. Although people know how to safely accommodate a …

A Hardware/Software Co-Design Architecture For Thermal, Power, And Reliability Management In Chip Multiprocessors, Omer Khan

Open Access Dissertations

Today’s designs are being shaped by the challenges of nano-CMOS technologies: increased power density, rising junction temperatures, and rising rate of errors and device failures that constrain average rate of power dissipation, and design technologies that limit peak power delivery. This thesis focuses on how to leverage the hardware and software abstraction layers of today’s systems. Several of the low level hardware details such as power, hotspots, and faults are tightly correlated to interactions within the system including application and hardware behavior. The conventional approach to tackling such problems come with additional costs and design complexity, and they are limited …

Protocol And System Design For A Service-Centric Network Architecture, Xin Huang

Open Access Dissertations

Next-generation Internet will be governed by the need for flexibility. Heterogeneous end-systems, novel applications, and security and manageability challenges require networks to provide a broad range of services that go beyond store-and-forward. Following this trend, a service-centric network architecture is proposed for the next-generation Internet. It utilizes router-based programmability to provide packet processing services inside the network and decompose communications into these service blocks. By providing different compositions of services along the data path, such network can customize its connections to satisfy various communication requirements. This design extends the flexibility of the Internet to meet its next-generation challenges. This work …

Floornet: Deployment And Evaluation Of Amultihop Wireless 802.11 Testbed, Pablo Serrano, Carlos J. Bernardos, Antonio De La Oliva, Albert Banchs, Ignacio Soto, Michael Zink

Michael Zink

A lot of attention has been given to multihop wireless networks lately, but further research—in particular, through experimentation—is needed. This attention has motivated an increase in the number of 802.11-based deployments, both indoor and outdoor. These testbeds, which require a significant amount of resources during both deployment and maintenance, are used to run measurements in order to analyze and understand the limitation and differences between analytical or simulation-based figures and the results from real-life experimentation. This paper makes two major contributions: (i) first, we describe a novel wireless multihop testbed, which we name FloorNet, that is deployed and operated under …

Approaches To Multiprocessor Error Recovery Using An On-Chip Interconnect Subsystem, Ramakrishna P. Vadlamani

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

For future multicores, a dedicated interconnect subsystem for on-chip monitors was found to be highly beneficial in terms of scalability, performance and area. In this thesis, such a monitor network (MNoC) is used for multicores to support selective error identification and recovery and maintain target chip reliability in the context of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). A selective shared memory multiprocessor recovery is performed using MNoC in which, when an error is detected, only the group of processors sharing an application with the affected processors are recovered. Although the use of DVFS in contemporary multicores provides significant protection from …

Calibration Of The Umass Advanced Multi-Frequency Radar, Matthew Mclinden

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The Advanced Multi-Frequency Radar is a three-frequency system designed and built by the University of Massachusetts Microwave Remote Sensing Lab (MIRSL). The radar has three frequencies, Ku-band (13.4 GHz), Ka-band (35.6 GHz), and W-band (94.92GHz). The additional information gained from additional frequencies allows the system to be sensitive to a wide range of atmospheric and precipitation particle sizes, while increasing the ability to derive particle microphysics from radar retrievals.

This thesis details the calibration of data from the Canadian CloudSat/CALIPSO Validation Project (C3VP) held during January 2007 in Ontario, Canada. The calibration used internal calibration path data and was confirmed …

Scalable, Memory-Intensive Scientific Computing On Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Salma Mirza

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Cache-based, general purpose CPUs perform at a small fraction of their maximum floating point performance when executing memory-intensive simulations, such as those required for many scientific computing problems. This is due to the memory bottleneck that is encountered with large arrays that must be stored in dynamic RAM. A system of FPGAs, with a large enough memory bandwidth, and clocked at only hundreds of MHz can outperform a CPU clocked at GHz in terms of floating point performance. An FPGA core designed for a target performance that does not unnecessarily exceed the memory imposed bottleneck can then be distributed, along …

Fast Parameter-Space Sweep Of Wideband Electromagnetic Systems Using Bt-Pod, Wei Wang

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Modeling and design of high frequency electronic systems such as antennas and microwave devices require the rigorous numerical solution of Maxwell’s equa- tions. The frequency-domain (time-harmonic) tangential vector finite element method (TVFEM) for Maxwell equations results in a second-order dynamical electromagnetic model that must be repeatedly solved for multiple frequencies, excitation or material parameters each design loop. This leads to extremely long design turnaround that often is not optimal. This work will propose an accurate, error controllable and ef- ficient multi-parametric model order reduction scheme that significantly accelerate these parameters sweep. At the core of this work is the proper …

Optical Lithography Simulation Using Wavelet Transform, Rance Rodrigues

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Optical lithography is an indispensible step in the process flow of Design for Manufacturability (DFM). Optical lithography simulation is a compute intensive task and simulation performance, or lack thereof can be a determining factor in time to market. Thus, the efficiency of lithography simulation is of paramount importance. Coherent decomposition is a popular simulation technique for aerial imaging simulation. In this thesis, we propose an approximate simulation technique based on the 2D wavelet transform and use a number of optimization methods to further improve polygon edge detection. Results show that the proposed method suffers from an average error of less …

Efficient Modeling Techniques For Time-Dependent Quantum System With Applications To Carbon Nanotubes, Zuojing Chen

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The famous Moore's law states: Since the invention of the integrated circuit, the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. As a result of the downscaling of the size of the transistor, quantum effects have become increasingly important while affecting significantly the device performances. Nowadays, at the nanometer scale, inter-atomic interactions and quantum mechanical properties need to be studied extensively. Device and material simulations are important to achieve these goals because they are flexible and less expensive than experiments. They are also important for designing and characterizing new …

Data Fusion For The Problem Of Protein Sidechain Assignment, Yang Lei

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In this thesis, we study the problem of protein side chain assignment (SCA) given

multiple sources of experimental and modeling data. In particular, the mechanism

of X-ray crystallography (X-ray) is re-examined using Fourier analysis, and a novel

probabilistic model of X-ray is proposed for SCA's decision making. The relationship

between the measurements in X-ray and the desired structure is reformulated in terms

of Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The decision making is performed by developing

a new resolution-dependent electron density map (EDM) model and applying

Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation, which simply reduces to the Least Squares

(LS) solution. Calculation of the …

Terahertz And Microwave Detection Using Metallic Single Wall Carbon Nanotubes, Enrique A. Carrion

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are promising nanomaterials for high frequency applications due to their unique physical characteristics. CNTs have a low heat capacity, low intrinsic capacitance, and incredibly fast thermal time constants. They can also exhibit ballistic transport at low bias, for both phonons and electrons, as evident by their fairly long mean free paths. However, despite the great potential they present, the RF behavior of these nanostructures is not completely understood. In order to explore this high frequency regime we studied the microwave (MW) and terahertz (THz) response of individual and bundled single wall nanotube based devices. This thesis is …

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Hossein Pishro-Nik, Shahrokh Valaee, Maziar Nekovee

Hossein Pishro-Nik

No abstract provided.