Engineering Commons^™

A Highly Sensitive, Polarization Maintaining Photonic Crystal Fiber Sensor Operating In The Thz Regime, Sohel Rana, Nirmala Kandadai, Harish Subbaraman

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, a high sensitivity, polarization preserving photonic crystal fiber (PCF), based on circular air holes for sensing in the terahertz (THz) band, is presented. The finite element method, a practical and precise computational technique for describing the interactions between light and matter, is used to compute the modal properties of the designed fiber. For the designed PCF, comprising of circular air holes in both the cladding and in the porous core, a relative sensitivity of 73.5% and a high birefringence of 0.013 are achieved at 1.6 THz. The all circular air-hole structure, owing to its simplicity and compatibility …

Modeling Harmonic Impacts Of Electric Vehicle Chargers On Distribution Networks, Nicole Woodman, Robert B. Bass, Mike Donnelly

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

As the proliferation of electric vehicles continues to grow, it is becoming important to understand the impacts that electric vehicle charging will have on distribution assets. EV chargers are non-linear, multi-state loads. This manuscript presents a design method for the modeling of EV charging units using a VHDL-AMS simulation environment, per IEEE Standard 1076.1. Voltage and current data collected from in-service EV charging stations were used to create harmonic profiles of the EV charging units. From these profiles, generalized models for both Level 2 and Level 3 EV chargers were created. These models were validated within a larger system context …

Ion-Sensitive Field-Effect Transistors With Micropillared Gates For Measuring Cell Ion Exchange At Molecular Levels, Mohammad G. Abdallah, Rayan Khan, Christian Garcia, Young-Tae Kim, Samir M. Iqbal

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The detection of small concentrations of cancer cells before cancer takes over the primary organ completely, or metastasizes to other areas of the body is important for early screening of cancer. One approach to address cancer early screening is through cell ion exchange bioelectricity, which characterizes voltage potential in non-neuronal cells to regulate shape changing, proliferation, differentiation, migration, and cancer formation. Herein, novel ion-sensitive field-effective transistor (ISFET) modality is shown to measure cell behavior during the change of cell properties at molecular levels. ISFETs produce low resistance signals and consume low power. The small size of ISFETs enables miniature diagnosis …

Thermal Management In 3d Ic Designs For Nano-Cmos Technologies: Analysis On Graphene- Vs. Graphite-Based Tim, Satya K. Vendra, Malgorzata Chrzanowska-Jeske

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

With a high thermal conductivity of 3000-5000 W/m-K, Graphene outstands almost all materials in effective lateral heat spreading. Will introduction of 2D monolayer graphene in 3D-IC help in vertical heat conduction too? In this work, we investigate the impact of Graphene- and Graphite- -based inter-die thermal interface material (TIM) on the peak temperature of the 3D-IC. We compare configurations of additional intermediate layer (IL) of monolayer graphene, graphite and copper materials along with TIM. Simulations show a peak temperature reduction of up to 500C in GSRC benchmarks. Role of thermal conductivity and the additional IL critical thickness in peak temperature …

Interference Mitigating Satellite Broadcast Receiver Using Reduced Complexity List-Based Detection In Correlated Noise, Zohair Abu-Shaban, Hani Mehrpouyan, Bhavani Shankar M.R., Björn Ottersten

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The recent commercial trends towards using smaller dish antennas for satellite receivers, and the growing density of broadcasting satellites, necessitate the application of robust adjacent satellite interference (ASI) cancellation schemes. This orbital density growth along with the wider beamwidth of a smaller dish have imposed an overloaded scenario at the satellite receiver, where the number of transmitting satellites exceeds the number of receiving elements at the dish antenna. To ensure successful operation in this practical scenario, we propose a satellite receiver that enhances signal detection from the desired satellite by mitigating the interference from neighboring satellites. Towards this objective, we …

Introducing The Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset And An Efficient Offline Recognizer Of Isolated Bangla Characters, Nishatul Majid, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This introduces the Boise State Bangla Handwriting Dataset, a publicly accessible offline handwriting dataset of Bangla script. This can be found at https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/saipl/1/

A basic character recognition method is presented where the features are extracted based on zonal pixel counts, structural strokes and grid points with U-SURF descriptors modeled with bag of features.

Benchmarking with this approach on 3 other publicly available Bangla datasets is reported. The highest classification accuracy obtained with an SVM classifier based on a cubic kernel is 96.8%.

Power System Spoof Detection With A Hybrid Hardware/Software Benchmarking Framework, Keaton Dieter, Ben Mccamish, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, Robert B. Bass, Scott Wallace, Xinghui Zhao

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The integration of monitoring and control networks at different voltage levels and across utility boundaries has made it harder to maintain and assess the resilience of power systems due to increasing cyber attacks. On the software side, a variety of research efforts pursue cyber protection algorithms, such as spoof detection techniques. On the hardware and firmware side, research has demonstrated the feasibility of adversarial attacks by providing an entry point at the device level. This work proposes and evaluates two detection performance metrics for a variety of cyber spoofing attacks introduced in a realistic Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) network for …

Event Detection Using Correlation Within Arrays Of Streaming Pmu Data, Rich Meier, Ben Mccamish, Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, Jordan Landford, Robert B. Bass, David Chiu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Phasor measurement units provide real-time power system monitoring. We present a data analysis method that leverages statistical correlation and analysis methods to identify power system events. This research uses archived phasor measurement unit data to show that the method is useful for detecting power system events. Results from a lighting strike case study are presented. A monitoring stratagem based on PMU clustering is discussed, and the viability of monitoring pertinent statistical parameters over various clustering schemes is demonstrated.

Flipping A Hardware Design Class: An Encouragement Of Active Learning. Should It Continue?, Nader Rafla, H. Shelton Jacinto

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we aim to present the lessons learned from flipping the classroom of an entry-level graduate course on digital hardware design. This digital hardware design course uses hardware description languages (HDLs) for programming and requires students to learn relevant concepts and methodologies to successfully design, simulate, synthesize, and verify digital circuits created using hands-on projects and in-class activities. In addition, students in the digital hardware design class get exposure and gain familiarity with an industrial design suite to enhance their knowledge of real-life design cycles.

Typically, students struggle with provided in-class activities, assignments, and projects in any digital …

Using Veterans’ Technical Skills In An Engineering Laboratory, Noah Salzman, Thad B. Welch, Harish Subbaraman, Cameron H.G. Wright

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

After years of dissatisfaction with student knowledge and ability to use electrical test and measurement equipment (T&ME), a veteran with significant expertise using this equipment was placed in a Circuit Analysis Lab. This paper reports on this trial and its assessment results. Based on the overwhelming success of this program, this one-semester trial was extended for a second semester.

Senior Civil Engineering Students’ Views On Sustainability And Resiliency, Noah Salzman, Bhaskar C.S. Chittoori, Sondra M. Miller, Thomas A. Robbins

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent years, civil engineering education and workforce development have evolved to include a greater emphasis on sustainability and resiliency. Sustainability balances economic, ecological, and societal needs by being responsive to community impact, human health, and the environment. Resilient infrastructure lasts, retaining functional and structural capacity and supporting interconnected transportation, energy, water, and social systems after a distress event. While many undergraduate civil engineering programs address sustainability, it tends to be limited to individual courses, and resiliency concepts are rarely incorporated. To address these shortcomings, we are incorporating sustainability and resiliency conceptual threads and activities throughout our curriculum, from our …

Work In Progress: Progress Of The Nsf Red Revolution, Noah Salzman

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The National Science Foundation (NSF) REvolutionizing engineering and computer science Departments (RED) program is an important initiative in engineering education. The goals of RED are to “enable engineering and computer science departments to lead the nation by successfully achieving significant sustainable changes necessary to overcome longstanding issues in their undergraduate programs and educate inclusive communities of engineering and computer science students prepared to solve 21^st-century challenges.” In 2015, six RED projects were funded followed by seven in 2016 and six more in 2017, bringing the total number of projects to 19. In addition, NSF funded REDPAR (RED Participatory …

Second Year Of Using The Sidekick Basic Kit For Ti Launchpad With Elementary School Students, Tara N. Kimmey, Cameron H.G. Wright, Thad B. Welch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes a second year, follow-on study in which 4^th and 5^th grade students were exposed to engineering-related topics using a microcontroller, input/output circuitry, sensors, and the associated software coding needed to achieve a desired functionality of the hardware. The first year study was described in a paper presented at the 2017 ASEE Annual Conference. This second year study took students to the “next level,” and showed very promising results.

Assessing Scrum Project Management And Teamwork In Electrical And Computer Engineering Courses, Branimir Pejcinovic, Robert B. Bass, Phillip Wong

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teamwork and project management are essential skills for engineering students, as recognized in the proposed new ABET topic area 7. Our team of instructors exposes students to project management techniques at multiple levels within our undergraduate ECE program. By learning project management early and practicing it often, students improve their teamwork efficacy in projects, courses, and in their future careers. Scrum is a cyclical project management technique commonly used in high-tech industries. Scrum provides a framework that facilitates teamwork through an adaptable and incremental process. Our variant of scrum is tailored to students working on engineering projects in a higher-education …

An Implantable Peripheral Nerve Recording And Stimulation System For Experiments On Freely Moving Animal Subjects, Byunghun Lee, Mukhesh K. Koripalli, Yaoyao Jia, Joshua Acosta, M. S. E. Sendi, Yoonsu Choi, Maysam Ghovanloo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A new study with rat sciatic nerve model for peripheral nerve interfacing is presented using a fully-implanted inductively-powered recording and stimulation system in a wirelessly-powered standard homecage that allows animal subjects move freely within the homecage. The Wireless Implantable Neural Recording and Stimulation (WINeRS) system offers 32-channel peripheral nerve recording and 4-channel current-controlled stimulation capabilities in a 3 × 1.5 × 0.5 cm3 package. A bi-directional data link is established by on-off keying pulse-position modulation (OOK-PPM) in near field for narrow-band downlink and 433 MHz OOK for wideband uplink. An external wideband receiver is designed by adopting a commercial software …

Joint Pilot Allocation And Robust Transmission Design For Ultra-Dense User-Centric Tdd C-Ran With Imperfect Csi, Cunhua Pan, Hani Mehrpouyan, Yuanwei Liu, Maged Elkashlan, Arumugam Nallanathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper considers the unavailability of complete channel state information (CSI) in ultra-dense cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). The user-centric cluster is adopted to reduce the computational complexity, while the incomplete CSI is considered to reduce the heavy channel training overhead, where only large-scale inter-cluster CSI is available. Channel estimation for intra-cluster CSI is also considered, where we formulate a joint pilot allocation and user equipment (UE) selection problem to maximize the number of admitted UEs with fixed number of pilots. A novel pilot allocation algorithm is proposed by considering the multi-UE pilot interference. Then, we consider robust beam-vector optimization …

Review: Electric Field Driven Pumping In Microfluidic Device, Mohammad R. Hossan, Diganta Dutta, Nazmul Islam, Prashanta Dutta

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Pumping of fluids with precise control is one of the key components in a microfluidic device. The electric field has been used as one of the most popular and efficient nonmechanical pumping mechanism to transport fluids in microchannels from the very early stage of microfluidic technology development. This review presents fundamental physics and theories of the different microscale phenomena that arise due to the application of an electric field in fluids, which can be applied for pumping of fluids in microdevices. Specific mechanisms considered in this report are electroosmosis, AC electroosmosis, AC electrothermal, induced charge electroosmosis, traveling wave dielectrophoresis, and …

Head Waves In Ocean Acoustic Ambient Noise: Measurements And Modeling, Martin Siderius, Jie Li, Peter Gerstoft

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Seismic interferometry recovers the Green’s function between two receivers by cross-correlating the field measured from sources that surround the receivers. In the seismic literature, it has been widely reported that this processing can produce artifacts in the Green’s function estimate called “spurious multiples” or the “virtual refracted wave.” The spurious multiples are attributed to the head wave and its multiples and travels in the seabed. The head wave phenomenon is shown to be observable from both controlled active sources and from ocean ambient noise and for both vertical and horizontal arrays. The processing used is a generalization of the passive …

Superimposed Signaling Inspired Channel Estimation In Full-Duplex Systems, Abbas Koohian, Hani Mehrpouyan, Ali A. Nasir, Salman Durrani, Steven D. Blostein

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Residual self-interference (SI) cancellation in the digital baseband is an important problem in full-duplex (FD) communication systems. In this paper, we propose a new technique for estimating the SI and communication channels in a FD communication system, which is inspired from superimposed signaling. In our proposed technique, we add a constant real number to each constellation point of a conventional modulation constellation to yield asymmetric shifted modulation constellations with respect to the origin. We show mathematically that such constellations can be used for bandwidth efficient channel estimation without ambiguity. We propose an expectation maximization (EM) estimator for use with the …

Joint Power Allocation In Interference-Limited Networks Via Distributed Coordinated Learning, Roohollah Amiri, Hani Mehrpouyan, David Matolak, Maged Elkashlan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Dense deployment of small base stations (SBSs) is one of the main methods to meet the 5G data rate requirements. However, high density of independent SBSs will increase the interference within the network. To circumvent this interference, there is a need to develop self-organizing methods to manage the resources of the network. In this paper, we present a distributed power allocation algorithm based on multi-agent Q-learning in an interference-limited network. The proposed method leverages coordination through simple message passing between SBSs to achieve an optimal joint power allocation. Simulation results show the optimality of the proposed method for a …

Introducing The Xxx Bangla Handwriting Dataset And An Efficient Offline Recognizer Of Isolated Bangla Characters, Nishatul Majid, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a publicly accessible Bangla offline handwriting dataset, as well as benchmarking with a simple and robust isolated handwritten character recognition scheme. The dataset is named XXX Bangla Handwriting Dataset. The dataset contains 2 pages. The first has a 104 word/364 character essay. The essay uses 49 basic characters, all 11 vowel diacritics and 32 high frequency consonant conjuncts. The second page contains 84 isolated units containing all basic characters, numbers, vowel diacritics and several high frequency conjuncts. The initial release is based on the voluntary contribution of 100 different writers. One of the highlights and unique features …

A New Reconfigurable Antenna Mimo Architecture For Mmwave Communication, Mojtaba Ahmadi Almasi, Hani Mehrpouyan, Vida Vakilian, Nader Behdad, Hamid Jafarkhani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The large spectrum available in the millimeter- Wave (mmWave) band has emerged as a promising solution for meeting the huge capacity requirements of the 5th generation (5G) wireless networks. However, to fully harness the potential of mmWave communications, obstacles such as severe path loss, channel sparsity and hardware complexity should be overcome. In this paper, we introduce a generalized reconfigurable antenna multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture that takes advantage of lens-based reconfigurable antennas. The considered antennas can support multiple radiation patterns simultaneously by using a single RF chain. The degrees of freedom provided by the reconfigurable antennas are used to, first, …

A Machine Learning Approach For Power Allocation In Hetnets Considering Qos, Roohollah Amiri, Hani Mehrpouyan, Lex Fridman, Ranjan K. Mallik, Arumugam Nallanathan, David Matolak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is an increase in usage of smaller cells or femtocells to improve performance and coverage of next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks (HetNets). However, the interference caused by femtocells to neighboring cells is a limiting performance factor in dense HetNets. This interference is being managed via distributed resource allocation methods. However, as the density of the network increases so does the complexity of such resource allocation methods. Yet, unplanned deployment of femtocells requires an adaptable and self-organizing algorithm to make HetNets viable. As such, we propose to use a machine learning approach based on Q-learning to solve the resource allocation …

Self-Organizing Mmwave Networks: A Power Allocation Scheme Based On Machine Learning, Roohollah Amiri, Hani Mehrpouyan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is anticipated to provide significant throughout gains in urban scenarios. To this end, network densification is a necessity to meet the high traffic volume generated by smart phones, tablets, and sensory devices while overcoming large pathloss and high blockages at mmWaves frequencies. These denser networks are created with users deploying small mmWave base stations (BSs) in a plug-and-play fashion. Although, this deployment method provides the required density, the amorphous deployment of BSs needs distributed management. To address this difficulty, we propose a self-organizing method to allocate power to mmWave BSs in an ultra dense network. The proposed …

Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access Based On Hybrid Beamforming For Mmwave Systems, Mojtaba Ahmadi Almasi, Hani Mehrpouyan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper aims to study the utilization of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in hybrid beamforming (HB) multiuser systems, called HB-NOMA, to serve a large number of mobile users. First, a sum-rate expression for the HB-NOMA problem is formulated. Second, an effective algorithm is proposed to maximize the sum-rate. Then, a lower bound is derived under two cases: i) the angle between the effective channel vectors of the MU with the highest channel gain and other MUs located inside a cluster is zero (or close to it) which is denoted by perfect correlation, and ii) this angle is non-zero, which we …

A Time-Efficient Cmos-Memristive Programmable Circuit Realizing Logic Functions In Generalized And-Xor Structures, Muayad Aljafar, Marek Perkowski, John M. Acken, Robin Tan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper describes a CMOS-memristive Programmable Logic Device connected to CMOS XOR gates (mPLD-XOR) for realizing multi-output functions well-suited for two-level {NAND, AND, NOR, OR}-XOR based design. This structure is a generalized form of AND-XOR logic where any combination of NAND, AND, NOR, OR, and literals can replace the AND level. For mPLD-XOR, the computational delay, which is measured as the number of clock cycles, equals the maximum number of inputs to any output XOR gate of a function assuming that the number of XOR gates is large enough to calculate the outputs of the function simultaneously. The input levels …

Terahertz Imaging Of Thin Film Layers With Matched Field Processing, Scott Schecklman, Lisa M. Zurk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Terahertz (THz) time of flight (TOF) tomography systems offer a new measurement modality for non-destructive evaluation (NDE) of the subsurface layers of protective coatings and/or laminated composite materials for industrial, security and biomedical applications. However, for thin film samples, the time-of-flight within a layer is less than the duration of the THz pulse and consequently there is insufficient range resolution for NDE of the sample under test. In this paper, matched field processing (MFP) techniques are applied to thickness estimation in THz TOF tomography applications, and these methods are demonstrated by using measured THz spectra to estimate the the thicknesses …

Subspace Clustering Using Ensembles Of K-Subspaces, John Lipor, David Hong, Yan Shuo Tan, Laura Balzano

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Subspace clustering is the unsupervised grouping of points lying near a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces. Algorithms based directly on geometric properties of such data tend to either provide poor empirical performance, lack theoretical guarantees, or depend heavily on their initialization. We present a novel geometric approach to the subspace clustering problem that leverages ensembles of the K-subspaces (KSS) algorithm via the evidence accumulation clustering framework. Our algorithm, referred to as ensemble K-subspaces (EKSS), forms a co-association matrix whose (i,j)th entry is the number of times points i and j are clustered together by several runs of KSS with random …