Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Robust Self-Replication Of Combinatorial Information Via Crystal Growth And Scission, Rebecca Schulman, Bernard Yurke, Erik Winfree

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Understanding how a simple chemical system can accurately replicate combinatorial information, such as a sequence, is an important question for both the study of life in the universe and for the development of evolutionary molecular design techniques. During biological sequence replication, a nucleic acid polymer serves as a template for the enzyme-catalyzed assembly of a complementary sequence. Enzymes then separate the template and complement before the next round of replication. Attempts to understand how replication could occur more simply, such as without enzymes, have largely focused on developing minimal versions of this replication process. Here we describe how a different …

Multi-Bit Continuous-Time Delta-Sigma Modulator For Audio Application, Rajaram Mohan Roy Koppula, Sakkarapani Balagopal, Vishal Saxena

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The design considerations for low-power continuous time (CT) delta-sigma (ΔΣ) modulators is studied and circuit design details for a 13.5 bit modulator are given. The converter has been designed in a 0.5 um C5FN AMI CMOS technology and achieves a maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 85 dB in a 48 kHz bandwidth and dissipates 5.4 mW from a 5 V supply when clocked at 6.144 MHz. It features a third-order active-RC loop filter, a 4-bit flash quantizer along with a Data Weighted averaging (DWA). The loop filter architecture and its coefficients have been targeted for the minimum …

Verification Of Particle Image Velocimeter For Study Of Martian And Lunar Regoliths, Kristopher Burch, Eric Wright, Jozey Mitcham, Alfredo Bravo Iniguez

College of Engineering Poster Presentations

The behavior of dust, or regolith, on Mars and the moon is critical to our understanding of the Martian and lunar environments. The dust interaction with space suits and other equipment is a major concern for long term space missions. Dust on the moon greatly deteriorated the space suits in NASA’s Apollo program. We have developed a test enclosure for the study of dust motion. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a Particle Image Velocimeter (PIV) to measure the velocity and size of thousands of moving particles. The PIV was developed as a demonstration project for use on possible …

Effect Of “Ground Truth” On Image Binarization, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Chang An

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Image binarization has a large effect on the rest of the document image analysis processes in character recognition. Algorithm development is still a major focus of research. Evaluation of image binarization has been done by comparison of the result of OCR systems on images binarized by different methods. That has been criticized in that the binarization alone is not evaluated, but rather how it interacts with the downstream processes. Recently pixel accurate "ground truth" images have been introduced for use in binarization algorithm evaluation. This has been shown to be open to interpretation. The choice of binarization ground truth affects …

A Unified Wireless Sensor Network Framework, Joshua Kiepert, Sin Ming Loo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been a significant area of research over the past decade. WSN systems are used in a wide range of applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, target tracking, wildlife tracking, personal health monitoring, machinery monitoring, and many others. With such wide ranging applications, there is active research in nearly every facet of the field including network topologies, communication protocols, node localization, time synchronization, and sensor data processing. This movement has largely been the result of the advances in microelectronics and low-power radio systems. These advancements have enabled the design and implementation of small, powerful, low-power, wireless …

Application Of Image Processing To Track Twin Boundary Motion In Magnetic Shape Memory Alloys, Adrian Rothenbuhler, Elisa Barney Smith, Peter Müllner

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Materials scientists make use of image processing tools more and more as technology advances and the data volume that needs to be analyzed increases. We propose a method to optically measure magnetic eld induced strain (MFIS) as well as twin boundary movement in Ni₂MnGa single crystal shape memory alloys to facilitate spatially resolved tracking of deformation. Current magneto-mechanical experiments used to measure MFIS can measure strain only in one direction and do not provide information about the movement of individual twin boundaries. A sequence of images captured from a high resolution camera is analyzed by a boundary detection …

An Inertial Measurement System For Hand And Finger Tracking, Edward Nelson Henderson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The primary Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) today are the keyboard and mouse. These interfaces do not facilitate a fluid flow of thought and intent from the operator to the computer. A computer mouse provides only 2 Degrees of Freedom (2DOF). Touch interfaces also provide 2DOF, but with multiple points, making the touch interface far more expressive. The hand has 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DOF)by itself. Combined with the motion of the fingers, the hand has the potential to represent a vast array of differing gestures. Hand gestures must be captured before they can be used as a HCI. Fortunately, advances …

Matlab/Simulink Implementation And Analysis Of Three Pulse-Width-Modulation (Pwm) Techniques, Phuong Hue Tran

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

With advances in solid-state power electronic devices and microprocessors, various pulse-width-modulation (PWM) techniques have been developed for industrial applications. For example, PWM-based three-phase voltage source inverters (VSI) convert DC power to AC power with variable voltage magnitude and variable frequency.

This thesis discusses the advantages and drawbacks of three different PWM techniques: the sinusoidalPWM(SPWM) technique, the third-harmonic-injection PWM(THIPWM) technique, and the space-vector PWM (SVPWM) technique. These three methods are compared by discussing their ease of implementation and by analyzing the output harmonic spectra of various output voltages (poles voltages, line-to-neutral voltages, and line-to-line voltages) and their total harmonic distortion (THD). …

Efficient Design And Synthesis Of Decimation Filters For Wideband Delta-Sigma Adcs, Rajaram Mohan Roy Koppula, Sakkarapani Balagopal, Vishal Saxena

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A design methodology for synthesizing power-optimized decimation filters for wideband Delta Sigma (ΔΣ) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for next-generation wireless standards is presented. The decimation filter is designed to filter the out-of-band quantization noise from a fifth-order continuous-time ΔΣ modulator, with 20 MHz signal bandwidth and 14-bits resolution. The modulator employs an oversampling ratio (OSR) of 16 with a clock rate of 640 MHz. Retiming, pipelining, Canonical Signed Digits (CSD) encoding has been utilized along with an optimized halfband filter to realize the power savings in the overall decimation filter. A process flow to rapidly design the optimized filters in MATLAB, …

Survey Of Sensor Technology For Aircraft Cabin Environment Sensing, Derek Klein, Sin Ming Loo, Joshua Kiepert, Michael Pook, Jim Hall

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The aircraft cabin environment is unique due to the proximity of the passengers, the need for cabin pressurization, and the low humidity. All of these aspects are complicated by the fact that the aircraft is a semi-enclosed structure. There is an increased desire to monitor the aircraft cabin environment with various sensors for comfort and safety. However, the aircraft cabin environment is composed of a large number of factors. Some of these factors can include air quality, temperature, level of pressurization, and motion of the aircraft. Therefore, many types of sensors must be used to monitor aircraft environments. A variety …

Wireless Sensor Network For Aircraft Cabin Environment Sensing, Joshua Kiepert, Sin Ming Loo, Derek Klein, Michael Pook

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Wireless sensor networks consist of physically distributed autonomous sensor nodes that cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions. One of the greatest benefits of wireless sensor networks is that they are capable of generating a more complete view of the sensed environment by acquiring larger quantities of correlated data than independent sensor monitors. The aircraft cabin is a highly dynamic environment which necessitates the use of more advanced sensing systems. It is with the motivation of painting a better picture of the aircraft cabin environment that such a wireless sensor network is being designed and prototyped. This paper discusses the design …

Hydrodynamic Modeling Of Surface Plasmon Enhanced Photon Induced Current In A Gold Grating, Alex English, Cheng-Wen Cheng, Lloyd Lowe Ii, Min-Hsiung Shih, Wan Kuang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The current induced by incident photons on an gold grating slab is investigated numerically and experimentally. A semi-classical electrodynamic model is developed under the weak nonlinearity approximation. Electrons in the conduction band are treated as an electron gas in the presence of a self-consistent electromagnetic field. The model is solved by the finite element method and compared with measurements. The calculated current density as a function of incident angle and wavelength is found to be in qualitative agreement with the experimental measurements. The results show that increasing surface plasmon spatial variation enhances photon induced current.

Design Guide For Cmos Process On-Chip 3d Inductor Using Thru-Wafer Vias, Gary Vanackern

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Three-dimensional (3D) inductors using high aspect ratio (10:1) thru-wafer via (TWV) technology in a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process have been designed, fabricated, and measured. The inductors were designed using 500 μm tall vias with the number of turns ranging from 1 to 20 in both a wide and narrow trace width to space ratios. Radio frequency characterization was studied with emphasis upon de-embedding techniques and resulting effects. The open, short, thru de-embedding (OSTD) technique was used to measure all devices. The highest quality factor (Q) measured was 11.25 at 798MHz for a 1-turn device with a self-resonant frequency …

Electrical Switching Studies Of Chalcogenide-Based Ion-Conducting Variable Resistance Devices, Beth Rose Cook

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In this work, ion-conducting devices using layers of chalcogenide materials are explored as potential non-volatile memory devices. This technology is also known in the literature as conductively bridged RAM (CBRAM), programmable metallization cell (PMC), and programmable conductor RAM (PCRAM; not to be confused with the acronym PCRAM as used to denote phase-change memory).

Electrical measurements with five different programming currents at four temperatures have been performed on two-terminal devices comprised of silver with a metal-selenide and germanium-chalcogenide layer. The metal-selenide layer is Sb₂Se₃, SnSe, PbSe, In₂Se₃, or Ag₂Se. The germanium-chalcogenide …

Low-Power, High-Bandwidth And Ultra-Small Memory Module Design, Qawi Ibnzayd Harvard

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The main memory subsystem has become inefficient. The performance gained has come at the expenses of power consumption, capacity, and cost. This dissertation proposes novel module, DRAM, and interconnect architectures in an attempt to alleviate these trends. The proposed architectures utilize low-cost interconnects and packaging innovations to substantially reduce the power, and increase the capacity and bandwidth of the main memory system.

This dissertation develops the theory behind a low-cost packaging technology to create an 8-die and 32-die memory module. The 32-die memory module measures less than 2 cm³.

This dissertation also proposes a 4 Gb DRAM architecture …

Monitoring Civil Infrastructure Using Image Template Matching, Vikram Mukesh Patel

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an active area of research devoted to systems that can autonomously and proactively assess the structural integrity of civil structures. This thesis explores the possibility of monitoring civil structures using image template matching and low-cost embedded data acquisition. By acquiring several consecutive images of a structure, one can determine if movement in the structure has occurred. This information can be analyzed to determine long-term changes within a structure, which can then be used to proactively prioritize maintenance, reduce maintenance costs, and prevent structural failure. This will allow structures to be maintained based on objective data …

Structural Study Of Ag-Ge-S Solid Electrolyte Glass System For Resistive Radiation Sensing, Ping Chen, Mahesh Ailavajhala, Maria I. Mitkova, Dmitri A. Tenne, Ivan Sanchez Esqueda, Hugh Barnaby

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Solid electrolytes based on chalcogenide glasses have been one of the most promising candidates for the next generation non-volatile memories. Here we propose a new application of chalcogenide solid electrolytes for low cost, high performance microelectronic radiation sensor that reacts to γ-radiation to produce an easily measurable change in electrical resistance. The active layer material is Ag-doped GeS thin film glasses and several compositions of GeS base glasses were tested for best resistive sensing capability. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) was used for elemental analysis and Raman scattering spectroscopy was measured to determine the structural details and radiation induced structural changes. …

Rf Sputter Optimization Of Germanium Sulfide (Ges2) Thin Films, Steven Livers

College of Engineering Poster Presentations

Radio frequency sputter deposition of germanium sulfide thin films can be optimized for surface thickness homogeneity and surface roughness. Optimizing these two components are the first steps of producing memory devices that use the film as a solid electrolyte. The best films were produced using a sputter power of 16 Watts and a pressure of 0.2 mbar. Using these settings a deposition rate of 3.7 nm/min was recorded and the films had a minimum RMS surface roughness of 0.4550 nm.

Hop Funnel And Field Emitter Array Interaction, Tyler Rowe

College of Engineering Poster Presentations

Investigate the use of hop funnels with field emitter arrays (FEAs) as a method to improve FEA performance for use in various microwave vacuum electron devices (MVEDs).

A Prototyping Hardware Platform For ∆Σ Adcs, Abbas Alahmed, Mohammed Alhajji, Zacharias Arnos, Vishal Saxena

College of Engineering Poster Presentations

The project involves development of a generic test-bed for prototyping and characterizing Delta-Sigma Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). The ADCs are designed at the Analog Mixed Signal IC (AMS) Laboratory at Boise State. This is a high-speed evaluation board that can be connected into an FPGA board which assists in controlling the ADC chip and assists in capturing blocks of digital data.

Camera Imaging System, Wayne Kreimeyer, Adrian Rothenbühler, Anita Poudel, Elisa Barney Smith

College of Engineering Poster Presentations

• Magnetic shape memory alloys are functional materials which can remember their shape
•  Currently, twin boundaries as a function of magnetic field angle can not be measured
•  Information about shape changes of different parts of the sample will increase the understanding of deformation mechanisms

Enhancement Of Historical Printed Document Images By Combining Total Variation Regularization And Non-Local Means Filtering, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Jérôme Darbon, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement which combines two recent powerful noise-reduction steps. The first step is based on the total variation framework. It flattens background grey-levels and produces an intermediate image where background noise is considerably reduced. This image is used as a mask to produce an image with a cleaner background while keeping character details. The second step is applied to the cleaner image and consists of a filter based on non-local means: character edges are smoothed by searching for similar patch images in pixel neighborhoods. The document images to be enhanced are real historical …

A Faceted Magnetron Concept Using Field Emission Cathodes, Jim Browning, Jack Watrous

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A magnetron concept using field emission cathodes has been modeled with the Air Force Research Laboratory particle-in-cell code ICEPIC and the 2D particle trajectory simulation Lorentz2E. In this approach, field emitters are used to provide a distributed cathode in place of a traditional thermionic cathode. The emitters are placed below the interaction space in a shielded structure. The cathode is comprised of facet plates with slits to protect the emitters. Simulation of an L-band rising sun magnetron shows that the faceted magnetron will oscillate using both five and ten facet cathodes. The startup times are very similar to that of …

A Mask-Based Enhancement Method For Historical Documents, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Jerôme Darbon, Laurence Likforman-Sulem

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement. The method is based on the combination of two state-of-the-art filters through the construction of a mask. The mask is applied to a TV (Total Variation) -regularized image where background noise has been reduced. The masked image is then filtered by NLmeans (Non-Local Means) which reduces the noise in the text areas located by the mask. The document images to be enhanced are real historical documents from several periods which include several defects in their background. These defects result from scanning, paper aging and bleed-through. We observe the improvement of this …

Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots, George Nagy, Daniel Lopresti, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Ziyan Wu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. The PDF files were downloaded, converted to TIF images, and posted on the PERFECT website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization. The accuracy and robustness of …

Descreening Of Color Halftone Images In The Frequency Domain, C. J. Stanger, Thanh Tran, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Scanning a halftone image introduces halftone artifacts, known as Moiré patterns, which significantly degrade the image quality. Printers that use amplitude modulation (AM) screening for halftone printing position dots in a periodic pattern. Therefore, frequencies relating halftoning are easily identifiable in the frequency domain. This paper proposes a method for descreening scanned color halftone images using a custom band reject filter designed to isolate and remove only the frequencies related to halftoning while leaving image edges sharp without image segmentation or edge detection. To enable hardware acceleration, the image is processed in small overlapped windows. The windows are filtered individually …

Electron Hop Funnel Measurements And Comparison With The Lorentz-2e Simulation, Charles Lester, Jim Browning, Lael Matthews

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Electron hop funnels have been fabricated using a Low Temperature Co-Fired Ceramic (LTCC). Measurements of the hop funnel I-V curve and electron energy distribution have been made using gated field emitters as the electron source. The charged particle simulation Lorentz 2E has been used to model the hop funnel charging and to predict the I-V and energy characteristics. The results of this comparison indicate that the simulation can be used to design hop funnel structures for use in various applications.

Elimination Theory For Nonlinear Parameter Estimation, John Chiasson, Ahmed Oteafy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The work presented here exploits elimination theory (solving systems of polynomial equations in several variables) [1][2] to perform nonlinear parameter identification. In particular show how this technique can be used to estimate the rotor time constant and the stator resistance values of an induction machine. Although the example here is restricted to an induction machine, parameter estimation is applicable to many practical engineering problems. In [3], L. Ljung has outlined many of the challenges of nonlinear system identification as well as its particular importance for biological systems. In these types of problems, the model developed for analysis is typically a …

Development Of Dna Based Active Macro-Materials For Biology And Medicine: A Review, Frank Xue Jiang, Bernard Yurke, Devendra Verma, Michelle Previtera, Rene Schloss, Noshir A. Langrana

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

DNA was first discovered as the carrier of genetic information for the majority of the known living organisms, encoding the secret of life. Its delicate design based upon double helical structure and base pairing offers a stable and reliable media for storing hereditary codes, laying the foundation for the central dogma (Watson et al. 2003). The impact of this molecule is far reaching into scientific community and our society, as manifested in many fields, for instance, forensics (Budowle et al. 2003), besides medicine. To date, a great deal of research effort has been directed towards understanding

An Investigation Of Carrier Transport In Hafnium Oxide/Silicon Dioxide Mos Gate Dielectric Stacks From 5.6-400k, Richard G. Southwick Iii

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Hafnium oxide (HfO₂) is replacing silicon dioxide (SiO₂) as the gate dielectric in metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) structures driven mainly by need to reduce high leakage currents observed in sub-2nm SiO₂. The high dielectric constant of HfO₂ (~25) compared to SiO₂ (3.9 bulk) allows a thicker HfO₂ layer to be used in place of the thinner SiO₂ layer thereby reducing the gate leakage current in MOS devices while maintaining the same capacitive coupling provided by the thinner SiO₂. However, incorporating HfO₂ into MOS devices produces a SiO …