Matching Items (318)
Filtering by
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Phelan, Patrick
- Creators: Chakrabarti, Chaitali
- Creators: Goryll, Michael
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
Process variations have become increasingly important for scaled technologies starting at 45nm. The increased variations are primarily due to random dopant fluctuations, line-edge roughness and oxide thickness fluctuation. These variations greatly impact all aspects of circuit performance and pose a grand challenge to future robust IC design. To improve robustness, efficient methodology is required that considers effect of variations in the design flow. Analyzing timing variability of complex circuits with HSPICE simulations is very time consuming. This thesis proposes an analytical model to predict variability in CMOS circuits that is quick and accurate. There are several analytical models to estimate nominal delay performance but very little work has been done to accurately model delay variability. The proposed model is comprehensive and estimates nominal delay and variability as a function of transistor width, load capacitance and transition time. First, models are developed for library gates and the accuracy of the models is verified with HSPICE simulations for 45nm and 32nm technology nodes. The difference between predicted and simulated σ/μ for the library gates is less than 1%. Next, the accuracy of the model for nominal delay is verified for larger circuits including ISCAS'85 benchmark circuits. The model predicted results are within 4% error of HSPICE simulated results and take a small fraction of the time, for 45nm technology. Delay variability is analyzed for various paths and it is observed that non-critical paths can become critical because of Vth variation. Variability on shortest paths show that rate of hold violations increase enormously with increasing Vth variation.
ContributorsGummalla, Samatha (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Cao, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Concrete columns constitute the fundamental supports of buildings, bridges, and various other infrastructures, and their failure could lead to the collapse of the entire structure. As such, great effort goes into improving the fire resistance of such columns. In a time sensitive fire situation, a delay in the failure of critical load bearing structures can lead to an increase in time allowed for the evacuation of occupants, recovery of property, and access to the fire. Much work has been done in improving the structural performance of concrete including reducing column sizes and providing a safer structure. As a result, high-strength (HS) concrete has been developed to fulfill the needs of such improvements. HS concrete varies from normal-strength (NS) concrete in that it has a higher stiffness, lower permeability and larger durability. This, unfortunately, has resulted in poor performance under fire. The lower permeability allows for water vapor to build up causing HS concrete to suffer from explosive spalling under rapid heating. In addition, the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of HS concrete is lower than that of NS concrete. In this study, the effects of introducing a region of crumb rubber concrete into a steel-reinforced concrete column were analyzed. The inclusion of crumb rubber concrete into a column will greatly increase the thermal resistivity of the overall column, leading to a reduction in core temperature as well as the rate at which the column is heated. Different cases were analyzed while varying the positioning of the crumb-rubber region to characterize the effect of position on the improvement of fire resistance. Computer simulated finite element analysis was used to calculate the temperature and strain distribution with time across the column's cross-sectional area with specific interest in the steel - concrete region. Of the several cases which were investigated, it was found that the improvement of time before failure ranged between 32 to 45 minutes.
ContributorsZiadeh, Bassam Mohammed (Author) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Kaloush, Kamil (Thesis advisor) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Locomotion of microorganisms is commonly observed in nature. Although microorganism locomotion is commonly attributed to mechanical deformation of solid appendages, in 1956 Nobel Laureate Peter Mitchell proposed that an asymmetric ion flux on a bacterium's surface could generate electric fields that drive locomotion via self-electrophoresis. Recent advances in nanofabrication have enabled the engineering of synthetic analogues, bimetallic colloidal particles, that swim due to asymmetric ion flux originally proposed by Mitchell. Bimetallic colloidal particles swim through aqueous solutions by converting chemical fuel to fluid motion through asymmetric electrochemical reactions. This dissertation presents novel bimetallic motor fabrication strategies, motor functionality, and a study of the motor collective behavior in chemical concentration gradients. Brownian dynamics simulations and experiments show that the motors exhibit chemokinesis, a motile response to chemical gradients that results in net migration and concentration of particles. Chemokinesis is typically observed in living organisms and distinct from chemotaxis in that there is no particle directional sensing. The synthetic motor chemokinesis observed in this work is due to variation in the motor's velocity and effective diffusivity as a function of the fuel and salt concentration. Static concentration fields are generated in microfluidic devices fabricated with porous walls. The development of nanoscale particles that swim autonomously and collectively in chemical concentration gradients can be leveraged for a wide range of applications such as directed drug delivery, self-healing materials, and environmental remediation.
ContributorsWheat, Philip Matthew (Author) / Posner, Jonathan D (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Chen, Kangping (Committee member) / Buttry, Daniel (Committee member) / Calhoun, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In this thesis the performance of a Hybrid AC System (HACS) is modeled and optimized. The HACS utilizes solar photovoltaic (PV) panels to help reduce the demand from the utility during peak hours. The system also includes an ice Thermal Energy Storage (TES) tank to accumulate cooling energy during off-peak hours. The AC runs continuously on grid power during off-peak hours to generate cooling for the house and to store thermal energy in the TES. During peak hours, the AC runs on the power supplied from the PV, and cools the house along with the energy stored in the TES. A higher initial cost is expected due to the additional components of the HACS (PV and TES), but a lower operational cost due to higher energy efficiency, energy storage and renewable energy utilization. A house cooled by the HACS will require a smaller size AC unit (about 48% less in the rated capacity), compared to a conventional AC system. To compare the cost effectiveness of the HACS with a regular AC system, time-of-use (TOU) utility rates are considered, as well as the cost of the system components and the annual maintenance. The model shows that the HACS pays back its initial cost of $28k in about 6 years with an 8% APR, and saves about $45k in total cost when compared to a regular AC system that cools the same house for the same period of 6 years.
ContributorsJubran, Sadiq (Author) / Phelan, Patrick (Thesis advisor) / Calhoun, Ronald (Committee member) / Trimble, Steve (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
A low cost expander, combustor device that takes compressed air, adds thermal energy and then expands the gas to drive an electrical generator is to be designed by modifying an existing reciprocating spark ignition engine. The engine used is the 6.5 hp Briggs and Stratton series 122600 engine. Compressed air that is stored in a tank at a particular pressure will be introduced during the compression stage of the engine cycle to reduce pump work. In the modified design the intake and exhaust valve timings are modified to achieve this process. The time required to fill the combustion chamber with compressed air to the storage pressure immediately before spark and the state of the air with respect to crank angle is modeled numerically using a crank step energy and mass balance model. The results are used to complete the engine cycle analysis based on air standard assumptions and air to fuel ratio of 15 for gasoline. It is found that at the baseline storage conditions (280 psi, 70OF) the modified engine does not meet the imposed constraints of staying below the maximum pressure of the unmodified engine. A new storage pressure of 235 psi is recommended. This only provides a 7.7% increase in thermal efficiency for the same work output. The modification of this engine for this low efficiency gain is not recommended.
ContributorsJoy, Lijin (Author) / Trimble, Steve (Thesis advisor) / Davidson, Joseph (Committee member) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Passive cooling designs & technologies offer great promise to lower energy use in buildings. Though the working principles of these designs and technologies are well understood, simplified tools to quantitatively evaluate their performance are lacking. Cooling by night ventilation, which is the topic of this research, is one of the well known passive cooling technologies. The building's thermal mass can be cooled at night by ventilating the inside of the space with the relatively lower outdoor air temperatures, thereby maintaining lower indoor temperatures during the warmer daytime period. Numerous studies, both experimental and theoretical, have been performed and have shown the effectiveness of the method to significantly reduce air conditioning loads or improve comfort levels in those climates where the night time ambient air temperature drops below that of the indoor air. The impact of widespread adoption of night ventilation cooling can be substantial, given the large fraction of energy consumed by air conditioning of buildings (about 12-13% of the total electricity use in U.S. buildings). Night ventilation is relatively easy to implement with minimal design changes to existing buildings. Contemporary mathematical models to evaluate the performance of night ventilation are embedded in detailed whole building simulation tools which require a certain amount of expertise and is a time consuming approach. This research proposes a methodology incorporating two models, Heat Transfer model and Thermal Network model, to evaluate the effectiveness of night ventilation. This methodology is easier to use and the run time to evaluate the results is faster. Both these models are approximations of thermal coupling between thermal mass and night ventilation in buildings. These models are modifications of existing approaches meant to model dynamic thermal response in buildings subject to natural ventilation. Effectiveness of night ventilation was quantified by a parameter called the Discomfort Reduction Factor (DRF) which is the index of reduction of occupant discomfort levels during the day time from night ventilation. Daily and Monthly DRFs are calculated for two climate zones and three building heat capacities. It is verified that night ventilation is effective in seasons and regions when day temperatures are between 30 oC and 36 oC and night temperatures are below 20 oC. The accuracy of these models may be lower than using a detailed simulation program but the loss in accuracy in using these tools more than compensates for the insights provided and better transparency in the analysis approach and results obtained.
ContributorsEndurthy, Akhilesh Reddy (Author) / Reddy, T Agami (Thesis advisor) / Phelan, Patrick (Committee member) / Addison, Marlin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
There will always be a need for high current/voltage transistors. A transistor that has the ability to be both or either of these things is the silicon metal-silicon field effect transistor (MESFET). An additional perk that silicon MESFET transistors have is the ability to be integrated into the standard silicon on insulator (SOI) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process flow. This makes a silicon MESFET transistor a very valuable device for use in any standard CMOS circuit that may usually need a separate integrated circuit (IC) in order to switch power on or from a high current/voltage because it allows this function to be performed with a single chip thereby cutting costs. The ability for the MESFET to cost effectively satisfy the needs of this any many other high current/voltage device application markets is what drives the study of MESFET optimization. Silicon MESFETs that are integrated into standard SOI CMOS processes often receive dopings during fabrication that would not ideally be there in a process made exclusively for MESFETs. Since these remnants of SOI CMOS processing effect the operation of a MESFET device, their effect can be seen in the current-voltage characteristics of a measured MESFET device. Device simulations are done and compared to measured silicon MESFET data in order to deduce the cause and effect of many of these SOI CMOS remnants. MESFET devices can be made in both fully depleted (FD) and partially depleted (PD) SOI CMOS technologies. Device simulations are used to do a comparison of FD and PD MESFETs in order to show the advantages and disadvantages of MESFETs fabricated in different technologies. It is shown that PD MESFET have the highest current per area capability. Since the PD MESFET is shown to have the highest current capability, a layout optimization method to further increase the current per area capability of the PD silicon MESFET is presented, derived, and proven to a first order.
ContributorsSochacki, John (Author) / Thornton, Trevor J (Thesis advisor) / Schroder, Dieter (Committee member) / Vasileska, Dragica (Committee member) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that stable lipid bilayers can be set up on an array of silicon micropores and can be used as sites for self-inserting ion-channel proteins which can be studied independently of each other. In course of this study an acrylic based holder was designed and machined to ensure leak-free fluidic access to the silicon micropores and physical isolation of the individual array channels. To measure the ion-channel currents, we simulated, designed and manufactured low-noise transimpedance amplifiers and support circuits based on published patch clamp amplifier designs, using currently available surface-mount components. This was done in order to achieve a reduction in size and costs as well as isolation of individual channels without the need for multiplexing of the input. During the experiments performed, stable bilayers were formed across an array of four vertically mounted 30 µm silicon micropores and OmpF porins were added for self insertion in each of the bilayers. To further demonstrate the independence of these bilayer recording sites, the antibiotic Ampicillin (2.5 mM) was added to one of the fluidic wells. The ionic current in each of the wells was recorded simultaneously. Sub-conductance states of Ompf porin were observed in two of the measurement sites. In addition, the conductance steps in the site containing the antibiotic could be clearly seen to be larger compared to those of the unmodified site. This is due to the transient blocking of ion flow through the porin due to translocation of the antibiotic. Based on this demonstration, ion-channel array reconstitution is a potential method for efficient electrophysiological characterization of different types of ion-channels simultaneously as well as for studying membrane permeation processes.
ContributorsRamakrishnan, Shankar (Author) / Goryll, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Thornton, Trevor J (Committee member) / Blain Christen, Jennifer M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In the last few years, significant advances in nanofabrication have allowed tailoring of structures and materials at a molecular level enabling nanofabrication with precise control of dimensions and organization at molecular length scales, a development leading to significant advances in nanoscale systems. Although, the direction of progress seems to follow the path of microelectronics, the fundamental physics in a nanoscale system changes more rapidly compared to microelectronics, as the size scale is decreased. The changes in length, area, and volume ratios due to reduction in size alter the relative influence of various physical effects determining the overall operation of a system in unexpected ways. One such category of nanofluidic structures demonstrating unique ionic and molecular transport characteristics are nanopores. Nanopores derive their unique transport characteristics from the electrostatic interaction of nanopore surface charge with aqueous ionic solutions. In this doctoral research cylindrical nanopores, in single and array configuration, were fabricated in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) using a combination of electron beam lithography (EBL) and reactive ion etching (RIE). The fabrication method presented is compatible with standard semiconductor foundries and allows fabrication of nanopores with desired geometries and precise dimensional control, providing near ideal and isolated physical modeling systems to study ion transport at the nanometer level. Ion transport through nanopores was characterized by measuring ionic conductances of arrays of nanopores of various diameters for a wide range of concentration of aqueous hydrochloric acid (HCl) ionic solutions. Measured ionic conductances demonstrated two distinct regimes based on surface charge interactions at low ionic concentrations and nanopore geometry at high ionic concentrations. Field effect modulation of ion transport through nanopore arrays, in a fashion similar to semiconductor transistors, was also studied. Using ionic conductance measurements, it was shown that the concentration of ions in the nanopore volume was significantly changed when a gate voltage on nanopore arrays was applied, hence controlling their transport. Based on the ion transport results, single nanopores were used to demonstrate their application as nanoscale particle counters by using polystyrene nanobeads, monodispersed in aqueous HCl solutions of different molarities. Effects of field effect modulation on particle transition events were also demonstrated.
ContributorsJoshi, Punarvasu (Author) / Thornton, Trevor J (Thesis advisor) / Goryll, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Saraniti, Marco (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Redundant Binary (RBR) number representations have been extensively used in the past for high-throughput Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems. Data-path components based on this number system have smaller critical path delay but larger area compared to conventional two's complement systems. This work explores the use of RBR number representation for implementing high-throughput DSP systems that are also energy-efficient. Data-path components such as adders and multipliers are evaluated with respect to critical path delay, energy and Energy-Delay Product (EDP). A new design for a RBR adder with very good EDP performance has been proposed. The corresponding RBR parallel adder has a much lower critical path delay and EDP compared to two's complement carry select and carry look-ahead adder implementations. Next, several RBR multiplier architectures are investigated and their performance compared to two's complement systems. These include two new multiplier architectures: a purely RBR multiplier where both the operands are in RBR form, and a hybrid multiplier where the multiplicand is in RBR form and the other operand is represented in conventional two's complement form. Both the RBR and hybrid designs are demonstrated to have better EDP performance compared to conventional two's complement multipliers. The hybrid multiplier is also shown to have a superior EDP performance compared to the RBR multiplier, with much lower implementation area. Analysis on the effect of bit-precision is also performed, and it is shown that the performance gain of RBR systems improves for higher bit precision. Next, in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the RBR representation at the system-level, the performance of RBR and hybrid implementations of some common DSP kernels such as Discrete Cosine Transform, edge detection using Sobel operator, complex multiplication, Lifting-based Discrete Wavelet Transform (9, 7) filter, and FIR filter, is compared with two's complement systems. It is shown that for relatively large computation modules, the RBR to two's complement conversion overhead gets amortized. In case of systems with high complexity, for iso-throughput, both the hybrid and RBR implementations are demonstrated to be superior with lower average energy consumption. For low complexity systems, the conversion overhead is significant, and overpowers the EDP performance gain obtained from the RBR computation operation.
ContributorsMahadevan, Rupa (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Kiaei, Sayfe (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011