Matching Items (32)
Description
Biological membranes are critical to cell sustainability by selectively permeating polar molecules into the intracellular space and providing protection to the interior organelles. Biomimetic membranes (model cell membranes) are often used to fundamentally study the lipid bilayer backbone structure of the biological membrane. Lipid bilayer membranes are often supported using inorganic materials in an effort to improve membrane stability and for application to novel biosensing platforms. Published literature has shown that a variety of dense inorganic materials with various surface properties have been investigated for the study of biomimetic membranes. However, literature does not adequately address the effect of porous materials or supports with varying macroscopic geometries on lipid bilayer membrane behavior. The objective of this dissertation is to present a fundamental study on the synthesis of lipid bilayer membranes supported by novel inorganic supports in an effort to expand the number of available supports for biosensing technology. There are two fundamental areas covered including: (1) synthesis of lipid bilayer membranes on porous inorganic materials and (2) synthesis and characterization of cylindrically supported lipid bilayer membranes. The lipid bilayer membrane formation behavior on various porous supports was studied via direct mass adsorption using a quartz crystal microbalance. Experimental results demonstrate significantly different membrane formation behaviors on the porous inorganic supports. A lipid bilayer membrane structure was formed only on SiO2 based surfaces (dense SiO2 and silicalite, basic conditions) and gamma-alumina (acidic conditions). Vesicle monolayer adsorption was observed on gamma-alumina (basic conditions), and yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) of varying roughness. Parameters such as buffer pH, surface chemistry and surface roughness were found to have a significant impact on the vesicle adsorption kinetics. Experimental and modeling work was conducted to study formation and characterization of cylindrically supported lipid bilayer membranes. A novel sensing technique (long-period fiber grating refractometry) was utilized to measure the formation mechanism of lipid bilayer membranes on an optical fiber. It was found that the membrane formation kinetics on the fiber was similar to its planar SiO2 counterpart. Fluorescence measurements verified membrane transport behavior and found that characterization artifacts affected the measured transport behavior.
ContributorsEggen, Carrie (Author) / Lin, Jerry Y.S. (Thesis advisor) / Dai, Lenore (Committee member) / Rege, Kaushal (Committee member) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Vogt, Bryan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The first part describes Metal Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MESFET) based fundamental analog building blocks designed and fabricated in a single poly, 3-layer metal digital CMOS technology utilizing fully depletion mode MESFET devices. DC characteristics were measured by varying the power supply from 2.5V to 5.5V. The measured DC transfer curves of amplifiers show good agreement with the simulated ones with extracted models from the same process. The accuracy of the current mirror showing inverse operation is within ±15% for the current from 0 to 1.5mA with the power supply from 2.5 to 5.5V. The second part presents a low-power image recognition system with a novel MESFET device fabricated on a CMOS substrate. An analog image recognition system with power consumption of 2.4mW/cell and a response time of 6µs is designed, fabricated and characterized. The experimental results verified the accuracy of the extracted SPICE model of SOS MESFETs. The response times of 4µs and 6µs for one by four and one by eight arrays, respectively, are achieved with the line recognition. Each core cell for both arrays consumes only 2.4mW. The last part presents a CMOS low-power transceiver in MICS band is presented. The LNA core has an integrated mixer in a folded configuration. The baseband strip consists of a pseudo differential MOS-C band-pass filter achieving demodulation of 150kHz-offset BFSK signals. The SRO is used in a wakeup RX for the wake-up signal reception. The all digital frequency-locked loop drives a class AB power amplifier in a transmitter. The sensitivity of -85dBm in the wakeup RX is achieved with the power consumption of 320µW and 400µW at the data rates of 100kb/s and 200kb/s from 1.8V, respectively. The sensitivities of -70dBm and -98dBm in the data-link RX are achieved with NF of 40dB and 11dB at the data rate of 100kb/s while consuming only 600µW and 1.5mW at 1.2V and 1.8V, respectively.
ContributorsKim, Sung (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Christen, Jennifer Blain (Committee member) / Cao, Yu (Committee member) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The partially-depleted (PD) silicon Metal Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MESFET) is becoming more and more attractive for analog and RF applications due to its high breakdown voltage. Compared to conventional CMOS high voltage transistors, the silicon MESFET can be fabricated in commercial standard Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) CMOS foundries without any change to the process. The transition frequency of the device is demonstrated to be 45GHz, which makes the MESFET suitable for applications in high power RF power amplifier designs. Also, high breakdown voltage and low turn-on resistance make it the ideal choice for switches in the switching regulator designs. One of the anticipated applications of the MESFET is for the pass device for a low dropout linear regulator. Conventional NMOS and PMOS linear regulators suffer from high dropout voltage, low bandwidth and poor stability issues. In contrast, the N-MESFET pass transistor can provide an ultra-low dropout voltage and high bandwidth without the need for an external compensation capacitor to ensure stability. In this thesis, the design theory and problems of the conventional linear regulators are discussed. N-MESFET low dropout regulators are evaluated and characterized. The error amplifier used a folded cascode architecture with gain boosting. The source follower topology is utilized as the buffer to sink the gate leakage current from the MESFET. A shunt-feedback transistor is added to reduce the output impedance and provide the current adaptively. Measurement results show that the dropout voltage is less than 150 mV for a 1A load current at 1.8V output. Radiation measurements were done for discrete MESFET and fully integrated LDO regulators, which demonstrate their radiation tolerance ability for aerospace applications.
ContributorsChen, Bo (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis advisor) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Sliding-Mode Control (SMC) has several benefits over traditional Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) control in terms of fast transient response, robustness to parameter and component variations, and low sensitivity to loop disturbances. An All-Digital Sliding-Mode (ADSM) controlled DC-DC converter, utilizing single-bit oversampled frequency domain digitizers is proposed. In the proposed approach, feedback and reference digitizing Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) are based on a single-bit, first order Sigma-Delta frequency to digital converter, running at 32MHz over-sampling rate. The ADSM regulator achieves 1% settling time in less than 5uSec for a load variation of 600mA. The sliding-mode controller utilizes a high-bandwidth hysteretic differentiator and an integrator to perform the sliding control law in digital domain. The proposed approach overcomes the steady state error (or DC offset), and limits the switching frequency range, which are the two common problems associated with sliding-mode controllers. The IC is designed and fabricated on a 0.35um CMOS process occupying an active area of 2.72mm-squared. Measured peak efficiency is 83%.
ContributorsDashtestani, Ahmad (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Song, Hongjiang (Committee member) / Kiaei, Sayfe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Power management plays a very important role in the current electronics industry. Battery powered and handheld applications require novel power management techniques to extend the battery life. Most systems have multiple voltage regulators to provide power sources to the different circuit blocks and/or sub-systems. Some of these voltage regulators are low dropout regulators (LDOs) which typically require output capacitors in the range of 1's to 10's of µF. The necessity of output capacitors occupies valuable board space and can add additional integrated circuit (IC) pin count. A high IC pin count can restrict LDOs for system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. The presented research gives the user an option with regard to the external capacitor; the output capacitor can range from 0 - 1µF for a stable response. In general, the larger the output capacitor, the better the transient response. Because the output capacitor requirement is such a wide range, the LDO presented here is ideal for any application, whether it be for a SoC solution or stand-alone LDO that desires a filtering capacitor for optimal transient performance. The LDO architecture and compensation scheme provide a stable output response from 1mA to 200mA with output capacitors in the range of 0 - 1µF. A 2.5V, 200mA any-cap LDO was fabricated in a proprietary 1.5µm BiCMOS process, consuming 200µA of ground pin current (at 1mA load) with a dropout voltage of 250mV. Experimental results show that the proposed any-cap LDO exceeds transient performance and output capacitor requirements compared to previously published work. The architecture also has excellent line and load regulation and less sensitive to process variation. Therefore, the presented any-cap LDO is ideal for any application with a maximum supply rail of 5V.
ContributorsTopp, Matthew (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Ozev, Sule (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The high cut-off frequency of deep sub-micron CMOS technologies has enabled the integration of radio frequency (RF) transceivers with digital circuits. However, the challenging point is the integration of RF power amplifiers, mainly due to the low breakdown voltage of CMOS transistors. Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) metal semiconductor field effect transistors (MESFETs) have been introduced to remedy the limited headroom concern in CMOS technologies. The MESFETs presented in this thesis have been fabricated on different SOI-CMOS processes without making any change to the standard fabrication steps and offer 2-30 times higher breakdown voltage than the MOSFETs on the same process. This thesis explains the design steps of high efficiency and wideband RF transmitters using the proposed SOI-CMOS compatible MESFETs. This task involves DC and RF characterization of MESFET devices, along with providing a compact Spice model for simulation purposes. This thesis presents the design of several SOI-MESFET RF power amplifiers operating at 433, 900 and 1800 MHz with ~40% bandwidth. Measurement results show a peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 55% and a peak output power of 22.5 dBm. The RF-PAs were designed to operate in Class-AB mode to minimize the linearity degradation. Class-AB power amplifiers lead to poor power added efficiency, especially when fed with signals with high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) such as wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA). Polar transmitters have been introduced to improve the efficiency of RF-PAs at backed-off powers. A MESFET based envelope tracking (ET) polar transmitter was designed and measured. A low drop-out voltage regulator (LDO) was used as the supply modulator of this polar transmitter. MESFETs are depletion mode devices; therefore, they can be configured in a source follower configuration to have better stability and higher bandwidth that MOSFET based LDOs. Measurement results show 350 MHz bandwidth while driving a 10 pF capacitive load. A novel polar transmitter is introduced in this thesis to alleviate some of the limitations associated with polar transmitters. The proposed architecture uses the backgate terminal of a partially depleted transistor on SOI process, which relaxes the bandwidth and efficiency requirements of the envelope amplifier in a polar transmitter. The measurement results of the proposed transmitter demonstrate more than three times PAE improvement at 6-dB backed-off output power, compared to the traditional RF transmitters.
ContributorsGhajar, Mohammad Reza (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis advisor) / Aberle, James T., 1961- (Committee member) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Every engineer is responsible for completing a capstone project as a culmination of accredited university learning to demonstrate technical knowledge and enhance interpersonal skills, like teamwork, communication, time management, and problem solving. This project, with three or four engineers working together in a group, emphasizes not only the importance of technical skills acquired through laboratory procedures and coursework, but the significance of soft skills as one transitions from a university to a professional workplace; it also enhances the understanding of an engineer's obligation to ethically improve society by harnessing technical knowledge to bring about change. The CC2541 Smart SensorTag is a device manufactured by Texas Instruments that focuses on the use of wireless sensors to create low energy applications, or apps; it is equipped with Bluetooth Smart, which enables it to communicate wirelessly with similar devices like smart phones and computers, assisting greatly in app development. The device contains six built-in sensors, which can be utilized to track and log personal data in real-time; these sensors include a gyroscope, accelerometer, humidifier, thermometer, barometer, and magnetometer. By combining the data obtained through the sensors with the ability to communicate wirelessly, the SensorTag can be used to develop apps in multiple fields, including fitness, recreation, health, safety, and more. Team SensorTag chose to focus on health and safety issues to complete its capstone project, creating applications intended for use by senior citizens who live alone or in assisted care homes. Using the SensorTag's ability to track multiple local variables, the team worked to collect data that verified the accuracy and quality of the sensors through repeated experimental trials. Once the sensors were tested, the team developed applications accessible via smart phones or computers to trigger an alarm and send an alert via vibration, e-mail, or Tweet if the SensorTag detects a fall. The fall detection service utilizes the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors with the hope that such a system will prevent severe injuries among the elderly, allow them to function more independently, and improve their quality of life, which is the obligation of engineers to better through their work.
ContributorsMartin, Katherine Julia (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis director) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
MESFETs are used in high frequency applications and are typically made from GaAs. Dr. Trevor Thornton designed a silicon-on-insulator MESFET \u2014 a cheaper alternative with competitive capabilities. This paper concerns the characterization and modeling of this device to exhibit its marketability as a CMOS integrated transistor. Overviews of the MESFET's history and DLTS (deep level transient spectroscopy) are offered.
ContributorsTerrell, Catherine Elaine (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis director) / Young, Alexander (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The Metal Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor (MESFET) has high potential to enter analog and RF applications due to their high breakdown voltage and switching frequency characteristics. These MESFET devices could allow for high voltage analog circuits to be integrated with low voltage digital circuits on a single chip in an extremely cost effective way. Higher integration leads to electronics with increased functionality and a smaller finished product. The MESFETs are designed in-house by the research group led by Dr. Trevor Thornton. The layouts are then sent to multi-project wafer (MPW) integrated circuit foundry companies, such as the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS) to be fabricated. Once returned, the electrical characteristics of the devices are measured. The MESFET has been implemented in various applications by the research group, including the low dropout linear regulator (LDO) and RF power amplifier. An advantage of the MESFET is that it can function in extreme environments such as space, allowing for complex electrical systems to continue functioning properly where traditional transistors would fail.
ContributorsKam, Jason (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis director) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis presents a gas sensor readout IC for amperometric and conductometric electrochemical sensors. The Analog Front-End (AFE) readout circuit enables tracking long term exposure to hazardous gas fumes in diesel and gasoline equipments, which may be correlated to diseases. Thus, the detection and discrimination of gases using microelectronic gas sensor system is required. This thesis describes the research, development, implementation and test of a small and portable based prototype platform for chemical gas sensors to enable a low-power and low noise gas detection system. The AFE reads out the outputs of eight conductometric sensor array and eight amperometric sensor arrays. The IC consists of a low noise potentiostat, and associated 9bit current-steering DAC for sensor stimulus, followed by the first order nested chopped £U£G ADC. The conductometric sensor uses a current driven approach for extracting conductance of the sensor depending on gas concentration. The amperometric sensor uses a potentiostat to apply constant voltage to the sensors and an I/V converter to measure current out of the sensor. The core area for the AFE is 2.65x0.95 mm2. The proposed system achieves 91 dB SNR at 1.32 mW quiescent power consumption per channel. With digital offset storage and nested chopping, the readout chain achieves 500 fÝV input referred offset.
ContributorsKim, Hyun-Tae (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Vermeire, Bert (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011