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This creative project is a part of the work being done as a Senior Design Project in which an autonomous solar charge controller is being developed. The goal of this project is to design and build a prototype of an autonomous solar charge controller that can work independently of the power grid. This solar charge controller is being built for a community in Monument Valley, Arizona who live off grid. The controller is designed to step down power supplied by an array of solar panels to charge a 48V battery and supply power to an inverter. The charge controller can implement MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) to charge the battery and power the inverter, it also is capable of disconnecting from the battery when the battery is fully charged and reconnecting when it detects that the battery has discharged. The charge controller can also switch from supplying power to the inverter from the panel to supplying power from the battery at low sun or night. These capabilities are not found in solar charge controllers that are on the market. This project aims to achieve all these capabilities and provide a solution for the problems being faced by the current solar charge controller
providing flexible network services at relative high transmission rates. This work investigates the effectiveness of localized routing that prioritizes transmissions over the local gateway to the optical network and avoids wireless packet transmissions in radio zones that do not contain the packet source or destination. Existing routing schemes for FiWi networks consider mainly hop-count and delay metrics over a flat WMN node topology and do not specifically prioritize the local network structure. The combination of clustered and localized routing (CluLoR) performs better in terms of throughput-delay compared to routing schemes that are based on minimum hop-count which do not consider traffic localization. Subsequently, this work also investigates the packet delays when relatively low-rate traffic that has traversed a wireless network is mixed with conventional high-rate PON-only traffic. A range of different FiWi network architectures with different dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) mechanisms is considered. The grouping of the optical network units (ONUs) in the double-phase polling (DPP) DBA mechanism in long-range (order of 100~Km) FiWi networks is closely examined, and a novel grouping by cycle length (GCL) strategy that achieves favorable packet delay performance is introduced. At the end, this work proposes a novel backhaul network architecture based on a Smart Gateway (Sm-GW) between the small cell base stations (e.g., LTE eNBs) and the conventional backhaul gateways, e.g., LTE Servicing/Packet Gateway (S/P-GW). The Sm-GW accommodates flexible number of small cells while reducing the infrastructure requirements at the S-GW of LTE backhaul. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed Sm-GW incorporates the scheduling mechanisms to achieve the network fairness while sharing the resources among all the connected small cells base stations.
The research described in this dissertation consists of four main parts. First is a new circuit architecture of a differential threshold logic flipflop called PNAND. The PNAND gate is an edge-triggered multi-input sequential cell whose next state function is a threshold function of its inputs. Second a new approach, called hybridization, that replaces flipflops and parts of their logic cones with PNAND cells is described. The resulting \hybrid circuit, which consists of conventional logic cells and PNANDs, is shown to have significantly less power consumption, smaller area, less standby power and less power variation.
Third, a new architecture of a field programmable array, called field programmable threshold logic array (FPTLA), in which the standard lookup table (LUT) is replaced by a PNAND is described. The FPTLA is shown to have as much as 50% lower energy-delay product compared to conventional FPGA using well known FPGA modeling tool called VPR.
Fourth, a novel clock skewing technique that makes use of the completion detection feature of the differential mode flipflops is described. This clock skewing method improves the area and power of the ASIC circuits by increasing slack on timing paths. An additional advantage of this method is the elimination of hold time violation on given short paths.
Several circuit design methodologies such as retiming and asynchronous circuit design can use the proposed threshold logic gate effectively. Therefore, the use of threshold logic flipflops in conventional design methodologies opens new avenues of research towards more energy-efficient circuits.
The shading losses are reduced by lowering the finger width of the solar cell .This reduction of the front metal coverage causes an increase in the series resistance, thereby adversely affecting the fill factor and hence efficiency. To overcome this problem, double printing method is explored to be used for front grid metallization. Before its implementation, it is important to accurately understand the effect of reducing the finger width on the series resistance. Hence, series resistance models are modified from the existing generic model and developed to capture the effects of screen-printing. To have minimum power loss in the solar cell, finger spacing is optimized for the front grid design with each of the finger widths chosen, which are narrower than the baseline finger width. A commercial software package called Griddler is used to predict the results of the model developed to capture effects of screen-printing.
The process for double printing with accurate alignment for finger width down to 50um is developed. After designing the screens for optimized front grid, solar cells are fabricated using both single printing and double printing methods and an improvement of efficiency from 17.2% to 17.8%, with peak efficiency of 18% is demonstrated.
With the motivation of developing enabling techniques for two-way relay (TWR) channels experiencing excessive synchronization errors, two conceptually-different schemes are proposed to accommodate any relative misalignment between the signals received at any node. By designing a practical transmission/detection mechanism based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the proposed schemes perform significantly better than existing competing solutions. In a related direction, differential modulation is implemented for asynchronous TWR systems that lack the channel state information (CSI) knowledge. The challenge in this problem compared to the conventional point-to-point counterpart arises not only from the asynchrony but also from the existence of an interfering signal. Extensive numerical examples, supported by analytical work, are given to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed schemes.
Other important issues considered in this dissertation are related to the extension of the two-way relaying scheme to the multiple-user case, known as the multi-way relaying. First, a distributed source coding solution based on Slepian-Wolf coding is proposed to compress correlated messages close to the information theoretical limits in the context of multi-way relay (MWR) channels. Specifically, the syndrome approach based on low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes is implemented. A number of relaying strategies are considered for this problem offering a tradeoff between performance and complexity. The proposed solutions have shown significant improvements compared to the existing ones in terms of the achievable compression rates. On a different front, a novel approach to channel coding is proposed for the MWR channel based on the implementation of nested codes in a distributed manner. This approach ensures that each node decodes the messages of the other users without requiring complex operations at the relay, and at the same time, providing substantial benefits compared to the traditional routing solution.