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- All Subjects: Electrical Engineering
- Creators: Chakrabarti, Chaitali
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
Demand for biosensor research applications is growing steadily. According to a new report by Frost & Sullivan, the biosensor market is expected to reach $14.42 billion by 2016. Clinical diagnostic applications continue to be the largest market for biosensors, and this demand is likely to continue through 2016 and beyond. Biosensor technology for use in clinical diagnostics, however, requires translational research that moves bench science and theoretical knowledge toward marketable products. Despite the high volume of academic research to date, only a handful of biomedical devices have become viable commercial applications. Academic research must increase its focus on practical uses for biosensors. This dissertation is an example of this increased focus, and discusses work to advance microfluidic-based protein biosensor technologies for practical use in clinical diagnostics. Four areas of work are discussed: The first involved work to develop reusable/reconfigurable biosensors that are useful in applications like biochemical science and analytical chemistry that require detailed sensor calibration. This work resulted in a prototype sensor and an in-situ electrochemical surface regeneration technique that can be used to produce microfluidic-based reusable biosensors. The second area of work looked at non-specific adsorption (NSA) of biomolecules, which is a persistent challenge in conventional microfluidic biosensors. The results of this work produced design methods that reduce the NSA. The third area of work involved a novel microfluidic sensing platform that was designed to detect target biomarkers using competitive protein adsorption. This technique uses physical adsorption of proteins to a surface rather than complex and time-consuming immobilization procedures. This method enabled us to selectively detect a thyroid cancer biomarker, thyroglobulin, in a controlled-proteins cocktail and a cardiovascular biomarker, fibrinogen, in undiluted human serum. The fourth area of work involved expanding the technique to produce a unique protein identification method; Pattern-recognition. A sample mixture of proteins generates a distinctive composite pattern upon interaction with a sensing platform consisting of multiple surfaces whereby each surface consists of a distinct type of protein pre-adsorbed on the surface. The utility of the "pattern-recognition" sensing mechanism was then verified via recognition of a particular biomarker, C-reactive protein, in the cocktail sample mixture.
ContributorsChoi, Seokheun (Author) / Chae, Junseok (Thesis advisor) / Tao, Nongjian (Committee member) / Yu, Hongyu (Committee member) / Forzani, Erica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Sensing and controlling current flow is a fundamental requirement for many electronic systems, including power management (DC-DC converters and LDOs), battery chargers, electric vehicles, solenoid positioning, motor control, and power monitoring. Current Shunt Monitor (CSM) systems have various applications for precise current monitoring of those aforementioned applications. CSMs enable current measurement across an external sense resistor (RS) in series to current flow. Two different types of CSMs designed and characterized in this paper. First design used direct current reading method and the other design used indirect current reading method. Proposed CSM systems can sense power supply current ranging from 1mA to 200mA for the direct current reading topology and from 1mA to 500mA for the indirect current reading topology across a typical board Cu-trace resistance of 1 ohm with less than 10 µV input-referred offset, 0.3 µV/°C offset drift and 0.1% accuracy for both topologies. Proposed systems avoid using a costly zero-temperature coefficient (TC) sense resistor that is normally used in typical CSM systems. Instead, both of the designs used existing Cu-trace on the printed circuit board (PCB) in place of the costly resistor. The systems use chopper stabilization at the front-end amplifier signal path to suppress input-referred offset down to less than 10 µV. Switching current-mode (SI) FIR filtering technique is used at the instrumentation amplifier output to filter out the chopping ripple caused by input offset and flicker noise by averaging half of the phase 1 signal and the other half of the phase 2 signal. In addition, residual offset mainly caused by clock feed-through and charge injection of the chopper switches at the chopping frequency and its multiple frequencies notched out by the since response of the SI-FIR filter. A frequency domain Sigma Delta ADC which is used for the indirect current reading type design enables a digital interface to processor applications with minimally added circuitries to build a simple 1st order Sigma Delta ADC. The CSMs are fabricated on a 0.7µm CMOS process with 3 levels of metal, with maximum Vds tolerance of 8V and operates across a common mode range of 0 to 26V for the direct current reading type and of 0 to 30V for the indirect current reading type achieving less than 10nV/sqrtHz of flicker noise at 100 Hz for both approaches. By using a semi-digital SI-FIR filter, residual chopper offset is suppressed down to 0.5mVpp from a baseline of 8mVpp, which is equivalent to 25dB suppression.
ContributorsYeom, Hyunsoo (Author) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Thesis advisor) / Kiaei, Sayfe (Committee member) / Ozev, Sule (Committee member) / Yu, Hongyu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) and channel hot carrier (CHC) are important reliability issues impacting analog circuit performance and lifetime. Compact reliability models and efficient simulation methods are essential for circuit level reliability prediction. This work proposes a set of compact models of NBTI and CHC effects for analog and mixed-signal circuit, and a direct prediction method which is different from conventional simulation methods. This method is applied in circuit benchmarks and evaluated. This work helps with improving efficiency and accuracy of circuit aging prediction.
ContributorsZheng, Rui (Author) / Cao, Yu (Thesis advisor) / Yu, Hongyu (Committee member) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (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
Description
The past two decades have been monumental in the advancement of microchips designed for a diverse range of medical applications and bio-analysis. Owing to the remarkable progress in micro-fabrication technology, complex chemical and electro-mechanical features can now be integrated into chip-scale devices for use in biosensing and physiological measurements. Some of these devices have made enormous contributions in the study of complex biochemical processes occurring at the molecular and cellular levels while others overcame the challenges of replicating various functions of human organs as implant systems. This thesis presents test data and analysis of two such systems. First, an ISFET based pH sensor is characterized for its performance in a continuous pH monitoring application. Many of the basic properties of ISFETs including I-V characteristics, pH sensitivity and more importantly, its long term drift behavior have been investigated. A new theory based on frequent switching of electric field across the gate oxide to decrease the rate of current drift has been successfully implemented with the help of an automated data acquisition and switching system. The system was further tested for a range of duty cycles in order to accurately determine the minimum length of time required to fully reset the drift. Second, a microfluidic based vestibular implant system was tested for its underlying characteristics as a light sensor. A computer controlled tilt platform was then implemented to further test its sensitivity to inclinations and thus it‟s more important role as a tilt sensor. The sensor operates through means of optoelectronics and relies on the signals generated from photodiode arrays as a result of light being incident on them. ISFET results show a significant drop in the overall drift and good linear characteristics. The drift was seen to reset at less than an hour. The photodiodes show ideal I-V comparison between photoconductive and photovoltaic modes of operation with maximum responsivity at 400nm and a shunt resistance of 394 MΩ. Additionally, post-processing of the tilt sensor to incorporate the sensing fluids is outlined. Based on several test and fabrication results, a possible method of sealing the open cavity of the chip using a UV curable epoxy has been discussed.
ContributorsMamun, Samiha (Author) / Christen, Jennifer Blain (Thesis advisor) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Yu, Hongyu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This thesis investigated two different thermal flow sensors for intravascular shear stress analysis. They were based on heat transfer principle, which heat convection from the resistively heated element to the flowing fluid was measured as a function of the changes in voltage. For both sensors, the resistively heated elements were made of Ti/Pt strips with the thickness 0.12 µm and 0.02 µm. The resistance of the sensing element was measured at approximately 1.6-1.7 kohms;. A linear relation between the resistance and temperature was established over the temperature ranging from 22 degree Celsius to 80 degree Celsius and the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) was at approximately 0.12 %/degree Celsius. The first thermal flow sensor was one-dimensional (1-D) flexible shear stress sensor. The structure was sensing element sandwiched by a biocompatible polymer "poly-para-xylylene", also known as Parylene, which provided both insulation of electrodes and flexibility of the sensors. A constant-temperature (CT) circuit was designed as the read out circuit based on 0.6 µm CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process. The 1-D shear stress sensor suffered from a large measurement error. Because when the sensor was inserted into blood vessels, it was impossible to mount the sensor to the wall as calibrated in micro fluidic channels. According to the previous simulation work, the shear stress was varying and the sensor itself changed the shear stress distribution. We proposed a three-dimensional (3-D) thermal flow sensor, with three-axis of sensing elements integrated in one sensor. It was in the similar shape as a hexagonal prism with diagonal of 1000 µm. On the top of the sensor, there were five bond pads for external wires over 500 µm thick silicon substrate. In each nonadjacent side surface, there was a bended parylene branch with one sensing element. Based on the unique 3-D structure, the sensor was able to obtain data along three axes. With computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, it is possible to locate the sensor in the blood vessels and give us a better understanding of shear stress distribution in the presence of time-varying component of blood flow and realize more accurate assessment of intravascular convective heat transfer.
ContributorsTang, Rui (Author) / Yu, Hongyu (Thesis advisor) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Pan, George (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In this work, we present approximate adders and multipliers to reduce data-path complexity of specialized hardware for various image processing systems. These approximate circuits have a lower area, latency and power consumption compared to their accurate counterparts and produce fairly accurate results. We build upon the work on approximate adders and multipliers presented in [23] and [24]. First, we show how choice of algorithm and parallel adder design can be used to implement 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm with good performance but low area. Our implementation of the 2D DCT has comparable PSNR performance with respect to the algorithm presented in [23] with ~35-50% reduction in area. Next, we use the approximate 2x2 multiplier presented in [24] to implement parallel approximate multipliers. We demonstrate that if some of the 2x2 multipliers in the design of the parallel multiplier are accurate, the accuracy of the multiplier improves significantly, especially when two large numbers are multiplied. We choose Gaussian FIR Filter and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithms to illustrate the efficacy of our proposed approximate multiplier. We show that application of the proposed approximate multiplier improves the PSNR performance of 32x32 FFT implementation by 4.7 dB compared to the implementation using the approximate multiplier described in [24]. We also implement a state-of-the-art image enlargement algorithm, namely Segment Adaptive Gradient Angle (SAGA) [29], in hardware. The algorithm is mapped to pipelined hardware blocks and we synthesized the design using 90 nm technology. We show that a 64x64 image can be processed in 496.48 µs when clocked at 100 MHz. The average PSNR performance of our implementation using accurate parallel adders and multipliers is 31.33 dB and that using approximate parallel adders and multipliers is 30.86 dB, when evaluated against the original image. The PSNR performance of both designs is comparable to the performance of the double precision floating point MATLAB implementation of the algorithm.
ContributorsVasudevan, Madhu (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Gupta, Sandeep (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Structural integrity is an important characteristic of performance for critical components used in applications such as aeronautics, materials, construction and transportation. When appraising the structural integrity of these components, evaluation methods must be accurate. In addition to possessing capability to perform damage detection, the ability to monitor the level of damage over time can provide extremely useful information in assessing the operational worthiness of a structure and in determining whether the structure should be repaired or removed from service. In this work, a sequential Bayesian approach with active sensing is employed for monitoring crack growth within fatigue-loaded materials. The monitoring approach is based on predicting crack damage state dynamics and modeling crack length observations. Since fatigue loading of a structural component can change while in service, an interacting multiple model technique is employed to estimate probabilities of different loading modes and incorporate this information in the crack length estimation problem. For the observation model, features are obtained from regions of high signal energy in the time-frequency plane and modeled for each crack length damage condition. Although this observation model approach exhibits high classification accuracy, the resolution characteristics can change depending upon the extent of the damage. Therefore, several different transmission waveforms and receiver sensors are considered to create multiple modes for making observations of crack damage. Resolution characteristics of the different observation modes are assessed using a predicted mean squared error criterion and observations are obtained using the predicted, optimal observation modes based on these characteristics. Calculation of the predicted mean square error metric can be computationally intensive, especially if performed in real time, and an approximation method is proposed. With this approach, the real time computational burden is decreased significantly and the number of possible observation modes can be increased. Using sensor measurements from real experiments, the overall sequential Bayesian estimation approach, with the adaptive capability of varying the state dynamics and observation modes, is demonstrated for tracking crack damage.
ContributorsHuff, Daniel W (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Chattopadhyay, Aditi (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
High Impedance Surfaces (HISs), which have been investigated extensively, have proven to be very efficient ground planes for low profile antenna applications due to their unique reflection phase characteristics. Another emerging research field among the microwave and antenna technologies is the design of flexible antennas and microwave circuits to be utilized in conformal applications. The combination of those two research topics gives birth to a third one, namely the design of Conformal or Flexible HISs (FHISs), which is the main subject of this dissertation. The problems associated with the FHISs are twofold: characterization and physical realization. The characterization involves the analysis of scattering properties of FHISs in the presence of plane wave and localized sources. For this purpose, an approximate analytical method is developed to characterize the reflection properties of a cylindrically curved FHIS. The effects of curvature on the reflection phase of the curved FHISs are examined. Furthermore, the effects of different types of currents, specifically the ones inherent to finite sized periodic structures, on the reflection phase characteristics are observed. After the reflection phase characterization of curved HISs, the performance of dipole antennas located in close proximity to a curved HIS are investigated, and the results are compared with the flat case. Different types of resonances that may occur for such a low-profile antenna application are discussed. The effects of curvature on the radiation performance of antennas are examined. Commercially available flexible materials are relatively thin which degrades the bandwidth of HISs. Another practical aspect, which is related to the substrate thickness, is the compactness of the surface. Because of the design limitations of conventional HISs, it is not possible to miniaturize the HIS and increase the bandwidth, simultaneously. To overcome this drawback, a novel HIS is proposed with a periodically perforated ground plane. Copper plated through holes are extremely vulnerable to bending and should be avoided at the bending parts of flexible circuits. Fortunately, if designed properly, the perforations on the ground plane may result in suppression of surface waves. Hence, metallic posts can be eliminated without hindering the surface wave suppression properties of HISs.
ContributorsDurgun, Ahmet Cemal (Author) / Balanis, Constantine A (Thesis advisor) / Aberle, James T (Committee member) / Yu, Hongyu (Committee member) / Bakkaloglu, Bertan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013