Sine-Wave Signal Characterization Using Square-Wave and ΣΔ-Modulation: Application to Mixed-Signal BIST

This paper presents a method for extracting, in the digital domain, the main characteristic parameters of an analog sine-wave signal. It is based on a double-modulation, square-wave and sigma-delta, together with a simple Digital Processing Algorithm. It leads to an efficient and robust approach very suitable for BIST applications. In this line, some considerations for on-chip implementation are addressed together with simulation results that validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.Diego Vázquez was born in El Coronil, Sevilla, Spain, in 1966. He received the Licenciado en Física degree in 1989 and the Doctor en Ciencias Físicas degree in 1995, both from the University of Sevilla, Spain. Since 1990, he has been with the Departamento de Electrónica y Electromagnetismo, University of Sevilla, where he is a Associate Professor, and also with the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica (IMSE-CNM-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain. He has published about 100 papers in international journals, books and major conferences. In 1992 he won the Best Paper Award of the 10th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium. His research interests are in the fields of design, fault tolerance, test, and design for testability of analog and mixed-signal circuits.Gloria Huertas was born in Sevilla, Spain, in 1974. She received the Licenciado en Física degree in 1997 and the Ph.D. in 2004, both from the University of Sevilla, Spain. Since then, she has been with the Departamento de Electrónica y Electromagnetismo, University of Sevilla, where she is Assistant Professor, and also with the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica (IMSE-CNM-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain. Her research focuses on designing electronic mixed-signal circuits and systems including techniques for testability.África Luque was born in Zamora (Spain) in 1977. She received the Licenciado en Física degree in 2000 from the University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain. She is with the Departamento de Electrónica y Electromagnetismo, University of Sevilla, and also with the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica (IMSE-CNM-CSIC), Sevilla, Spain, where she is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. Her research focuses on the design and test of mixed-signal circuits including Silicon-On-Insulator technologies.Manuel J. Barragan was born in Sevilla, Spain, in 1980. He received the Licenciado en Física degree in 2003 from the University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree from the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla (IMSE, CNM) on the topics of test and design for testability of analog and mixed-signal circuits.Gildas Leger was born in St. Brieuc, Côtes dArmor, France, in 1976. He received the Ingénieur en Physique degree in 1999 from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) of Rennes, France.He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree from the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla (IMSE, CNM). His research focuses on designing electronic mixed-signal circuits and systems including techniques for testability, specially in the domain of analog to digital conversion.Adoración Rueda joined the Department of Electronics and Electromagnetism at the University of Seville in 1976 as Assistant Professor, and obtained the Ph.D. degree in 1982. From 1984 to 1996 she was Associate Professor in that Department, where now holds the position of Full Professor in Electronics. In 1989 she became researcher at the Department of Analog Design of the National Microelectronics Center (CNM), now Institute of Microelectronics at Seville (IMSE).She has participated in several research projects financed by the Spanish CICYT and by different programs of the European Community. She has published about 135 papers in international journals, books and major conferences. In 1992 she won the Best Paper Award of the 10th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium. Her research interests are currently focused on the topics of Design and Test of Analog and Mixed-signal Circuits, Behavioral Modeling of Mixed-signal Circuits, and development of CAD tools.Jose Luis Huertas received the Licenciado en Física degree nd the Doctor en Ciencias Físicas degrees in 1969 and 1973, respectively, both from the University of Sevilla, Spain.From 1970 to 1971, he was with the Philips International Institute, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as a postgraduate student. Since 1971, he has been with the Departamento de Electrónica y Electromagnetismo, University of Sevilla, Spain, where he is a Full Professor. He is also the Director of the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica de Sevilla, Seville, Spain. His current interests include the design and testing of analog/digital integrated circuits, computer-aided IC analysis and design, fuzzy logic, nonlinear microelectronics, and neural networks.     

High‐Conductivity Poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene):Poly(styrene sulfonate) Film and Its Application in Polymer Optoelectronic Devices

The conductivity of a poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) film can be enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude by adding a compound with two or more polar groups, such as ethylene glycol, meso‐erythritol (1,2,3,4‐tetrahydroxybutane), or 2‐nitroenthanol, to an aqueous solution of PEDOT:PSS. The mechanism for this conductivity enhancement is studied, and a new mechanism proposed. Raman spectroscopy indicates an effect of the liquid additive on the chemical structure of the PEDOT chains, which suggests a conformational change of PEDOT chains in the film. Both coil and linear conformations or an expanded‐coil conformation of the PEDOT chains may be present in the untreated PEDOT:PSS film, and the linear or expanded‐coil conformations may become dominant in the treated PEDOT:PSS film. This conformational change results in the enhancement of charge‐carrier mobility in the film and leads to an enhanced conductivity. The high‐conductivity PEDOT:PSS film is ideal as an electrode for polymer optoelectronic devices. Polymer light‐emitting diodes and photovoltaic cells fabricated using such high‐conductivity PEDOT:PSS films as the anode exhibit a high performance, close to that obtained using indium tin oxide as the anode.     

A Silicon–Silica Nanocomposite Material

The synthesis and characterization of a novel silicon–silica nanocomposite material are reported. A self‐assembly method allows the encapsulation of silicon nanoclusters within the channels of a periodic mesoporous silica thin film. The result is the formation of a silicon–silica nanocomposite film with bright, room‐temperature photoluminescence in the visible range, and a nanosecond luminescence lifetime. The properties of the nanocomposite material have been studied by several analytical techniques, which collectively show the existence within the channels of non‐diamondoid‐structure‐type silicon nanoclusters with various hydrogenated silicon sites. It is estimated that the silicon nanoclusters in the silica mesoporous films occupy up to 39 % of the accessible pore volume. The nanocomposite film shows improved resistance to air oxidation compared to crystalline silicon. The high loading and chemical stability to oxidation under ambient conditions are important advantages in terms of the development of silicon‐based light‐emitting diodes from this class of materials.     

Improving the Brightness and Daylight Contrast of Organic Light‐Emitting Diodes

For most applications of displays based on organic light‐emitting diodes (LEDs), it is desirable to have good daylight contrast in combination with a high intensity of emitted light. The conventional approaches to enhance the daylight contrast, using a black cathode or circular polarizers, result in a significant loss of light emitted by the LED. A rather novel approach to enhance daylight contrast while keeping loss of emitted light to a minimum is the introduction of a chiral‐nematic film in the device. This approach leads to an increase in light efficiency by a factor of 1.8 (with respect to circular polarizers) with some loss in daylight contrast values within the reflection band of the chiral‐nematic film. Outside the reflection band, however, the contrast approaches infinity.     

Design and Architecture of Low‐Latency High‐Speed Turbo Decoders

In this paper, we propose and present implementation results of a high‐speed turbo decoding algorithm. The latency caused by (de)interleaving and iterative decoding in a conventional maximum a posteriori turbo decoder can be dramatically reduced with the proposed design. The source of the latency reduction is from the combination of the radix‐4, center to top, parallel decoding, and early‐stop algorithms. This reduced latency enables the use of the turbo decoder as a forward error correction scheme in real‐time wireless communication services. The proposed scheme results in a slight degradation in bit error rate performance for large block sizes because the effective interleaver size in a radix‐4 implementation is reduced to half, relative to the conventional method. To prove the latency reduction, we implemented the proposed scheme on a field‐programmable gate array and compared its decoding speed with that of a conventional decoder. The results show an improvement of at least five fold for a single iteration of turbo decoding.     

Performance evolution of trellis coding in Multiple Input Multiple Output communication systems—A review

In recent years, it has been realized that the Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) communication system is inevitable in accelerating the evolution of high data rate applications. Also the latest research in Information and Communication Technology has told that considerable gains in capacity of wireless communication are feasible in MIMO systems. MIMO with Space Time Trellis Code (STTC) offers both diversity gain and coding gain. This paper discusses the evolutional variants of Space Time Trellis Code developed over a decade. The performance of New Trellis code for STTC, STTC for 4-PSK, Space Frequency Trellis code (SFTC), Space Time Bit Trellis Code, and Silver STTC have been studied and discussed. STTC with Trellis Coded Modulation creates a bandwidth efficient system with coding gain.     

A new concept of planar self-reconfigurable modular robot for conveying microparts

Modularity and self-healing are two interesting properties that could help to design more flexible conveyors of micro-objects. In the Smart Blocks project, we propose to design a 2D modular and self-reconfigurable robot composed of centimeter-scale sliding blocks that embed their own actuators and control electronics. This article presents a proof-of-concept of the linkage and of the traveling system as well as an algorithm able to reconfigure a set of blocks from a spatial configuration to another one. Prototype blocks have been realized using electro-permanent magnets which show a good motion speed while saving power consumption during the linkage. Our reconfiguration algorithm is implemented in a simulator software showing in real-time the reconfiguration of the robot.     

A Discrete‐Amplitude Pulse Width Modulation for a High‐Efficiency Linear Power Amplifier

A new discrete‐amplitude pulse width modulation (DAPWM) scheme for a high‐efficiency linear power amplifier is proposed. A radio frequency (RF) input signal is divided into an envelope and a phase modulated carrier. The low‐frequency envelope is modulated so that it can be represented by a pulse whose area is proportional to its amplitude. The modulated pulse has at least two different pulse amplitude levels in order that the duty ratios of the pulse are kept large for small input. Then, an RF pulse train is generated by mixing the modulated envelope with the phase modulated carrier. The RF pulse train is amplified by a switching‐mode power amplifier, and the original RF input signal is restored by a band pass filter. Because duty ratios of the RF pulse train are kept large in spite of a small input envelope, the DAPWM technique can reduce loss from harmonic components. Furthermore, it reduces filtering efforts required to suppress harmonic components. Simulations show that the overall efficiency of the pulsed power amplifier with DAPWM is about 60.3% for a mobile WiMax signal. This is approximately a 73% increase compared to a pulsed power amplifier with PWM.     

Superparamagnetic Nanostructures for Off‐Resonance Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Imaging

This study proposes a new method to generate positive contrast in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using superparamagnetic contrast agents. Superparamagnetic nanostructures consisting of octahedron manganese ferrite nanoparticles embedded in spherical nanogels are fabricated using a bottom‐up approach. The composite nanoparticles are strongly magnetized in an external magnetic field and produce a unique NMR frequency shift in water protons, which can be demonstrated in MR spectroscopy and imaging to be different from the bulk pool. Moreover, the particles exhibit excellent colloidal stability in aqueous media and good cell biocompatibility. Hence, these particles are potentially useful as biomarkers by taking advantage of the positive contrast effects produced in MRI.