Recapillarity: Electrochemically Controlled Capillary Withdrawal of a Liquid Metal Alloy from Microchannels

This paper describes the mechanistic details of an electrochemical method to control the withdrawal of a liquid metal alloy, eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn), from microfluidic channels. EGaIn is one of several alloys of gallium that are liquid at room temperature and form a thin (nm scale) surface oxide that stabilizes the shape of the metal in microchannels. Applying a reductive potential to the metal removes the oxide in the presence of electrolyte and induces capillary behavior; we call this behavior “recapillarity” because of the importance of electrochemical reduction to the process. Recapillarity can repeatably toggle on and off capillary behavior by applying voltage, which is useful for controlling the withdrawal of metal from microchannels. This paper explores the mechanism of withdrawal and identifies the applied current as the key factor dictating the withdrawal velocity. Experimental observations suggest that this current may be necessary to reduce the oxide on the leading interface of the metal as well as the oxide sandwiched between the wall of the microchannel and the bulk liquid metal. The ability to control the shape and position of a metal using an applied voltage may prove useful for shape reconfigurable electronics, optics, transient circuits, and microfluidic components.     

Signal Detection Performance of Overlapped FFT Scheme with Additional Frames Consisting of Non-continuous Samples in Indoor Environment

Overlapped FFT has been proposed as a signal detection scheme in dynamic spectrum access to reduce the variance of the noise and improve the detection probability. However, the improvement of the detection probability in the conventional overlapped FFT is bounded with the upper limit of the overlap ratio. This paper proposes a new overlapped FFT scheme using additional frames. In the proposed scheme, in addition to the original FFT frames, new frames that consist of multiple subframes with non-continuous samples are constructed and included. It can realize the increase of the number of the FFT frames and the improvement of the detection probability compared with the conventional scheme. Numerical results through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme improves the detection probability by up to 0.07. On indoor channel models the proposed scheme also improves the detection probability. In addition, it is clarified that as the delay spread increases the detection probability reduces due to the correlation between the frames.     

The Einstein relation for degenerate semiconductors with nonuniformband structures

Modification of the Einstein equation for semiconductors with nonparabolic energy bands and doped nonuniformly with impurity atoms is suggested. The suggestion is based on a new approximation of the Fermi-Dirac integral of order 1/2, namely, F_1/2(η_n), where η_n is the reduced Fermi level for electrons. The relation reduces to that for semiconductors with parabolic energy bands and doped uniformly with impurity atoms under appropriate boundary conditions. A comparison of the calculated and exact results for F_1/2(η) is found to be very encouraging     

Restoration of images degraded by compound noise sources using Markov random field models

The main theme of this paper is the derivation of a new algorithm for restoring digitized images degraded by both additive and multiplicative noise sources. In order to keep the derivation sufficiently general, the authors also include degradation caused by blur and a class of nonlinearities. The images under consideration are modeled as Markov random fields, while the additive and multiplicative noise sources are assumed to be Gaussian processes with known means and variances. Blurring of images is accomplished by a shift-invariant point-spread function. Test results with degraded images indicate that the algorithm is effective in restoring images degraded by high levels of additive and multiplicative noise.     

Arbitrary dual-band unequal Wilkinson power divider based on negative refractive index transmission lines

This paper focused on the application of negative refractive index transmission line (NRI-TL) in dual-band unequal Wilkinson power divider (WPD) with controllable frequency and power dividing ratio. Theory and design procedure of the dual-band NRI-TL are presented in details. For demonstration, two dual-band unequal Wilkinson power dividers (WPDs) with power dividing ratio of 2 : 1 and operating frequencies of 0.9 and 1.8 GHz are designed, fabricated and tested. The first unequal divider is based on 2-stage NRI-TLs and the second one is based on 4-stage NRI-TLs. In addition, these two types of NRI-TLs are presented to demonstrate that by increasing the number of NRI-TL unit-cells the phase response of the NRI-TLs converge to the desired characteristic. The good agreement between measured and simulated results confirmed the design concept and derived closed-form design equations. Measurements show that the first divider has 18.37% and 21.86% relative bandwidths and the second one has 33.52% and 29.12% relative bandwidths at 0.9 and 1.8 GHz, respectively. The design concept of this paper can be extended to equal dual-band power dividers with arbitrary frequency ratio.     

Interpolation techniques for building a continuous map from discrete wireless sensor network data

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) typically gather data at a discrete number of locations. However, it is desirable to be able to design applications and reason about the data in more abstract forms than in points of data. By bestowing the ability to predict inter‐node values upon the network, it is proposed that it will become possible to build applications that are unaware of the concrete reality of sparse data. This interpolation capability is realised as a service of the network. In this paper, the ‘map’ style of presentation has been identified as a suitable sense data visualisation format. Although map generation is essentially a problem of interpolation between points, a new WSN service, called the map generation service, which is based on a Shepard interpolation method, is presented. A modified Shepard method that aims to deal with the special characteristics of WSNs is proposed. It requires small storage, can be localised and integrates the information about the application domain to further reduce the map generation cost and improve the mapping accuracy. Empirical analysis has shown that the map generation service is an accurate, a flexible and an efficient method. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-voltage and low-power Ku-band CMOS LNA using capacitive feedback

Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing - An ultra-wideband (12–18 GHz) low-noise amplifier (LNA) using a 65 nm CMOS technology is proposed, in which a...     

Yellow–Orange Electroluminescence of Novel Tin Complexes

Novel tin complexes were synthesized for use as fluorescent materials in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). The structures of these complexes were characterized by ultraviolet–visible, Fourier-transform infrared, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy methods and elemental analyses. The energy levels of the tin complexes were determined using cyclic voltammetry measurements. Devices were fabricated with an indium tin oxide (ITO)/PEDOT:PSS (90 nm)/PVK:PBD:tin complexes (75 nm)/Al (180 nm) structure; the resultant devices had peak emissions ranging from 537 nm to 580 nm. The tin complexes accounted for 8 wt.% of the blend in the PVK:PBD (100:40), which was used as a host. The electroluminescent spectra of the tin complexes were red-shifted as compared with the PVK:PBD blend. We believe that the electroluminescence performance of OLED devices based on tin complexes relies on overlaps between the absorption of the tin compounds and the emission of PVK:PBD.     

A Fast Recursive Algorithm and Architecture for Pruned Bit-reversal Interleavers

In this paper, pruned bit-reversal permutations employed in variable-length interleavers and their associated fast pruning algorithms and architectures are considered. Pruning permutations is mathematically formulated as a counting problem in a set of k integers and any subset of $\alpha $ consecutive integers under some permutation, where integers from this subset that map into indices less than some $\beta <k$ are to be counted. A solution to this problem using sums involving integer floors and related functions is proposed. It is shown that these sums can be evaluated recursively using integer operations. Specifically, a mathematical treatment for bit-reversal permutations (BRPs) and their permutation statistics are presented. These permutations have been mainly addressed using numerical techniques in the literature to speed up in-place computations of fast Fourier and related transforms. Closed-form expressions for BRP statistics including inversions, serial correlations, and a new statistic called permutation inliers that characterizes the pruning gap of pruned interleavers, are derived. Using the inliers statistic, a recursive algorithm that computes the minimum number of inliers in a pruned BR interleaver (PBRI) in logarithmic time complexity is presented. This algorithm enables parallelizing a serial PBRI algorithm by any desired parallelism factor by computing the pruning gap in lookahead rather than a serial fashion, resulting in significant reduction in interleaving latency and memory overhead. Extensions to 2-D block and stream interleavers are also presented. Moreover, efficient hardware architectures for the proposed algorithms employing simple logic gates are presented. Simulation results of interleavers employed in modern communication standards demonstrate 3 to 4 orders of magnitude improvement in interleaving time compared to existing approaches.     

Hybrid cascode feedforward compensation for nano-scale low-power ultra-area-efficient three-stage amplifiers

A modified frequency compensation technique is proposed for low-power area-efficient three-stage amplifiers driving medium to large capacitive loads. Coined hybrid cascode feedforward compensation (HCFC), the total compensation capacitor is divided and shared between two internal high-speed feedback loops instead of only one loop as is common in prior art. Detailed analysis of this technique shows significant improvement in terms of bandwidth and stability. This is verified for a 1.2-V amplifier driving a 500-pF capacitive load in 90-nm CMOS technology, where HCFC reduces the total capacitor size and improves the gain-bandwidth by at least 30% and 40% respectively, compared to the prevailing schemes.