Analysis and design of a novel radial folded waveguide structure for a feeder of a planar radial line antenna

Transmission characteristics of a new type of radial folded waveguide structure, consisting of a bifurcating metal disc with finite thickness between lower and upper radial waveguides and placed unsymmetrically in the folded portion as a general case, are investigated theoretically using a mode matching technique. A novel technique is proposed in which step junctions included in the bifurcating metal disc between lower and upper radial waveguides play an essential role in minimizing reflections caused by finite thickness of the bifurcating metal disc as well as the unsymmetry at the folded region and hence, a complete power transmission is achieved. Based on numerical computations some practical structure which is applied as a feeder for a planar radial line radiating structure of a plasma generating device is designed and perfect matching performance is demonstrated. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 9: 415–423, 1999     

High-gain W-band-printed antenna on flexible substrate

This article demonstrates a novel type of series-fed planar antenna array for a W-band (70 GHz) application. The proposed architecture is a 5-element antenna array with 10 numbers of gap-coupled parasitic patches in microstrip configuration over a thin, flexible and bio-compatible substrate named LCP (liquid crystal polymer). A detailed design methodology with all fabrication constraints has been elaborated on here. Full wave analysis of the whole structure has been carried out in the FEM-based 3D electromagnetic (EM) solver ANSYS HFSS Suite V.19.2. Parametric simulations were studied to achieve the optimized values of all design parameters. Further, an empirical electrical equivalent circuit model is proposed for the antenna array, and it was validated with the simulation results obtained from the FEM solver. Two prototypes have been fabricated, and measurements were carried out to fetch all the designed antenna parameters. The proto version of the antenna offers peak directive gain of about 19 dBi with better than 22 dB of return loss and 80% radiation efficiency for the frequency range of 67–85 GHz. Experimental and simulated results closely match each other. Small deviations are attributed to practical imperfections incurred by fabrication tolerances, measurement inaccuracies, testing, assembly-related issues and so forth. Finally, the current research work is compared with the recently reported literature.     

Measurement of atmospheric water vapour content over a tropical location by dual frequency microwave radiometry

Atmospheric water vapour was measured over a tropical location, Calcutta, by deploying dual frequency microwave radiometers operating at 22.235 and 31.4 GHz. Simultaneous measurements of brightness temperature and hence attenuation in the presence of thin cloud were made for the purpose. An algorithm was developed to exclude the effect of non-precipitating liquid water during the measurement of water vapour. The experimental results are supported by the corresponding radiosonde data analysis. Dual frequency radiometric measurements are shown to improve the rms accuracy, over the single frequency inversion technique, for the measurement of water vapour.     

Test Planning in Digital Microfluidic Biochips Using Efficient Eulerization Techniques

Digital microfluidic technology is now being extensively used for implementing a lab-on-a-chip. Microfluidic biochips are often used for safety-critical applications, clinical diagnosis, and for genome analysis. Thus, devising effective and faster testing methodologies to warrant correct operations of these devices after manufacture and during bioassay operations, is very much needed. In this paper, we propose an Euler tour based technique to obtain the route plan of a test droplet for the purpose of structural testing of biochips. The method is applicable to various digital microfluidic biochip architectures, e.g., fully reconfigurable arrays, application specific biochips, pin-constrained irregular geometry biochips, and to defect-tolerant biochips. We show that in general, the optimal Eulerization and subsequent determination of an Euler tour in the graph model of a biochip can be abstracted in terms of the classical Chinese postman problem. The Euler tour can be identified by running the classical Hierholzer’s algorithm, which relies on a simple cycle decomposition and splicing method. This improved Eulerization technique leads to an efficient test plan for the chip. This can also be used in phase-based test planning that yields savings in testing time. The method provides a unified approach towards structural testing and can be easily adopted to design a droplet routing procedure for functional testing of digital microfluidic biochips.     

Unsupervised image thresholding: hardware architecture and its usage for FPGA-SoC platform

ABSTRACT

Otsu’s global automatic image thresholding operation is used in various image processing applications. It needs computation of normalized cumulative histogram, mean and cumulative moments that are compute-intensive operations. In this paper, a custom architecture is presented for an efficient computation of Otsu’s algorithm along with its utilization as an intellectual property (IP) core in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based system-on-chip (SoC) environment for the application of connected component analysis (CCA). A self-normalization technique is employed, where single-cycle, read–modify–write operations are performed with block random access memories (BRAMs) and digital signal processing (DSP)slices. The architecture is designed for 640 × 480 size of images that are captured by a high-resolution analouge camera and buffered in a DDR2 SDRAM of Xilinx ML-507 platform at 25.175 MHz clock frequency. The embedded PowerPC processor core is used to control the frame acquisition process. Experimental results on Virtex-5 xc5vfx70t FPGA device show that the architecture utilizes 1.4% slices, 2.7% BRAMs and 3.9% DSP48E slices. The total power consumption of the design is 1440.59 mW. The proposed architecture as an IP core is able to work in real-time with standard VGA resolution video and requires low computational resources.     

Application of quantum dot gate nonvolatile memory (QDNVM) in image segmentation

This paper presents the application of quantum dot gate nonvolatile memory (QDNVM) in image processing application. The charge accumulation in the gate region varies the threshold voltage of QDNVM, which can be used as a reference voltage source in a comparator circuit. A simplified comparator circuit can be implemented using the QDNVM. In this work, the use of QDNVM-based comparators in image processing specially image segmentation is demonstrated, which can be efficient in future image processing application.     

Nonvolatile Silicon Memory Using GeO<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">x</Emphasis></Subscript>-Cladded Ge Quantum Dots Self-Assembled on SiO<Subscript>2</Subscript> and Lattice-Matched II–VI Tunnel Insulator

This paper presents fabrication and characterization of a quantum dot-based floating gate nonvolatile memory device with site-specific self-assembly of germanium oxide-cladded germanium (GeO _x -Ge) quantum dots on SiO₂ and ZnS/ZnMgS/ZnS (II–VI lattice-matched high-κ dielectric) tunnel insulator material. These monodispersed and individually cladded quantum dots have the potential to store charge uniformly in the floating gate and are well suited for nonvolatile memory applications.     

Non-uniform distributions of photonic bandgap microstripline structures

With the advent of planar photonic bandgap (PBG) materials different topologies of PBG structures have been proposed to improve the bandpass and band rejection performances of microwave signals. Conventional circular patterned PBGs have constraints in the broadband performance due to the high ripple heights in S-parameters. In this paper, we suggest two novel configurations with non-uniform dimensions of circular patterned PBG to improve the stopband bandwidth and the ripples. The dimensions of the circles are varied proportionally to the Binomial and Shebyshev polynomial distributions. The S-parameter performances with respect to frequencies have been presented. It is seen that Shebyshev distribution produce excellent performances by suppressing ripples and generating sharp cut-offs.     

Growth of Vertically Aligned Tunable Polyaniline on Graphene/ZrO2 Nanocomposites for Supercapacitor Energy‐Storage Application

In‐situ hydrothermal method is employed to synthesize graphene/zirconium oxide composite from respective precursors graphene oxide and zirconium oxy‐nitrate. In this method, the graphene oxide is reduced itself to graphene and simultaneously metal oxide gets anchor on the graphene sheets. A novel method is also developed for the preparation of vertically aligned tunable polyaniline on the graphene/zirconium oxide nanocomposite, which leads to achieve high surface area (207.1 m² g^?1), high electrical conductivity (70.8 S cm^?1), high specific capacitance (1359.99 Fg^?1 at 1 mV s^?1), and high electrochemical performances as supercapacitor electrode materials. This vertically aligned conducting polymer gets easy contact with electrolyte ions and provides numerous redox active sites during charging and discharging. Moreover, such a simple and low cost assembly approach can be a pioneer for the large‐scale production of various functional architectures for energy storage and conversions.