An improved sensorless driving method for SRM using a phase-shift circuit technique

This paper presents an improved sensorless driving method for switched reluctance motor (SRM) using a phase-shift circuit technique. The conventional method consists of impressing short voltage pulses during unenergized phases, measuring the phase current pulses, and finding the correlation between the filtered current signals and rotor position. However, the filtering process causes a signal phase delay which varies with motor speed. This delay must be compensated for in providing the sensorless signal which is proper to the rotor position. A solution for this phase delay compensation, based on a simple analog and digital circuit, is proposed in this paper.     

Soluble pentacene thin-film transistor using a high solvent and heat resistive polymeric dielectric with low-temperature processability and its long-term stability

Solution processable organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) were fabricated using 6,13-bis(triisopropyl-silylethynyl) pentacene (TIPS-pentacene) and low-temperature processable polyimide gate dielectric. The TIPS-pentacene OTFT with the dielectric was found to have a field-effect mobility of 0.15 cm²/Vs, which is comparable to that of OTFT with an inorganic dielectric. The OTFTs with the polyimide dielectric did not show any significant performance degradation as time passed. A field-effect mobility of the OTFTs in 60 days was found to be almost identical to that of pristine OTFT. The combination of TIPS-pentacene and our polyimide gate dielectric can be one of the potential candidates for the fabrication of stable OTFTs for large-area flexible electronics.     

Phase-separated polydimethylsiloxane as a dielectric surface treatment layer for organic field effect transistors

We suggest a novel method for treating the surfaces of dielectric layers in organic field effect transistors (OFETs). In this method, a blend of poly(9,9-dioctylfluorene-alt-bithiophene) (F8T2) and dimethylsiloxane (DMS) with a curing agent is spin coated onto the surface of a dielectric substrate, silicon oxide (SiO₂), and then thermally cured. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, contact angle measurements, and morphology analysis were used to show that the hydrophilic DMS layer is preferentially adsorbed on the SiO₂ substrate during the spin coating process. After thermal curing, the bottom DMS layer becomes a hydrophobic PDMS layer. This bottom PDMS layer becomes thinner during curing due to the upward motion of the hydrophobic PDMS molecules. The FET mobility of the cured system was 10^?2 cm²/Vs, which is similar to that of polymeric semiconductors on octadecyltrichlorosilane treated SiO₂ dielectric layers. We also discuss the possibility of using this blend method to increase the air-stability of polymeric semiconductors.     

Performance improvement of TCP in ad hoc networks by mitigating channel contention

In ad hoc networks, the spatial reuse property limits the number of packets which can be spatially transmitted over a path. In standard Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), however, a TCP sender keeps transmitting packets without taking into account this property. This causes heavy contention for the wireless channel, resulting in the performance degradation of TCP flows. Hence, two techniques have been proposed independently in order to reduce the contention. First, a TCP sender utilizes a congestion window limit (CWL), by considering the spatial reuse property. This prevents the TCP sender from transmitting more than CWL number of packets at one time. Second, a delayed ack (DA) strategy is exploited in order to mitigate the contention between the TCP ACK and DATA packets. Recently, although TCP‐DAA (Dynamic Adaptive Acknowledgment) attempts to utilize a CWL‐based DA strategy, TCP‐DAA overlooks a dynamic correlation between these two techniques. This paper, therefore, reveals the dynamic correlation and also proposes a protocol which not only reduces the frequency of the TCP ACK transmissions but also determines a CWL value dynamically, according to network conditions. Simulation studies show that our protocol performs the best in various scenarios, as compared to TCP‐DAA and standard TCP (such as TCP‐NewReno). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Low-Area Wrapper Cell Design for Hierarchical SoC Testing

System-on-chip (SoC) integrated circuits are designed and fabricated with multiple levels of hierarchy. However, most previous works on wrapper design, test access mechanism optimization and test scheduling did not take care of the hierarchy properly, thus the corresponding test schedules were often invalid for SoCs with hierarchical cores. We propose a low-area wrapper cell design which can treat SoCs with hierarchy properly and allows simultaneous testing of parent and child cores. The proposed cell uses 13%∼23% less area than a recently proposed cell design in equivalent gate count. As a result we achieve up to 21% area reduction for hierarchical ITC ’02 SoCs compared to the most recently proposed designs.     

Distributed Topology Construction in ZigBee Wireless Networks

Topology control is one of the important techniques in wireless multi-hop networks to preserve connectivity and extend the network lifetime. This is more significant in ZigBee, since the address assignment scheme is tightly coupled with topology construction. For example, there can be orphan nodes that cannot receive the network address and isolated from the network due to predefined network configurations. In this paper, we propose a distributed topology construction algorithm that controls the association time of each node in order to solve the orphan node problem in ZigBee as well as construct an efficient routing tree topology. The main idea of the distributed topology construction algorithm is to construct primary backbone nodes by propagating the invitation packets and controlling the association time based on the link quality. Since the dynamically selected primary nodes are spread throughout the network, they can provide backbone to accept the association requests from the remaining secondary nodes which are majority in a network. In the performance evaluation, we show that the proposed topology construction algorithm effectively solves the orphan node problem regardless of network density as well as provides efficient tree routing cost comparable to the approximation algorithm for degree constrained minimum routing cost tree (DC-MRCT) problem.     

Functionally Antagonistic Hybrid Electrode with Hollow Tubular Graphene Mesh and Nitrogen‐Doped Crumpled Graphene for High‐Performance Ionic Soft Actuators

Ionic soft actuators, which exhibit large mechanical deformations under low electrical stimuli, are attracting attention in recent years with the advent of soft and wearable electronics. However, a key challenge for making high‐performance ionic soft actuators with large bending deformation and fast actuation speed is to develop a stretchable and flexible electrode having high electrical conductivity and electrochemical capacitance. Here, a functionally antagonistic hybrid electrode with hollow tubular graphene meshes and nitrogen‐doped crumpled graphene is newly reported for superior ionic soft actuators. Three‐dimensional network of hollow tubular graphene mesh provides high electrical conductivity and mechanically resilient functionality on whole electrode domain. On the contrary, nitrogen‐doped wrinkled graphene supplies ultrahigh capacitance and stretchability, which are indispensably required for improving electrochemical activity in ionic soft actuators. Present results show that the functionally antagonistic hybrid electrode greatly enhances the actuation performances of ionic soft actuators, resulting in much larger bending deformation up to 620%, ten times faster rise time and much lower phase delay in a broad range of input frequencies. This outstanding enhancement mostly attributes to exceptional properties and synergistic effects between hollow tubular graphene mesh and nitrogen‐doped crumpled graphene, which have functionally antagonistic roles in charge transfer and charge injection, respectively.     

A 4-91-GHz traveling-wave amplifier in a standard 0.12-/spl mu/m SOI CMOS microprocessor technology

This paper presents five-stage and seven-stage traveling-wave amplifiers (TWA) in a 0.12-/spl mu/m SOI CMOS technology. The five-stage TWA has a 4-91-GHz bandpass frequency with a gain of 5 dB. The seven-stage TWA has a 5-86-GHz bandpass frequency with a gain of 9 dB. The seven-stage TWA has a measured 18-GHz noise figure, output 1-dB compression point, and output third-order intercept point of 5.5 dB, 10 dBm, and 15.5 dBm, respectively. The power consumption is 90 and 130 mW for the five-stage and seven-stage TWA, respectively, at a voltage power supply of 2.6 V. The chips occupy an area of less than 0.82 and 1 mm for the five-stage and seven-stage TWA, respectively.     

Thermally controlled wavelength locker integrated in widely tunable SGDBR-LD module

A sampled-grating distributed Bragg reflector laser module having an integrated multiwavelength locker has been developed and evaluated. The uniquely designed wavelength locker made of thermally controlled etalon has provided uniform wavelength monitoring and very stable wavelength locking in the 188-ITU grid channels (37 nm) with 25-GHz spacing. Over the case temperature from -5/spl deg/C to 65/spl deg/C, the laser wavelength was locked within /spl plusmn/0.5 GHz, and the total power consumption of the module was less than 4 W.     

Semi-blind channel estimation and PAR reduction for MIMO-OFDM system with multiple antennas

A combining of MIMO signal processing with OFDM is regarded as a promising solution of enhancing the performance of next generation wireless system. Therefore, in this paper, an OFDM-based wireless system employing layered space-time architecture is considered for a high-rate transmission. With an emphasis on a preamble design for multi-channel separation, we address a channel estimation based on the time-domain windowing and its imperfectness in MIMO-OFDM system. By properly designing each preamble for multiple antennas to be orthogonal in the time domain, the channel estimation can be executed based on semi-blind processing in the case of more than two transmitting antennas. And also we evaluate the PAR performance in the MIMO-OFDM system using the SLM and PTS approaches. The investigated SLM and PTS schemes for MIMO-OFDM signals select the transmitted sequence with lowest average PAR over all transmitting antennas and retrieve the side information very accurately at the expense of a slight degradation of the PAR performance. The low probability of false side information can improve the overall detection performance of the MIMO-OFDM system with erroneous side information compared to the ordinary SLM and PTS approaches, respectively. Also, we provide closed form of the average BER performance in MIMO-OFDM system using analytic approach.