Direct Writing of Gallium‐Indium Alloy for Stretchable Electronics

In this paper, a direct writing method for gallium‐indium alloys is presented. The relationships between nozzle inner diameter, standoff distance, flow rate, and the resulting trace geometry are demonstrated. The interaction between the gallium oxide layer and the substrate is critically important in understanding the printing behavior of the liquid metal. The difference between receding and advancing contact angles demonstrates that the adhesion of the oxide layer to the substrate surface is stronger than the wetting of the surface by the gallium‐indium alloy. This further demonstrates why free‐standing structures such as the traces described herein can be realized. In addition to the basic characterization of the direct writing process, a design algorithm that is generalizable to a range of trace geometries is developed. This method is applied to the fabrication of an elastomer‐encapsulated strain gauge that displays an approximately linear behavior through 50% strain with a gauge factor of 1.5.     

The Design Trade-Offs of BitTorrent-Like File Sharing Protocols

The BitTorrent (BT) file sharing protocol is very popular due to its scalability property and the built-in incentive mechanism to reduce free-riding. However, in designing such P2P file sharing protocols, there is a fundamental trade-off between keeping fairness and providing good performance. In particular, the system can either keep peers (especially those resourceful ones) in the system for as long as possible so as to help the system to achieve better performance, or allow more resourceful peers to finish their download as quickly as possible so as to achieve fairness. The current BT protocol represents only one possible implementation in this whole design space. The objective of this paper is to characterize the design space of BT-like protocols. The rationale for considering fairness in the P2P file sharing context is to use it as a measure of willingness to provide service. We show that there is a wide range of design choices, ranging from optimizing the performance of file download time, to optimizing the overall fairness measure. More importantly, we show that there is a simple and easily implementable design knob so that the system can operate at a particular point in the design space. We also discuss different algorithms, ranging from centralized to distributed, in realizing the design knob. Performance evaluations are carried out, both via simulation and network measurement, to quantify the merits and properties of the BT-like file sharing protocols.     

Lipid‐Containing Polymer Vesicles with pH/Ca2+‐Ion‐Manipulated,Size‐Selective Permeability

Polymeric vesicles attained from the self‐assembly of distearin (a diacylglycerol lipid)‐conjugated poly(acrylic acid) (PAAc) with various distearin contents in the aqueous phase show the capability of control over the vesicular‐wall permeability to hydrophilic solutes of varying sizes by a simple manipulation of the external pH. The pH sensitivity of the vesicle membranes in size‐selective permeability is largely dependent upon the lipid content of copolymer. By the addition of CaCl₂ in aqueous vesicle suspensions, the pH‐evolved assembly structure and the membrane permeability can be immobilized with promoted resistance to further pH alteration, along with an additional counterion screening effect that reduces the pH required for the onset of polar solutes of certain sizes to pass through the membranes. Small‐angle X‐ray scattering (SAXS) measurements of the vesicle structure in the aqueous phase indicate that the pH‐regulated permeability to polar solutes is virtually governed by the extent of hydration and swelling of the vesicle membranes, and the lipid residues within each vesicle wall are packed into the ≈4–5 repeating lamellar islet structure surrounded by PAAc segments.     

An Ultra-Broadband Doubly Balanced Monolithic Ring Mixer for Ku- to Ka-band Applications

A novel 12-40 GHz ultra-broadband doubly balanced monolithic ring mixer with a small chip size covering the Ku- to Ka-band applications implemented by a 0.15-mum pseudo- morphic high electron-mobility transistor process is presented. The proposed mixer consists of two spiral transformer baluns and a band-reject filter. The use of the spiral baluns leads to the achievement of a chip size less than 0.8 times 0.8 mm². The radio frequency (RF) spiral balun with a band-reject filter served by an L-C resonator is used to improve the bandwidth of the mixer and to provide an output port for the intermediate frequency (IF) extraction as well. The mixer exhibits a 6-12 dB conversion loss, high isolation over 12-40 GHz RF/local oscillation bandwidth, a DC-8 GHz IF bandwidth, and a 1-dB compression power of 14 dBm for both down- and up-converter applications.     

Bandwidth-Efficient Modulation Codes Based on Nonbinary Irregular Repeat–Accumulate Codes

Using nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with random-coset mapping, Bennatan and Burshtein constructed bandwidth-efficient modulation codes with remarkable performance under belief propagation (BP) decoding. However, due to the random nature of LDPC codes, most of the good LDPC codes found in the literature do not have a simple encoding structure. Thus, the encoding complexity of those LDPC codes can be as high as O(N ²), where N is the codeword length. To reduce the encoding complexity, in this paper, nonbinary irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA) codes with time-varying characteristic and random-coset mapping are proposed for bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes. The time-varying characteristic and random-coset mapping result in both permutation-invariance and symmetry properties, respectively, in the densities of decoder messages. The permutation-invariance and symmetry properties of the proposed codes enable the approximations of densities of decoder messages using Gaussian distributions. Under the Gaussian approximation, extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts for nonbinary IRA codes are developed and several codes of different spectral efficiencies are designed based on EXIT charts. In addition, by proper selection of nonuniform signal constellations, the constructed codes are inherently capable of obtaining shaping gains, even without separate shaping codes. Simulation results indicate that the proposed codes not only have simple encoding schemes, but also have remarkable performance that is even better than that constructed using nonbinary LDPC codes.     

A novel search method to reduce PAPR of an OFDM signal using partial transmit sequences

One of the main drawbacks of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the high peak‐to‐average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted OFDM signal. Partial transmit sequence (PTS) technique can improve the PAPR statistics of an OFDM signal. As ordinary PTS technique requires an exhaustive search over all combinations of allowed phase factors, the search complexity increases exponentially with the number of sub‐blocks. In this paper, we propose a novel PTS technique with reduced complexity that each level inverts twice of phase factor bits from previous level. Then we also use initial random phase sequence to find the better search way of PAPR reduction. Numerical results show that the proposed method can achieve significant reduction in search complexity with little performance degradation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Stabilized Multichannel Fast RLS Algorithm for Adaptive Transmultiplexer Receivers

The transmultiplexer (TMUX) system has been studied for its application to multicarrier communications. The channel impairments including noise, interference, and distortion draw the need for adaptive reconstruction at the TMUX receiver. Among possible adaptive methods, the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm is appealing for its good convergence rate and steady state performance. However, higher computational complexity due to the matrix operation is the drawback of utilizing RLS. A fast RLS algorithm used for adaptive signal reconstruction in the TMUX system is developed in this paper. By using the polyphase decomposition method, the adaptive receiver in the TMUX system can be formulated as a multichannel filtering problem, and the fast algorithm is obtained through the block Toeplitz matrix structure of received signals. In addition to the reduction of complexity, simulation results show that the adaptive TMUX receiver has a convergence rate close to that of the standard RLS algorithm and the performance approaches the minimum mean square error solution.     

Integrated optical device with second-harmonic generator,electrooptic lens, and electrooptic scanner in LiTaO3

This paper reports the first demonstration of an integrated optical device in z-cut LiTaO₃ that contains the following three functional parts: a quasiphase-matched second-harmonic generation (SHG) grating, an electrooptic (EO) lens, and an electrooptic scanner. The SHG device consists of channel waveguides passing through periodic domain-inverted gratings. The frequency of the input infrared (IR) light at 864 nm was doubled into blue light at 432 nm. A stack of EO lenses was used to collimate the light from the channel waveguide. The measured beam size at the output facet for various applied voltages to the lenses agreed with simulation. After collimation, light passes through an EO scanner that controls the angle of the output beam. A scanning sensitivity of 17 mrad/kV was measured for the scanner, compared to the calculated value of 15 mrad/kV     

Red polymer light-emitting devices based on dye-dispersed poly (9,9-dioctylfluorene-alt-benzothiadiazole)

A polymer-organic host-guest emitter (POHGE) system for obtaining polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) with pure red emission and high luminance is proposed. The POHGE system was prepared by the fluorescent dye 4-(dicyanomethylene)-2-t-butyl-6-(1,1,7,7-tetra-methyljulolidy-9-enyl)-4H-pyran (DCJTB) doped in green-emitting polymer poly (9,9-dioctylfluorene-alt-benzothiadiazole) (BTF8). A photoluminescence (PL) quenching phenomenon was observed owing to the higher doping amount of DCJTB dopant. In this study, the red DCJTB dopant emits with high luminance and without concentration quenching when the host BTF8 emitting layer is doped with a small amount of the red guest DCJTB dopant. An optimal amount of DCCJTB dopant was obtained at 2 mg. Devices with a configuration of indium tin oxide (ITO)/poly (ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with poly (styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS)/BTF8:DCJTB/Ca/Al were fabricated. This device achieved an electroluminescence (EL) efficiency of 1.33 cd/A at 6 V. The emission area is 1.5 × 0.5 cm². The devices show the red light emission with a peak at about 630 nm. The color coordinate in Commission Internationale d’Eclairage (CIE) chromaticity is at x = 0.64 and y = 0.36.