Planar Ultra-Wideband Bandpass Filter Using Edge Coupled Microstrip Lines and Stepped Impedance Open Stub

The design and implementation of a planar ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filter are presented. Three interdigital edge coupled microstrip lines are used for coupling enhancement. A stepped impedance open stub is used for realizing transmission zeros simultaneously in upper and lower stop bands as well as impedance matching in ultra-wide pass band. A pass band from 3.1-10.6 GHz is achieved with an insertion loss of 0.5 dB, a return loss of about 18 dB, a sharp out-of-band-rejection, and a low group delay of only 0.21ns. Single- and double-section filters are realized to meet the UWB mask requirement. The design of the filter is simple, and it shows good frequency response.     

An Effective Power-Aware At-Speed Test Methodology for IP Qualification and Characterization

Advanced nanometer technologies have led to a drastic increase in operational frequencies resulting in the performance of circuits becoming increasingly vulnerable to timing variations. The increasing process spread in advanced nanometer nodes poses considerable challenges in predicting post-fabrication silicon performance from timing models. Thus, there is a great need to qualify basic building structures on silicon in terms of critical parameters before they could be integrated within a complex System-on-Chip (SoC). The work of this paper presents a configurable circuit and an associated power-aware at-speed test methodology for the purpose of qualifying basic standard cells and complex IP structures to detect the presence of timing faults. Our design has been embedded within test-chips used for the development of the 28 nm Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) technology node. The relevant silicon results and analysis validate the proposed power-aware test methodology for qualification and characterization of IPs and provide deeper insights for process improvements.     

Binding of zinc to bovine and human milk proteins

Zn binding by whole bovine and human casein and by purified bovine caseins and whey proteins was investigated by equilibrium dialysis. Bovine alpha s1-casein had the greatest Zn-binding capacity (approximately 11 atoms Zn/mol). Protein aggregation was observed as Zn concentration was increased and the protein precipitated at a free Zn concentration of 1.7 mM. Zn binding increased with increasing pH in the range 5.4-7.0 and decreased with increasing ionic strength. Competition between Zn and Ca was observed for binding to alpha s1-casein indicating common binding sites for these two metals. Bovine beta-casein bound up to 8 atoms Zn/mol and precipitated at a free Zn concentration of approximately 2.5 mM, while kappa-casein bound 1-2 atoms Zn/mol. Whole bovine and human casein bound 5-8 atoms Zn/mol and precipitated at a free Zn concentration of approximately 2.0 mM. Scatchard plots for Zn binding to caseins showed upward convexity, possibly due to Zn-induced association of caseins. Apparent average association constants (Kapp) for all caseins were similar (log Kapp 3.0-3.2). Enzymic dephosphorylation of alpha s1- or whole bovine casein markedly reduced, but did not eliminate, Zn binding. Thus, phosphoserine residues appeared to be the primary Zn-binding sites in caseins. With the exception of bovine serum albumin, which bound over 8 atoms Zn/mol, the bovine whey proteins, beta-lactoglobulin, alpha-lactalbumin and lactotransferrin, had little capacity for Zn binding.     

Compression artifacts reduction with multiscale tensor regularization

Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing - We study a multiscale tensor regularization based JPEG decompression artifact removal in digital images. Structure tensor eigenvalues based robust...     

An efficient and intelligent routing strategy for vehicular delay tolerant networks

The vehicular delay-tolerant network is the real-life application based area of Delay tolerant network where communication takes place using vehicular nodes and roadside units. The topology used in vehicular networks is highly dynamic by architecture due to the use of moving vehicular nodes. It operates in such a scenario where a direct path between source and destination remains absent on the most piece of the time. In case of non-existence of connected path vehicular delay-tolerant network works opportunistically and uses the same store, carry, and forward paradigm as Delay Tolerant Network. However, the routing protocols designed for vehicular delay-tolerant network faces crucial challenges like inadequate relay node, incomplete data transfer, a large number of packet drop, and uncertain delivery time. In this research paper, we propose a novel routing strategy for the vehicular delay-tolerant network. The proposed routing strategy selects efficient vehicular relay node for complete packet transfer and intelligently reduces the packet drop for timely packet delivery. We implement the proposed routing strategy in the ONE simulator; the ONE simulator provides an opportunistic environment for nodes. We analyze the performance of the proposed strategy under various simulations results using different parameters. The results show that the proposed strategy outperforms standard routing protocols in terms of considered parameters and provide an efficient solution for the problem of disconnection.

     

Enhancing the isolation between the strips of dipoles antenna at terahertz frequency with cuboid-shaped graphene layer

Wireless Networks - In this paper, the concept of mantle cloaking method uses to enhance the isolation between the two electrically close dipole antenna at low-terahertz (THz) frequencies, two...     

Ultralow-k silicon containing fluorocarbon films prepared by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition

Low dielectric constant materials as interlayer dielectrics (ILDs) offer a way to reduce the RC time delay in high-performance ultra-large-scale integration (ULSI) circuits. Fluorocarbon films containing silicon have been developed for interlayer applications below 50-nm linewidth technology. The preparation of the films was carried out by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) using gas precursors of tetrafluorocarbon as the source of active species and disilane (5 vol.% in helium) as a reducing agent to control the ratio of F/C in the films. The basic properties of the low dielectric constant (low-k) interlayer dielectric films are studied as a function of the fabrication process parameters. The electrical, mechanical, chemical, and thermal properties were evaluated including dielectric constant, surface planarity, hardness, residual stress, chemical bond structure, and shrinkage upon heat treatments. The deposition process conditions were optimized for film thermal stability while maintaining a relative dielectric value as low as 2.0. The average breakdown field strength was 4.74 MV/cm. The optical energy gap was in the range 2.2–2.4 eV. The hardness and residual stress in the optimized processed SiCF films were, respectively, measured to be in the range 1.4–1.78 GPa and in the range 11.6–23.2 MPa of compressive stress.     

Making Large‐Area Titanium Disulfide Films at Reduced Temperature by Balancing the Kinetics of Sulfurization and Roughening

The synthesis of large‐area TiS₂ thin films is reported at temperatures as low as 500 °C using a scalable two‐step method of metal film deposition followed by sulfurization in an H₂S gas furnace. It is demonstrated that the lowest‐achievable sulfurization temperature depends strongly on the oxygen background during sulfurization. This dependence arises because Ti? O bonds present a substantial kinetic and thermodynamic barrier to TiS₂ formation. Lowering the sulfurization temperature is important to make smooth films, and to enable integration of TiS₂ and related transition metal dichalcogenides—including metastable phases and alloys—into device technology.     

Optical backbone and control of attocell network

Photonic Network Communications - For serving futuristic applications like distributed robotic systems with robots equipped with humanoid intelligence, wireless access to high-performance computing...