A High Speed, Low Voltage CMOS Offset Comparator

A high speed, low voltage offset comparator is presented. No common mode tracking circuit is used and the offset is added without compromising the high input impedance nature of the circuit. The circuit operates at 480 Mbps with 3.0–3.6 V and 1.6–2.0 V supplies and –40 to 125°C temperature range on a typical 0.5 m technology.     

Corrosion Inhibition of Novel Prepared Cationic Surfactants for API N80 Carbon Steel Pipelines in Oil Industries

The objective of this study is to investigate the corrosion inhibition of API N80 steel pipelines in 1M HCl solution by a synthesized compound (N-(3-(dimethyl octyl ammonio) propyl) palmitamide bromide, subjected to four different modes of measurements. Weight loss (WL) was investigated at five different temperatures: 25–60°C, while potentiodynamic polarization, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and electrochemical frequency modulation (EFM) were tested at 25°C. The result showed that the synthesized inhibitor was good and its protection efficiency (%η) significantly increased by increasing both the dose and the temperature. The polarization curve revealed that the studied inhibitor acts as mixed-type of inhibitor. Adsorption of the investigated inhibitor led to a reduction in the double layer capacitance and an increase in the charge transfer resistance. The adsorption of this inhibitor was found to obey the Langmuir adsorption model. The thermodynamic parameters were calculated and discussed. A clear correlation was found between corrosion protection efficiency and theoretical parameters obtained using density functional theory.     

AMAP for typecasting

We introduce a design of an associative memory array processor (AMAP) to be used in character recognition. The design example is based upon the bit-parallel organization. The AMAP consists of identical processing elements that can store information about a specific position into the pattern and also contain some logic gates to carry out logical operations. No effort has been made to perform either processing or feature extraction of any kind     

Robust palm and knuckle ROI extraction in unconstrained environment

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Palm and knuckle prints can be extracted from a hand using a low-cost camera in a contactless manner. This makes the process of palm and knuckle recognition fast...     

Adaptive compressive sensing for target tracking within wireless visual sensor networks-based surveillance applications

Wireless Visual Sensor Networks (WVSNs) have gained significant importance in the last few years and have emerged in several distinctive applications. The main aim is to design low power WVSN surveillance application using adaptive Compressive Sensing (CS) which is expected to overcome the WVSN resource constraints such as memory limitation, communication bandwidth and battery constraints. In this paper, an adaptive block CS technique is proposed and implemented to represent the high volume of captured images in a way for energy efficient wireless transmission and minimum storage. Furthermore, to achieve energy-efficient target detection and tracking with high detection reliability and robust tracking, to maximize the lifetime of sensor nodes as they can be left for months without any human interactions. Adaptive CS is expected to dynamically achieve higher compression rates depending on the sparsity nature of different datasets, while only compressing relative blocks in the image that contain the target to be tracked instead of compressing the whole image. Hence, saving power and increasing compression rates. Least mean square adaptive filter is used to predicts target’s next location to investigate the effect of CS on the tracking performance. The tracking is achieved in both indoor and outdoor environments for single/multi targets. Results have shown that with adaptive block CS up to 20 % measurements of data are required to be transmitted while preserving the required performance for target detection and tracking.     

Mass transfer from spherical particles and reservoirs into quiescent liquids

A continuous weighing technique was developed for measuring urea transfer (carbamide, a fertilizer) from a single opening on a coated sphere in a stagnant liquid. Urea release was determined from the changes of the particle weight with time. Mass transfer coefficients for Rayleigh numbers from 1.8 × 10⁷ to 6.8 × 10¹⁰ were measured and compared with those for uncoated urea spheres and literature data. For the opening oriented vertically upward in water, natural convection enhanced the transfer rate by 1.8 times compared to that for urea diffusion only. In other opening orientations (45°, 90°, 135° and 180° to the vertical), natural convection provided the major mechanism for the release. A model for urea diffusion was also developed. It agrees well with experimental data.     

Experimental investigation of phenolic wastewater treatment using combined activated carbon and UV processes

Experimental investigation shows that UV/hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) oxidation of a more concentrated phenolic wastewater can lead to economical savings. The savings can be achieved by the lower amount of H₂O₂ required and time needed to treat the wastewater. Phenolic wastewater can be concentrated by treating the bulk wastewater with activated carbon. The concentrated wastewater that is generated from activated carbon regeneration (assumed to be fully regenerated by steam) can then be treated with UV/H₂O₂. Experimental results show that H₂O₂ concentration goes through an optimum value where adding any more H₂O₂ will result in less effective removal of contaminants. Conductivity of treated wastewater increases sharply then drops down. This could be attributed to the presence of high molecular compounds, inorganic acids, and OH radicals.     

Widespread infection of lake whitefish Coregonus clupeaformis with the swimbladder nematode Cystidicola farionis in northern lakes Michigan and Huron

We estimated the prevalence, intensity, and abundance of swimbladder nematode infection in 1281 lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis) collected from four sites in northern lakes Huron (Cheboygan and DeTour Village) and Michigan (Big Bay de Noc and Naubinway) from fall 2003 through summer 2006. Morphological examination of nematode egg, larval, and mature stages through light and scanning electron microscopy revealed characteristics consistent with that of Cystidicola farionis Fischer 1798. Total C. farionis prevalence was 26.94%, while the mean intensity and abundance of infection was 26.72 and 7.21 nematodes/fish, respectively. Although we detected C. farionis in all four stocks that were examined, Lake Huron stocks generally had higher prevalence, intensity, and abundance of infection than Lake Michigan stocks. A distinct seasonal fluctuation in prevalence, abundance, and intensity of C. farionis was observed, which does not coincide with reported C. farionis development in other fish species. Lake whitefish that were heavily infected with C. farionis were found to have thickened swimbladder walls with deteriorated mucosa lining, which could affect swimbladder function. Whether C. farionis infection may be negatively impacting lake whitefish stocks in the Great Lakes is unclear; continued monitoring of C. farionis infection should be conducted to measure responses of lake whitefish stocks to infection levels.     

A low-voltage, highly linear voltage-controlled transconductor

A low-voltage fully differential, voltage-controlled transconductor is described. The proposed transconductor achieves a wide input/control voltage range, with a highly linear transconductance factor and truly fully differential output currents. The transconductor is used to implement a G/sub m/-C adaptive forward equalizer (FE) for a 125 Mbps wire line transceiver using digital core transistors with channel length of no more than double the feature size in a typical digital CMOS 180-nm process and supply voltage as low as 1.6 V. The adaptive FE enables IEEE 1394b transceivers to operate over UTP-5 cables for up to 100 m in length. The transconductor stage occupies 1945 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ and consumes an average power of 418 /spl mu/w at 125 Mbps and 1.8-V supply.     

An adaptive high-voltage protection and common-mode adjustment circuit for passive–active continuous-time sigma–delta ADCs

A digitally-programmable circuit is proposed to provide high-voltage protection at start-up, overload, and supply loss conditions in continuous-time passive–active sigma delta ADCs implemented in low-voltage nanometer CMOS technologies. The circuit optimizes the common-mode level at the input stage of the ADC enabling it to interface with input levels beyond its own supply voltage with no impact on device reliability or distortion levels, and minimum impact on area and noise performance, which provides maximum flexibility in the ADC usage. The proposed circuit along with the full ADC is implemented in a typical 65 nm CMOS technology.