scholarly journals Modeling and Optimization of Directly Modulated Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Flavius Pop ◽  
Bernard Herrera ◽  
Cristian Cassella ◽  
Matteo Rinaldi

The present work details a novel approach to increase the transmitting sensitivity of piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer arrays and performing the direct modulation of digital information on the same device. The direct modulation system can reach 3× higher signal-to-noise ratio level and 3× higher communication range (from 6.2 cm boosted to 18.6 cm) when compared to more traditional continuous wave drive at the same energy consumption levels. When compared for the same transmission performance, the direct modulation consumes 80% less energy compared to the continues wave. The increased performance is achieved with a switching circuit that allows to generate a short high-AC voltage on the ultrasonic array, by using an LC tank and a bipolar junction transistor, starting with a low-DC voltage, making it CMOS-compatible. Since the modulation signal can directly be formed by the transmitted bits (on/off keying encoding) this also serve as the modulation for the data itself, hence direct modulation. The working principle of the circuit is described, optimization is performed relative to several circuital parameters and a high-performance experimental application is demonstrated.

Author(s):  
Xiufeng Li ◽  
Victor T C Tsang ◽  
Lei Kang ◽  
Yan Zhang ◽  
Terence T W Wong

AbstractLaser diodes (LDs) have been considered as cost-effective and compact excitation sources to overcome the requirement of costly and bulky pulsed laser sources that are commonly used in photoacoustic microscopy (PAM). However, the spatial resolution and/or imaging speed of previously reported LD-based PAM systems have not been optimized simultaneously. In this paper, we developed a high-speed and high-resolution LD-based PAM system using a continuous wave LD, operating at a pulsed mode, with a repetition rate of 30 kHz, as an excitation source. A hybrid scanning mechanism that synchronizes a one-dimensional galvanometer mirror and a two-dimensional motorized stage is applied to achieve a fast imaging capability without signal averaging due to the high signal-to-noise ratio. By optimizing the optical system, a high lateral resolution of 4.8 μm has been achieved. In vivo microvasculature imaging of a mouse ear has been demonstrated to show the high performance of our LD-based PAM system.


The world of digital information has been generous to produce large data. The task of finding similar images in such a vast repository in real-time is very challenging. In this paper, Content Based Retrieval System is proposed to retrieve similar images with a novel approach of combining the image features like color and shape. The work includes extraction of color feature from images by dividing them into five significant portions, which emphasizes on center portion of an image where object may reside. This process is carried out and represented using color histograms. Next, shape features are extracted using Hu - moments for the entire image. Later, by combining these two features, similar image retrieval is done based on a query. Various trials of retrieval have been carried out with different categories and results are tabulated. These results are compared with existing works and shows high performance.


Author(s):  
Daniel L. Stevens ◽  
Stephanie A. Schuckers

Digital intercept receivers are currently moving away from Fourier-based analysis and towards classical time-frequency analysis techniques for the purpose of analyzing low probability of intercept radar signals. This paper presents the novel approach of characterizing low probability of intercept frequency modulated continuous wave radar signals through utilization and direct comparison of the Spectrogram versus the Scalogram. Two different triangular modulated frequency modulated continuous wave signals were analyzed. The following metrics were used for evaluation: percent error of: carrier frequency, modulation bandwidth, modulation period, chirp rate, and time-frequency localization (x and y direction). Also used were: percent detection, lowest signal-to-noise ratio for signal detection, and plot (processing) time. Experimental results demonstrate that overall, the Spectrogram produced more accurate characterization metrics than the Scalogram. An improvement in performance may well translate into saved equipment and lives.


Author(s):  
Daniel L. Stevens

Digital intercept receivers are currently moving away from Fourier-based analysis and towards classical time frequency analysis techniques for the purpose of analyzing low probability of intercept radar signals. This paper presents the novel approach of characterizing low probability of intercept triangular modulated frequency modulated continuous wave radar signals through utilization and direct comparison of the Wigner Ville Distribution versus the Choi Williams Distribution. The following metrics were used for evaluation: percent error of: carrier frequency, modulation bandwidth, modulation period, chirp rate, and time-frequency localization (x and y direction). Also used were: percent detection, lowest signal-to noise ratio for signal detection, and plot (processing) time. Experimental results demonstrate that overall, the Wigner Ville Distribution produced more accurate characterization metrics than the Choi Williams Distribution. An improvement in performance may well translate into an increase in personnel safety.


Author(s):  
Mohammed R. Elkobaisi ◽  
Fadi Al Machot

AbstractThe use of IoT-based Emotion Recognition (ER) systems is in increasing demand in many domains such as active and assisted living (AAL), health care and industry. Combining the emotion and the context in a unified system could enhance the human support scope, but it is currently a challenging task due to the lack of a common interface that is capable to provide such a combination. In this sense, we aim at providing a novel approach based on a modeling language that can be used even by care-givers or non-experts to model human emotion w.r.t. context for human support services. The proposed modeling approach is based on Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) which helps to integrate different IoT data sources in AAL environment. Consequently, it provides a conceptual support level related to the current emotional states of the observed subject. For the evaluation, we show the evaluation of the well-validated System Usability Score (SUS) to prove that the proposed modeling language achieves high performance in terms of usability and learn-ability metrics. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance at runtime of the model instantiation by measuring the execution time using well-known IoT services.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3455
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Meca Meca ◽  
Ernesto Martín-Gorostiza ◽  
Miguel Ángel García-Garrido ◽  
David Salido-Monzú

Transimpedance amplifiers (TIA) are widely used for front-end signal conditioning in many optical distance measuring applications in which high accuracy is often required. Small effects due to the real characteristics of the components and the parasitic elements in the circuit board may cause the error to rise to unacceptable levels. In this work we study these effects on the TIA delay time error and deduce analytic expressions, taking into account the trade-off between the uncertainties caused by the delay time instability and by the signal-to-noise ratio. A specific continuous-wave phase-shift case study is shown to illustrate the analysis, and further compared with real measurements. General strategies and conclusions, useful for designers of this kind of system, are extracted too. The study and results show that the delay time thermal stability is a key determinant factor in the measured distance accuracy and, without an adequate design, moderate temperature variations of the TIA can cause extremely high measurement errors.


Author(s):  
Denys Rozumnyi ◽  
Jan Kotera ◽  
Filip Šroubek ◽  
Jiří Matas

AbstractObjects moving at high speed along complex trajectories often appear in videos, especially videos of sports. Such objects travel a considerable distance during exposure time of a single frame, and therefore, their position in the frame is not well defined. They appear as semi-transparent streaks due to the motion blur and cannot be reliably tracked by general trackers. We propose a novel approach called Tracking by Deblatting based on the observation that motion blur is directly related to the intra-frame trajectory of an object. Blur is estimated by solving two intertwined inverse problems, blind deblurring and image matting, which we call deblatting. By postprocessing, non-causal Tracking by Deblatting estimates continuous, complete, and accurate object trajectories for the whole sequence. Tracked objects are precisely localized with higher temporal resolution than by conventional trackers. Energy minimization by dynamic programming is used to detect abrupt changes of motion, called bounces. High-order polynomials are then fitted to smooth trajectory segments between bounces. The output is a continuous trajectory function that assigns location for every real-valued time stamp from zero to the number of frames. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a newly created dataset of videos from a high-speed camera using a novel Trajectory-IoU metric that generalizes the traditional Intersection over Union and measures the accuracy of the intra-frame trajectory. The proposed method outperforms the baselines both in recall and trajectory accuracy. Additionally, we show that from the trajectory function precise physical calculations are possible, such as radius, gravity, and sub-frame object velocity. Velocity estimation is compared to the high-speed camera measurements and radars. Results show high performance of the proposed method in terms of Trajectory-IoU, recall, and velocity estimation.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2042
Author(s):  
Redha Boubenia ◽  
Patrice Le Moal ◽  
Gilles Bourbon ◽  
Emmanuel Ramasso ◽  
Eric Joseph

The paper deals with a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT)-based sensor dedicated to the detection of acoustic emissions from damaged structures. This work aims to explore different ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio and the sensitivity of such sensors focusing on the design and packaging of the sensor, electrical connections, signal processing, coupling conditions, design of the elementary cells and operating conditions. In the first part, the CMUT-R100 sensor prototype is presented and electromechanically characterized. It is mainly composed of a CMUT-chip manufactured using the MUMPS process, including 40 circular 100 µm radius cells and covering a frequency band from 310 kHz to 420 kHz, and work on the packaging, electrical connections and signal processing allowed the signal-to-noise ratio to be increased from 17 dB to 37 dB. In the second part, the sensitivity of the sensor is studied by considering two contributions: the acoustic-mechanical one is dependent on the coupling conditions of the layered sensor structure and the mechanical-electrical one is dependent on the conversion of the mechanical vibration to electrical charges. The acoustic-mechanical sensitivity is experimentally and numerically addressed highlighting the care to be taken in implementation of the silicon chip in the brass housing. Insertion losses of about 50% are experimentally observed on an acoustic test between unpackaged and packaged silicon chip configurations. The mechanical-electrical sensitivity is analytically described leading to a closed-form amplitude of the detected signal under dynamic excitation. Thus, the influence of geometrical parameters, material properties and operating conditions on sensitivity enhancement is clearly established: such as smaller electrostatic air gap, and larger thickness, Young’s modulus and DC bias voltage.


1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1178-1180 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Dorgeuille ◽  
B. Mersali ◽  
M. Feuillade ◽  
S. Sainson ◽  
S. Slempkes ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
Vol 383-390 ◽  
pp. 471-475
Author(s):  
Yong Bin Hong ◽  
Cheng Fa Xu ◽  
Mei Guo Gao ◽  
Li Zhi Zhao

A radar signal processing system characterizing high instantaneous dynamic range and low system latency is designed based on a specifically developed signal processing platform. Instantaneous dynamic range loss is a critical problem when digital signal processing is performed on fixed-point FPGAs. In this paper, the problem is well resolved by increasing the wordlength according to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of the algorithms through the data path. The distinctive software structure featuring parallel pipelined processing and “data flow drive” reduces the system latency to one coherent processing interval (CPI), which significantly improves the maximum tracking angular velocity of the monopulse tracking radar. Additionally, some important electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) are incorporated into this signal processing system.


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