Investigation of CMOS Varactors for High-GHz-Range Applications

This paper explores a variety of different CMOS varactor structures for RF and MMICs. A typical 0.18 μm CMOS foundry process was used as the study platform. The varactors' capacitance-voltage characteristics and cutoff frequencies have been examined up to 55 GHz. The primary aim of this work is to design varactors that can improve nonlinear-transmission-line (NLTL) pulse-compression circuits. The results should also be valuable for other applications up to millimeter wavelengths.

Token-Aware Completion Functions for Elastic Processor Verification

We develop a formal verification procedure to check that elastic pipelined processor designs correctly implement their instruction set architecture (ISA) specifications. The notion of correctness we use is based on refinement. Refinement proofs are based on refinement maps, which—in the context of this problem—are functions that map elastic processor states to states of the ISA specification model. Data flow in elastic architectures is complicated by the insertion of any number of buffers in any place in the design, making it hard to construct refinement maps for elastic systems in a systematic manner. We introduce token-aware completion functions, which incorporate a mechanism to track the flow of data in elastic pipelines, as a highly automated and systematic approach to construct refinement maps. We demonstrate the efficiency of the overall verification procedure based on token-aware completion functions using six elastic pipelined processor models based on the DLX architecture.

Disturbance Observer-Based Simple Nonlinearity Compensation for Matrix Converter Drives

This paper presents a new method to compensate the nonlinearity for matrix converter drives using disturbance observer. The nonlinearity of matrix converter drives such as commutation delay, turn-on and turn-off time of switching device, and on-state switching device voltage drop is modeled by disturbance observer and compensated. The proposed method does not need any additional hardware and offline experimental measurements. The proposed compensation method is applied for high-performance induction motor drives using a 3 kW matrix converter system without a speed sensor. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method using disturbance observer provides good compensating characteristics.

Distributed Source Localization Based on TOA Measurements in Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the problem of source localization in multihop wireless sensor networks. A fully distributed algorithm based on sensor measurements of time of arrivals (TOAs) is proposed. In contrast to centralized methods where all TOA measurements are transmitted via certain routes to a central location (the sink) for processing, the proposed method distributes the processing among the relay nodes on the routes to the sink. Fusion strategies are proposed so that the raw and intermediate data are progressively processed, and only the refined results are further relayed. As a result, the proposed scheme has improved flexibility and scalability since it does not impose any special requirements on the sink node. The proposed distributed strategy also has the potential to save energy and bandwidth due to reduced radio transmissions.

Experimental Observation of Oscillating Wave Propagation on Switch Lines for Generation of Continuous Electromagnetic Waves

We report the experimental observation of the generation of continuous electrical waves in a switch line, which is a transmission line periodically loaded with electronic switches. The oscillating motions of a wave front have been experimentally demonstrated in a line with discrete Esaki diodes employed as switches, when a rising step-pulse signal was passed through the line.