Sharif Digital Repository

Leakage power has already become the major contributor to the total on-chip power consumption, rendering its estimation a necessary step in the IC design flow. The problem is further exacerbated with the increasing uncertainty in the manufacturing process known as process variability. We develop a method to estimate the variation of leakage power in the presence of both intra-die and inter-die process variability. Various complicating issues of leakage prediction such as spatial correlation of process parameters, the effect of different input states of gates on the leakage, and DIBL and stack effects are taken into account while we model the simultaneous variability of the two most critical... 

In this paper, we present a reconfigurable architecture for networks-on-chip (NoC) on which arbitrary application-specific topologies can be implemented. When a new application starts, the proposed NoC tailors its topology to the application traffic pattern by changing the inter-router connections to some predefined configuration corresponding to the application. It addresses one of the main drawbacks of the existing application-specific NoC optimization methods, i.e., optimization of NoCs based on the traffic pattern of a single application. Supporting multiple applications is a critical feature of an NoC when several different applications are integrated into a single modern and complex... 

A novel architecture for efficient time and frequency synchronization, applied to the long-term evolution (LTE) standard, is proposed. For symbol timing, we propose applying a symbol-folding method on top of the sign-bit reduction technique, leading to a novel algorithm for the cyclic prefix-type recognition in LTE. Following the symbol timing, the fractional carrier frequency offset is estimated and compensated using an adaptive gain loop, which allows for a high-accuracy compensation in a short interval. In the frequency domain, for cell search, we propose a sign-bit reduction technique on top of the matched filter method for the primary synchronization signal detection. In addition, we... 

A multi-band frequency synthesizer for In-phase and Quadrature (I/Q) LO signal generation in Digital TV tuners is presented. Using divisor numbers other than powers of 2 (2 n ) for quadrature generation, reduces the required frequency range of the VCO, hence the number of VCO circuits, in multi-band frequency synthesizers. In the proposed synthesizer, VHF, UHF and L-band frequencies are covered with only one VCO. This is achieved by using a novel divide-by-3 circuit which produces precise I/Q LO signals. The VCO tuning range in this design is 2,400-3,632 MHz which is covered by a 6-bit switched-capacitor bank. A fast adaptive frequency calibration block selects the closest VCO frequency to... 

This paper reports transistor-level design of a new continuous-time (CT), discrete-time (DT) cascaded sigma delta modulator (SDM). The combination of a CT first stage and a DT second stage was utilized to realize a high speed, high resolution analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Power consumption of CT first stage is lowered by optimizing the gain coefficients of CT integrators in a feedforward topology. Moreover double sampling (CDS) was used in second stage integrators to further reduce power consumption. Proposed new SDM is simulated in 0.18μm CMOS technology and achieves 84dB dynamic range for a 10MHz signal bandwidth. Total analog power dissipation measured was 44mW  

An optimal soft multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector is proposed with linear complexity for a general spatial multiplexing system with two transmitting symbols and NR 2 receiving antennas. The computational complexity of the proposed scheme is independent of the operating signal-to-noise ratio and grows linearly with the constellation order. It provides the soft maximum-likelihood solution using an efficient log-likelihood ratio calculation method, avoiding the exhaustive search on all the candidate nodes. Moreover, an efficient pipelined hardware implementation of the detection algorithm is proposed, which is fabricated and fully tested in a 130-nm CMOS technology. Operating at... 

Microrings can have different hysteresis characteristics at their different resonance frequencies. They can be used as a multi-hysteresis optical component. In this paper an optical D-flip-flop circuit composed of a single nonlinear passive microring coupled to two straight waveguide based on the Kerr effect is proposed. The proposed circuit can operate as an optical digital circuit which synchronizes input DATA with the CLOCK of the circuit. A simple analytical model for hysteresis design and the transient analysis of the proposed D-flip-flop are presented. According to our model, the switching time of the flip-flop is in the order of 10 ps. Crown Copyright © 2008  

Heat generation from Very Large-Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuits increases with the development of high-density integrated circuit technology. One of the efficient techniques is liquid cooling by using a microchannel heat sink. Numerical simulations on the microchannel heat sink in the literature are mainly two dimensional. The purpose of the present study is to develop a three-dimensional procedure to investigate flow and conjugate heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink for electronic packaging applications. A finite volume numerical code with a multigrid technique, based on an additive correction multigrid (AC-MG) scheme, which is a high-performance solver, is developed to solve the... 

In this paper, ultra-small CuO nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized through a mechanochemical method using two different Cu-containing precursors (i.e. CuSO4·5H2O and CuCl2·2H2O), and their structure and antibacterial activity were studied. From the microstructural studies, it was observed that CuO NPs have a spherical morphology and a narrow size distribution with 7 and 14 nm median particle sizes for CuCl2·2H2O and CuSO4.5H2O precursors, respectively. The CuCl2·2H2O derived nanoparticles showed more antibacterial activity than CuSO4.5H2O derived nanoparticles. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of the synthesized nanoparticles (derived from both precursors) against E. coli and... 

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems, which are based on motor imagery, enable humans to command artificial peripherals by merely thinking about the task. There is a tremendous interest in implementing BCIs on portable platforms, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAS) due to their low-cost, low-power and portability characteristics. This article presents the design and implementation of a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system based on motor imagery on a Virtex-6 FPGA. In order to design an accurate algorithm, the proposed method avails statistical learning methods such as Mutual Information (MI), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). It also uses... 

In this paper the electrical characteristics of a novel nanoscale double-gate MOSFET (DG-MOSFET) have been investigate by a full Quantum Mechanical simulation framework. This framework consists of Non-Equilibrium Green's Function (NEGF) solved self-consistently with Poisson's Equation. Quantum transport equations are solved in two-dimension (2-D) by recursive NEGF method in active area of the device to obtain the charge density and Poisson's equation is solved in entire domain of simulation to get potential profile. Once self-consistently achieved all parameters of interest (e.g. potential profile, charge density, DIBL, etc) can be measured. In this novel DG-MOSFET structure, a front gate... 

One of the possible fluid-fluid interactions during water-flooding in oil reservoirs, that is still debated, is the effect of injected brine salinity on asphaltene destabilization. If asphaltene precipitation is induced by salinity changes in the oil reservoirs and surface facilities, this could have a massive impact on the economy of a low salinity water-flooding project. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effect of brine salinity on the amount of asphaltene precipitation and the governing destabilization mechanisms. Direct asphaltene precipitation measurements, along with the analyses of optical microscopy images and ion chromatography (IC), indicate that the asphaltene... 

This paper presents a phase-noise reduction technique for voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) using a harmonic tuned (HT) LC tank. The phase-noise suppression is achieved through almost rectangular-shaped VCO oscillating signal which effectively maximizes oscillating signal slope at zero crossing points resulting in-phase-noise degradation. In addition, by shortening down converted noise power around oscillating signal second harmonic, more phase-noise suppression has been achieved. A comprehensive analysis for frequency and amplitude deviations as high as 20% for third harmonic and its effect on output phase-noise suppression has been discussed. In the followings, a comprehensive analysis... 

In this paper the field-effect transistor DNA biosensor for detecting hepatitis B virus (HBV) based on indium tin oxide nanowires (ITO NWs) in label free approach has been fabricated. Because of ITO nanowires intensive conductance and functional modified surface, the probe immobilization and target hybridization were increased strongly. The high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) measurement showed that ITO nanowires were crystalline and less than 50 nm in diameter. The single-stranded hepatitis B virus DNA (SS-DNA) was immobilized as probe on the Au-modified nanowires. The DNA targets were measured in a linear concentration range from 1fM to 10 µM. The detection limit of...