Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (M.S. in Engineering Science (Electrical Engineering))--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): David Jenn, Jeffrey B. Knorr. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-76). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-118). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

In this work, a low-complexity two-dimensional (2D) frequency-scanned antenna is proposed to image a human using a Doppler radar. It consists of two back-to-back, air-filled microstrip leaky wave antennas (LWAs). The frequency-scanned pattern of the microstrip LWA is used to determine the target bearing in one dimension. Two such elements are used as an interferometer to determine the target bearing in the other dimension. In order to pack two LWAs closely, a design is proposed to achieve a minimal disturbance on the azimuth and elevation beam patterns. The design is measured with both static and Doppler targets to demonstrate the capability to form 2D frontal images. To investigate the potential performance of using the proposed antenna to image a human, a simulator that includes a dynamic human signature model and the frequency-scanned antenna pattern is developed. A radar waveform that is different from that used for the measurement conducted with simple Doppler targets is proposed. A simple five-point human model is tested first to understand the capability of the antenna to image a human. Next, the antenna design and the radar processing parameters are studied to improve the image quality. Simulated frontal images of a walking human are generated and discussed. With a redesigned antenna and new radar processing steps, simulation shows that frontal imagery of a human undergoing motion can be generated. / text

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

 This thesis focuses on three research topics on the design about planar ultrawide-band (UWB) monopole antennas, namely, the design of band notches for UWB monopole antennas, the ground-plane and cable effects on the measurement of compact UWB monopole antennas, and the design of a chipless UWB radio-frequency-identification (UWB-RFID) system. The designs of single, dual, triple and quadruple band-notched UWB monopole antennas using coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators, quarter-wavelength (λ/4)-resonators and meander lines (MLs) are presented. The center frequencies and bandwidths of the individual notches in all these designs can be adjusted independently by varying the dimensions of the resonators. Studies of the designs are carried out by computer simulations using the EM software tool, CST MWS. For verification of the simulation results, these antennas are fabricated and measured using the antenna measurement system, Satimo Starlab. The frequency-domain performances, in terms of return loss, peak gain, efficiency and radiation pattern, and the time-domain performances, in terms of pulse responses and fidelity, are investigated by simulation and measurement. Results show that these UWB antennas have approximately omnidirectional radiation patterns with good band-notched characteristics and fidelities of more than 85% in the pulse responses. Results of studies show that, using a small ground plane in the design of the compact UWB antennas, there will be larger discrepancies between the measured and simulated radiation patterns, radiation efficiencies and peak gains at low frequencies. The discrepancies are due to diffraction of the electric fields at the edges of the small ground plane, which leads to currents flowing back to the measuring cable and hence secondary radiation. Computer simulation and measurement are used to study the ground-plane effects using a group of nine UWB antennas. These antennas have the same radiator but with rectangular ground planes of different sizes. Results show that the width of the ground plane affects the efficiency more than the length, while the length affects the lower cut-off frequency. The cable effects are further studied by modeling the measuring cables. Results show that, by using the cable model, the simulation and measurement efficiencies agree extremely well. The design of a novel chipless UWB-RFID system is presented. The system employs uniplanar chipless tags and a pair of high-gain reader antennas. The chipless tag is composed of two UWB monopole antennas connected by a CPW. Tag identification (ID) is represented by a spectral signature in the UWB and created by using a multi-resonator embedded on the CPW. Detection of spectral signature is based on only the amplitude of the spectral signature. Vertically and horizontally polarized signals are used to reduce mutual coupling between the uplink and downlink signals. Further reduction of the mutual coupling is achieved by using a copper plate in the reader to separate the uplink and downlink signals. Results of studies in an anechoic chamber show that the proposed RFID system can achieve a read range larger than 30 cm, indicating that the proposed system has great potentials for short-range item tracking at low-cost. / published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This work explored the design considerations on the real-time medical ultrasound adaptive beamformer implementations using different computing platforms: CPU, GPU and FPGA. Adaptive beamforming has been well considered as an advanced solution for improving the image quality of medical ultrasound imaging machines. Although it provides promising improvements in lateral resolution, image contrast and imaging penetration depth, the use of adaptive beamforming is substantially more computationally demanding than conventional delay-and-sum beamformers. In order not to compromise the real-time performance of medical ultrasound systems, an accelerated solution is desirable. In this work, CPU implementation was used as a baseline implementation, based on which the intrinsic characteristics of the algorithm were analyzed. After the analysis of a particular adaptive beamforming algorithm, minimum-variance adaptive beamforming, two design parameters M and L were found to affect the implementation performance in two aspects: computational demand and image quality. The trends of the two aspects were contradictory with respect to the increment of M and L values. In our experiments, when M and L increased, the computational demand increased in a cubic curve; meanwhile, the image quality did not have much improvement when the increased values of M and L entered certain ranges. Since we targeted at a real-time solution without sacrificing the good image quality that adaptive beamforming proposed, a tradeoff was made on the selection of M and L values to balance the two contradictory requirements. Built upon the theoretical algorithmic analysis of the real-time adaptive beamformer realization, the implementations were developed with FPGA and GPU. While a dedicated hardware solution might be able to address the computational demand of the particular design, the need for an efficient algorithm exploration framework demanded a reprogrammable platform solution that was high-performance and easily reconfigurable. Besides, although a simple processor could provide convenient algorithm exploration via software development environment, real-time performance was usually not achievable. As a result, a reprogrammable medical ultrasound research platform for investigating advanced imaging algorithms was constructed in our project. The use of FPGA and GPU for implementing the real-time adaptive beamformer on our platform was explored. In our test cases, both FPGA- and GPUbased solutions achieved real-time throughput exceeding 80 frames-per-second, and over 38x improvement when compared to our baseline CPU implementation. Moreover, the implementations were also evaluated in terms of portability, data accuracy, programmability, and system integration. Due to its high power consumption, high-performance GPU solution is best suited for bedside applications, while FPGAs are more suitable for portable and hand-held medical ultrasound machines. Besides, while the development time on GPU platform remains much lower than its FPGA counterpart, the FPGA solution is effective in providing the necessary I/O bandwidth to enable an end-to-end real-time reconfigurable medical ultrasound image formation system. / published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Not available / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.