<p>GaAs/AlGaAs core-shell nanowires (NWs) were grown on GaAs(111)B substrates by Au-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to investigate how different Al compositions in the shell influences the structural and optical properties of the NWs. Investigations with a secondary electron microscope (SEM) revealed that an increase in Al content leads to an increase in radial growth rate and a decrease in the axial growth rate of the AlGaAs shell. Low temperature μ-photoluminescence (PL) measurements showed that there was great improvement in the luminescence for the GaAs/AlGaAs core-shell NWs compared to GaAs NWs without shell.</p>

<p>This master's thesis describe electromagnetic simulations of a gallium antimonide (GaSb) light emitting diode, LED. A problem for such devices is that most of the generated light is reflected from the surface due to total internal reflection, and is therefore prevented from coupling out of the semiconductor material. Etching out a 2D photonic crystal grating on the LED surface would put aside the absolute rule of total internal reflection, and could therefore be used to increase the total transmission. The simulation method which was developed was supposed to find geometry parameters for the photonic crystal to optimize the light extraction. A set of plane waves were therefore simulated using FDTD to build an equivalent to the Fresnel equations for the photonic crystal surface. From that the total transmittance and radiation patterns for the simulated geometries were calculated. The results indicated an increase in the transmission properties of up to 70% using a square grating of holes where the holes have a radius of 0.5µm, the hole depth is 0.4µm, and the grating constant is 1µm. A hexagonal grating of holes and a square grating of isotropically etched holes were also simulated, and featured improvements on the same scale, but with different dimensions for the holes. The simulations were computationally very demanding, and the simulation structure therefore had to be highly trimmed to limit the calculation time to reasonable values. This might have reduced the accuracy of the results. Especially the optimum grating constant, and the value of the optimum improvement itself is believed to be somewhat inaccurate.</p>

<p>Sun exposure and climate therapy is an effective treatment for psoriasis. However, even though this treatment gives the patients relief from their discomforting symptoms, it has some potentially dangerous side effects such as an increased risk of skin cancer and premature skin aging. A prospective field study plans to follow the patients undergoing the climate therapy. During this study the UV dose to each patient will be monitored by personal dosimeters worn by the patients. Furthermore the patients' skin spectra acquired by the means of optical spectroscopy will be obtained daily. Both psoriatic skin a unaffected skin will be observed. These data will be used to assess the skin changes which take place during the psoriasis treatment. This project is focused on developing an automatic algorithm for handling bulk spectrometric measurements data and to propose ways of numerically evaluating the skin spectra. These numerical values will be later used to compare the daily patients' spectra and monitor progress of the treatment. An inverse model based on a lookup table and successive iteration was proposed in this project. The model matches the diffuse skin reflectance spectra modeled with a diffuse skin model with the measured patients skin spectra. The measured skin spectra are then defined by the diffuse skin model input parameters which were found by the inverse model. These parameters are oxygenation, blood volume and melanin absorption coefficient. Additionally four indexes were proposed to supplement the parameters found by the inverse model, namely the erythema index, melanin index, hemoglobin index and oxygenation index. Measurements of several skin spectra including psoriatic plaques spectra were carried out and used to test the inverse fitting model performance. The proposed model proved to match the measured spectra in an acceptable form employable for distinguishing between different measured spectra. The highest deviation is at the ends of the spectra due to the use of a constant value of scattering coefficient and additional parameters not directly relevant to sun exposure, hence not considered by the model. The proposed parameters together with the indexes proved to be a viable means of evaluating the healing in the psoriatic plaques as well as determining the changes caused by the sun in normal skin.</p>

<p>Speckle arises when coherent light is reflected from a rough screen and observed by an intensity detector with a finite aperture. Because speckle causes serious image degradation when lasers are used as light sources in e.g. projectors, methods for reducing the speckle contrast need to be developed. Different speckle contrast reduction methods are investigated in this thesis, such as a rotating diffuser and a sinusoidal rotating grating. In addition, speckle simulations with the optical system design software ZEMAX has been explored. A setup consisting of a 4-f imaging system with a rotating diffuser in the Fourier plane was developed in order to decide whether or not it is advantageous to perform speckle reduction in the Fourier plane. Hence, measurement series were performed with the rotating diffuser placed at different positions in the 4-f imaging system for comparison. Measurement series were executed both with an empty object plane and with a lens in it to spread the light in the Fourier plane. Placing a rotating diffuser in the Fourier plane does not appear to be effective for speckle contrast reduction. The last setup investigated was a transmissive spatial light modulator (SLM) placed in the beam path. Sinusoidal rotating gratings created by means of gray levels, to simulate a potential modulator based on a deformable polymer layer, were implemented on the SLM. The gratings were rotated around their centers, and in a spiral in order to reduce the speckle contrast. For the first method the modulator speckle contrast was 34% for N = 18 averaged images, and for the second method it was 31% for N = 36 averaged images, both with a grating period of 4 pixels. Due to the drawbacks of the SLM optimal results were not achieved, but the SLM is useful for a proof-of-concept. Further measurements should be performed for this promising, novel method based on a true sinusoidal grating.</p>

<p>This thesis explores the ability of the proprietary Texas Instruments embedded 16 bits RISC microprocessor, NanoRisc, to process common lossless compression algorithms, and propose extensions in order to increase its performance on this task. In order to measure performance of the NanoRisc microprocessor, the existing software tool chain was enhanced for profiling and simulating the improvements, and three fundamentally different adaptive data compression algorithms with different supporting data structures were implemented in the NanoRisc assembly language. On the background of profiling results, some enhancements were proposed. The new enhancements improved throughput of the three implemented algorithms by between 18% and 103%, and the code sizes decreased between 6% and 31%. The bit field instructions also reduced RAM access by up to 53%. The enhancements were implemented in the NanoRisc VHDL model and synthesized. Synthesis reports showed an increase in gate count of 30%, but the whole NanoRisc core is still below 7k gates. Power consumption per MIPS increased by 7%, however reduced clock cycle count and memory access decreased the net power consumption of all tested algorithms. It is also shown that data compression with the NanoRisc prior to transmission in a low power RF transceiver may increase battery lifetime 4 times. Future work should include a comprehensive study of the effect of the proposed enhancements to more common applications for the NanoRisc microprocessor.</p>

<p>A 90nm CMOS technology has been characterized on the basis of IV and CV measurements. This was feasible by means of a state of the art probe station and measurement instrumentation, capable of measuring current and capacitance in the low fA and fF area respectively. From IV results it was found that the static power consumption is an increasing challenge as the technology is scaled down. The IV measurements also showed the impact from small-channel effects, which was not as prominent as expected. Investigation of literature has resulted in a methodology for accomplishing accurate CV measurements on thin-oxide transistors. By using extraction methods on the capacitance measured, key parameters have been obtained for the CMOS technology. Some of the extracted results suffer however from the choice of test setup.</p>

<p>Commodity computer graphics chips are probably today’s most powerful computational hardware one can buy for money. These chips, known generically as Graphics Processing Units or GPUs, has in recent years evolved from afterthought peripherals to modern, powerful programmable processor. Due to the movie and game industry we are where we are to today. One of Intel’s co-founder Gordon E. Moore said once that the number of transistors on a single integrated chip was to double every 18 month. So far this seems to be correct for the CPU. However for the GPU the development has gone much faster, and the floating point operations per second has increased enormously. Due to this rapid evolvement many researchers and scientists has discovered the enormous floating point potential can be taken advantage of, and a numerous applications has been tested such as audio and image algorithms. Also in the area of marine acoustics this has become interesting, where the demand for high computational power is increasing. This master report investigates how to make a program capable to run on a GPU for calculating an underwater sound field. To do this a graphics chips with programmable vertex and fragment processor is necessary. Programming this will require graphics API like OpenGL, a shading language like GLSL, and a general purpose GPU library like Shallows. A written program in Matlab is the basic for the GPU program. The goal is to reduce calculation time spent to calculate a underwater sound field. From this the increment from Matlab to GPU was found to be around 40-50 times. However if Matlab was able to calculate the same number of rays as maximum on the GPU, the increment would probably be bigger. Since this study was done on a laptop with nVidia GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip, a higher gain would theoretically be obtainable by a desktop graphics chip.</p>

<p>In a dense and complex emitter environment, a high pulse arrival rate and a large number of interleaved radar pulse sequences is expected, from both agile and stable emitters. This thesis evaluates the combination of interval-only algorithms with different monopulse parameters, in comparison to a neural network to do accurate emitter classification. This thesis has evaluated a selection of TOA deinterleaving algorithms with the intent to clearly discriminate between pulses emitted from agile emitters. The first section presents the different techniques, with emphasis on pinpointing the different algorithmic structures. The second section presents a neural network combinational recognition system, with a main focus on the fuzzy ARTMAP neural network, where also some practical implementations has been presented. The final section gives a partial system evaluation based on some statistical means, seeking to get an estimate on the information flow from the ESM receiver as a function of both the density and the expected parametric values, i.e. PW since this is proportional to the amount of processed pulses.</p>

<p>The concept of software-defined radio (SDR) holds great promise. The idea behind SDR is to move software as close to the antenna as possible. This can improve flexibility, adaptability and reduce the time-to-market. This thesis covers the evaluation of algorithms for implementing IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. In collaboration with a digital circuit designer some of these algorithms were chosen and formed a basis for a DSP architecture optimized for low-complexity, low-power radio standards. The performance of a implementation using these algorithms were then evaluated by means of analytical computations and by simulation</p>

<p>Power consumption becomes more important as more devices becomes embedded or battery dependant. Multipliers are generally complex circuits, consuming a lot of energy. This thesis uses Sand's multiplier generator, made for his master thesis, as a basis. It uses tree structures to perform the multiplication, but does not take power consumption into account when generating a multiplier. By adding power optimization to the generator, multipliers with low energy consumption could be made automatically. This thesis adds different reduction tree algorithms (Wallace, Dadda and Reduced Area) to the program, and an optimal algorithm might be found. After the multiplier tree generation, an optimization step is performed, trying to exploit the delay and activity characteristics of the generated multiplier. A simplified version of Oskuii's algorithm is used. To be able to compare the different algorithms with each other, a pre-layout power estimation routine was implemented. The estimator is also used by the post-generation optimization. Since accuracy is important in an estimator, the delay through a multiplier was also investigated. Taking the previous mentioned steps into account, we are able to get a 10% decrease in overall power reduction in a 0,18/0,15um CMOS technology, reported by "IC Compiler". Delay characteristics of a multiplier is also supplied, and can be used by other power estimators. This thesis shows how to achieve less power consumption in multipliers. It also shows that the delay model is important for estimation purposes, and how an estimator is used to optimize a multiplier. The findings in this thesis can be used as is, or be used as a basis for further study.</p>