<p>Nowadays, mobile phones have greater functionality; a camera, color LCD screen, wireless LAN, Bluetooth, IrDA and others. In the near future wider variety of new functionalities will be added, from high quality voice, high definition video to high data rate wireless channels. As consumer electronics integrate greater functionality and high operating frequencies, their emissions will exceed the specified limits, most of these emissions will be a result of the internal interferences in the mobile phone. Moreover higher operating frequencies will be required to improve the quality of these functionalities, something that will make it more difficult to control these interferences. Internal or external sources of electromagnetic interference can degrade the performance of sensitive analog/digital circuits inside the mobile phone. Moreover the electronic device must satisfy a host of global regulations that limit it’s susceptibility to these interferences, as well as the interference emitted by the device itself.</p><p>Therefore designing a new electronic device to perform new and exciting functions will not be a pleasant task if it can not meet certain specifications and function as required to adhere to certain global regulations.</p><p>This thesis project investigates the sources of interference inside a mobile phone; mainly the electromagnetic interferences and its effect on the radio transceiver focusing on the GSM receiver sensitivity. This report is a result of intensive research, an investigation of possible sources of interference, also actual measurements were performed; RSSI, OTA and sniffing measurements; to identify the physical sources of interferences, and their effect on the receiver sensitivity. Finally solutions were recommended and implemented to suppress the interferences due to different sources, mainly through filtering, shielding or proper grounding of signals and components/subsystems in the mobile phone.</p>

<p>In this Master's thesis, a direct-conversion receiver front-end has been designed in a 0.18um CMOS technology. </p><p>Direct-conversion receivers (DCR) have obvious advantages over the heterodyne counterpart. Since the intermediate frequency (IF) is zero, the problem of image is circumvented. As a result, no front-end image reject filter is required and the channel selection requires only a low-pass filter, which makes it easy to integrate directly on chip. However, the DCR also suffers from several drawbacks such as extreme sensitivity to DC offsets, 1/f noise, local oscillator (LO) leakage/radiation, front-end nonlinearity and I/Q mismatch. This implies very high demands on the DCR front-end. </p><p>The front-end comprises a low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a mixer. Different LNA and mixer architectures has been studied and from the mentioned inherited problems with direct conversion, one proposal for a solution is a differential source degenerated LNA and a differential harmonic mixer, which has been designed and simulated. </p><p>The LNA has a gain of 12dB, a noise figure of 3.6dB and provides a return loss better than -15dB. The overall noise figure of the signal path is 8dB and the overall IIP3 and IIP2 is -12dBm and 31dBm, respectively.</p>

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 112 pages. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States and microcalcifications clusters are one of the most important indicators of breast disease. Computer methodologies help in the detection and differentiation between benign and malignant lesions and have the potential to improve radiologists' performance and breast cancer diagnosis significantly. A Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD-Dx) algorithm has been previously developed to assist radiologists in the diagnosis of mammographic clusters of calcifications with the modules: (a) detection of all calcification-like areas, (b) false-positive reduction and segmentation of the detected calcifications, (c) selection of morphological and distributional features and (d) classification of the clusters. Classification was based on an artificial neural network (ANN) with 14 input features and assigned a likelihood of malignancy to each cluster. / ABSTRACT: The purpose of this work was threefold: (a) optimize the existing algorithm and test on a large database, (b) rank classification features and select the best feature set, and (c) determine the impact of single and two-view feature estimation on classification and feature ranking. Classification performance was evaluated with the NevProp4 artificial neural network trained with the leave-one-out resampling technique. Sequential forward selection was used for feature selection and ranking. Mammograms from 136 patients, containing single or two views of a breast with calcification cluster were digitized at 60 microns and 16 bits per pixel. 260 regions of interest (ROI's) centered on calcification cluster were defined to build the single-view dataset. 100 of the 136 patients had a two-view mammogram which yielded 202 ROI's that formed the two-view dataset. Classification and feature selection were evaluated with both these datasets. / ABSTRACT: To decide on the optimal features for two-view feature estimation several combinations of CC and MLO view features were attempted. On the single-view dataset the classifier achieved an AZ =0.8891 with 88% sensitivity and 77% specificity at an operating point of 0.4; 12 features were selected as the most important. With the two-view dataset, the classifier achieved a higher performance with an AZ =0.9580 and sensitivity and specificity of 98% and 80% respectively at an operating point of 0.4; 10 features were selected as the most important. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Η διαμόρφωση με πολύπλεξη συχνότητας ορθογωνίων φερουσών (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing - OFDM) είναι μια μέθοδος η οποία εξασφαλίζει άριστη αξιοποίηση του διαθέσιμου εύρους συχνοτήτων, ενώ παράλληλα παρέχει τα πλεονεκτήματα της μετάδοσης μέσω πολλαπλών φερουσών (multicarrier transmission). Το σημαντικότερο χαρακτηριστικό της είναι ότι επιτρέπει τη μετάδοση μέσω επιλεκτικών στη συχνότητα καναλιών χρησιμοποιώντας απλές διαδικασίες ισοστάθμισης. Το χαρακτηριστικό αυτό συνέβαλε στην εδραίωσή της ως μία από τις επικρατέστερες μεθόδους διαμόρφωσης για την υψηλού ρυθμού μετάδοση δεδομένων μέσω ασύρματων μέσων. Το αντικείμενο της εργασίας είναι η μελέτη αλγορίθμων και αρχιτεκτονικών για το συγχρονισμό σε ασύρματους τηλεπικοινωνιακούς δέκτες που στηρίζονται στη διαμόρφωση OFDM. Ο συγχρονισμός είναι μία διαδικασία η οποία αποτελεί ακρογωνιαίο λίθο για οποιοδήποτε τηλεπικοινωνιακό σύστημα. Ιδιαίτερα όμως για δέκτες OFDM, έχει εντοπιστεί ως ένας από τους σημαντικότερους παράγοντες που επηρεάζουν την απόδοση. Το πρόβλημα παρουσιάζει εξαιρετικό ενδιαφέρον, καθώς η φύση της διαμόρφωσης καθιστά απαγορευτική την εφαρμογή πολλών από τις μεθόδους που έχουν αναπτυχθεί για συστήματα μετάδοσης με μονή φέρουσα, ενώ παράλληλα θέτει νέες παραμέτρους στο πρόβλημα. Η μεθοδολογία που ακολουθήθηκε κατά την εκπόνηση της εργασίας περιλάμβανε σε πρώτη φάση τη μελέτη αλγοριθμικών λύσεων που έχουν προταθεί κατά καιρούς για το συγχρονισμό. Το ενδιαφέρον επικεντρώθηκε σε βασικές τεχνικές με ευρεία εφαρμοσιμότητα ενώ ο στόχος της ανάλυσης ήταν να γίνουν κατανοητές με διαισθητικό τρόπο, στοιχειώδεις ιδέες οι οποίες χρησιμοποιούνται κατά κόρον για την επίλυση του προβλήματος του συγχρονισμού. Κατά τη δεύτερη φάση έγινε μια μελέτη γύρω από τις λεπτομέρειες που σχετίζονται με την υλοποίηση ορισμένων από τους αλγορίθμους συγχρονισμού σε επίπεδο αρχιτεκτονικής VLSI. Το ενδιαφέρον επικεντρώθηκε σε μια αρχιτεκτονική μέσω της οποίας μπορεί να επιτευχθεί τυφλός συγχρονισμός για έναν ασύρματο δέκτη OFDM. Κατά την ανάλυση χρησιμοποιήθηκε ως βάση ένα αρκετά γενικό μοντέλο συστήματος OFDM βασικής ζώνης. Για την αξιολόγηση της αρχιτεκτονικής εκτελέστηκε ένα εκτενές σύνολο πειραμάτων, το οποίο είχε ως στόχο τον προσδιορισμό και την ποσοτικοποίηση των επιδόσεων τόσο για τη μονάδα συγχρονισμού, όσο και για το συνολικό τηλεπικοινωνιακό σύστημα. Από τα αποτελέσματα της πειραματικής διαδικασίας προέκυψαν πολύ ενδιαφέροντα συμπεράσματα για την ευαισθησία της τεχνικής OFDM σε σφάλματα συγχρονισμού καθώς επίσης και για την πολυπλοκότητα υλοποίησης της μονάδας συγχρονισμού. / The summary is not available.

Gas hydrates bind immense amounts of methane in marine sediments. If produced cost effectively, they can serve as a stable energy supply. No viable technologies for extracting gas hydrates from deep ocean deposits have been developed to date. Due to the shallow depths, low hydrate concentration, low permeability of the gas hydrate stability zone, lack of driving pressure and the slow melting process, low productivity is anticipated for gas production from gas hydrates in marine sediments. Therefore, only a large number of low cost wells can support an offshore production facility and pipeline transport to shore. The method of harvesting natural gas from sea floor gas hydrates presented in this paper is a combination of several new concepts including electrically adding heat inside hydrate rich sediments to release gas, using an overhead receiver to capture the gas, allowing gas to form hydrates again in the overhead receiver, and lifting produced hydrates to warm water to release and collect gas. This approach makes the best use of the nature of hydrates and the subsea pressure and temperature profiles. Consequently, it leads to a simple and open production system which is safe, economical, energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and without significant technical difficulties. Basic analyses and calculations on the feasibility and heat efficiency of the proposed method are presented and discussed.

In this thesis, a resource allocation problem in OFDMA is studied for the energy efficiency of wireless network. The objective is to minimize the total energy consumption which includes transmission energy consumption, and circuit energy consumption at both transmitter and receiver with required per user’s rate constraint. For problem solution, a heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity and suboptimal solution is proposed, developed in two steps with an increasing order of complexity. Besides, a bounding scheme based on model linearization of formulated nonlinear system model is also proposed to give lower and upper bounds for both small- and large-scale OFDMA network for further algorithm performance evaluation, while the implemented exhaustive search is only capable to provide the optimal solution for small-scale instance for algorithm performance evaluation. Numerical results show that the proposal heuristic algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance with applicable computational complexity even for large-scale networks, and that the bounds from the bounding scheme are very tight for both small- and large-scale OFDMA networks.

Thesis (MEng)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: There are two methods generally used for heliostat field layout optimization: the field growth method and the pattern method. A third, less commonly used method also exists: the free variable method. Each of these three methods offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of this study is to explore the subject of heliostat field layout optimization and to examine the free variable method. In order to achieve this objective, optimization was conducted using the free variable method. To perform optimization, a technical model of the heliostat field was constructed using approximating functions from literature and geometric analysis. Results of this study indicated that the free variable method is possible using a gradient-based optimization algorithm. The free variable method was applied to redesign the field of a commercial plant, PS10, located in Spain. The original plant was improved by 1.2% in annual intercepted energy. The study has demonstrated some of the characteristics, advantages and pitfalls of the free variable method and has proved useful in contributing to the understanding of heliostat field layout optimization. The free variable method requires more research and development before it may be used commercially. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Daar word oor die algemeen twee metodes gebruik om 'n heliostaatveld se uitleg te optimeer: die terreinvermeerderingsmetode (field growth) en die patroonmetode (pattern). 'n Derde, minder algemeen gebruikte metode bestaan ook: die vrye veranderlike metode (free variable). Elkeen van hierdie drie metodes bied sy eie voordele en nadele. Die doel van hierdie studie is om die onderwerp van heliostaat veld uitleg optimalisering te verken en die vrye veranderlike metode te ondersoek. Ten einde te hierdie oogmerk te bereik, is die optimalisering uitgevoer met gebruik van die vrye veranderlike metode. Om optimalisering uit te voer, is 'n tegniese model van die heliostaat veld gebou met behulp van benader funksies van letterkunde en geometriese analise. Resultate van hierdie studie het aangedui dat die vrye veranderlike metode moontlik is deur gebruik te maak van 'n gradientbebaseerde optimeeringslagoritme. Die vrye veranderlike metode is ook aangewend om die terrien van 'n kommersiele aanleg, PS10 in Spanje, te herontwerp. Die oorspronklike aanleg is in jaarlikse onderskep energie verbeter met 1.2%. Die studie het sommige van die eienskappe, voordele en slaggate van die vrye veranderlike metode getoon en het nuttige bewys om by te dra tot die begrip van heliostaat veld uitleg optimalisering. Die vrye veranderlike metode vereis meer navorsing en ontwikkeling voordat dit kommersieel gebruik kan word.

It is often required in communication and navigation systems to be able to receive signals from multiple stations simultaneously. A common practice to do this is to use multiple hardware resources; a different set of resources for each station. In this thesis, a Coherent Amplitude Modulated (AM) receiver system was developed based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology enabling reception of multiple signals using hardware resources needed only for one station. The receiver system architecture employs Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to share the single hardware resource among multiple streams of data. The architecture is designed so that it can be minimally modified to support any number of stations. The Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) was used to capture the receiver system architecture and design. The design and architecture are initially validated using HDL post-synthesis and post-implementation simulation. In addition, the receiver system architecture and design were implemented to a Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology prototyping board for experimental testing and final validation.

The objective of this research is to design and implement low-noise wideband RFIC components with CMOS technology for the direct-conversion architecture. This research proposes noise reduction techniques to improve the thermal noise and flicker noise contribution of a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a mixer. Of these techniques, the LNA is found to reduce noise, boost gain, and consume a relatively low amount of power without sacrificing the wideband and linearity advantages of a conventional common gate (CG) topology. The research concludes by investigating the proposed mixer topology, which senses and compensates local oscillator (LO) phase mismatches, the dominant cause of flicker noise.

In this thesis, based on the indoor channel measurements and ray-tracing modeling for the indoor mm-wave wireless communications, the challenges of the design of the radio in this band is studied. Considering the recently developed standards such as IEEE 802.15.3c, ECMA and WiGig at 60 GHz, the link budget of the system design for different classes of operation is done and the requirement for the antenna and other RF sections are extracted. Based on radiation characteristics of mm-wave and the fundamental limits of low-cost Silicon technology, it is shown that phased-array is the ultimate solution for the radio and physical layer of the mobile millimeter wave multi-Gb/s wireless networks. Different phased-array configurations are studied and a low-cost single-receiver array architecture with RF phase-shifting is proposed. A systematic approach to the analysis of the overall noise-figure of the proposed architecture is presented and the component technical requirements are derived for the system level specifications. The proposed on-chip antennas and antenna-in-packages for various applications are designed and verified by the measurement results. The design of patch antennas on the low-cost RT/Duroid substrate and the slot antennas on the IPD technologies as well as the compact on-chip slot DRA antenna are explained in the antenna design section. The design of reflective-type phase shifters in CMOS and MEMS technologies is explained. Finally, the design details of two developed 60 GHz integrated phased-arrays in CMOS technology are discussed. Front-end circuit blocks such as LNA, continuous passive reflective-type phase shifters, power combiner and variable gain amplifiers are investigated, designed and developed for a 60 GHz phased-array radio in CMOS technology. In the first design, the two-element CMOS phased-array front-ends based on passive phase shifting architecture is proposed and developed. In the second phased-array, the recently developed on-chip dielectric resonator antenna in our group in lower frequency is scaled and integrated with the front-end.