<p> With advancements in technology and people being more conscious about their health than ever, technical advancements in the field of medicine are inevitable. People are switching towards wearable devices to keep track of their health and fitness related data. This project looks into the development of a heart rate monitor to keep track of the user&rsquo;s heart rate. The report presents the development of a heart rate monitor interfaced with a Bluetooth module to wirelessly view related data on a smartphone or any other Bluetooth compatible device. The heart rate monitor developed uses the photoplethysmography (PPG) principle to calculate the heart beats per minute. The PPG module developed is then interfaced with an Arduino Uno board responsible for calculating the beats per minute. It then transfers the serial data to a Bluetooth module, which transmits the data to another Bluetooth compatible device. The results show that the heart rate is successfully transferred over Bluetooth and could be helpful in emergency or monitoring situations.</p>

Hardware implementations of Object-Tracking Algorithms are susceptible to radiation-induced soft errors. The thesis analyzes the results of fault emulation experiments conducted on register-transfer level on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of object tracking. Typical single event effect (SEE) induced faults were injected to core modules within the object tracking system. The results indicate that injected faults can cause observable errors in tracking system outputs, which are defined as values exceeding a selected threshold. The level of degradation is related to the fault injection location as well as the type of faults. Under the worst-case experiments, the output error rate was more than 88%. The cross-layered reliability analysis between circuit and algorithm is significant to algorithms optimization and selective circuit hardening.

The total ionizing dose (TID) response of HfO2-SiO2/SiGe pMOS FinFETs under different irradiation biases has been evaluated. Negative bias irradiation leads to the worst-case degradation. We attribute this result to an increase in density of additional radiation-induced holes that become trapped in the HfO2 under negative bias, and additional electron trapping under positive bias in the HfO2, as compared with the 0 V irradiation case. When devices are exposed to negative bias-temperature stress, we find similar values of Ea for oxide-trap charge buildup, and a reduced Ea for interface-trap buildup, for Si0.55Ge0.45 pMOSFETs with high-k gate stacks, compared to control Si devices with SiO2 gate dielectrics. The low-frequency 1/f noise of these devices was also investigated. The magnitude of noise is unaffected by negative-bias-temperature stress (NBTS) for temperatures below ~ 250 K, but increases significantly at higher temperatures. The noise is described well by the Dutta-Horn model before and after NBTS. The noise is attributed to oxygen-vacancy and hydrogen-related defects in the SiO2 and HfO2 (especially at the higher measuring temperatures) and/or hydrogen-dopant interactions in the SiGe layer of the device (especially for lower measuring temperature).

<p> The need to conserve water has increased with adverse weather conditions due to global warming. The proposed embedded system model provides an economical method in preventing unmonitored water loss from storage facilities. The model consists of an ultrasonic level controller that is interfaced with a microcontroller. Using sonar, the delay between the transmitted and received signals is used for finding the liquid level. When the level of a liquid falls below a certain point, the pump automatically starts and continues pumping until the required liquid level is reached. The pump operates using the signals received from a microcontroller and uses a relay mechanism. A step down transformer, a bridge rectifier, a capacitive filter, and a voltage regulator convert the AC to DC voltage level of +5v to operate both the microcontroller and Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). Results show the level measurement is unaffected by the physical properties of a liquid.</p>

Financial Transmission Rights (FTR) is an investment that protects the market customers from price uncertainty in the case of transmission line congestion. Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM) allows bidding of FTR's on various transmission paths. This thesis investigates quantitative methods for portfolio optimization to produce a risk-minimum portfolio of FTR's to bid. A computer model based on Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problem and Risk-Reward Analysis is developed to simulate various operating conditions of a power system and predict the variations of power flows and corresponding electricity prices. It offers guidelines about the bidding cost and the amount of megawatts to bid for each transmission path, in order to obtain a certain profit with the corresponding minimum risk. The method for calculating the risk and reward is Markowitz Mean-Variance Analysis. The computer model also includes the LMP determination for which a MATLAB code has been developed. The model is tested on a 6-bus power system.

<p> Super Regenerative Receivers exploit more complex modulation techniques in order to achieve better bit per symbol rate. This study presents a novel 8-Phase Shift Keying (PSK) Super Regenerative Receiver operating in the 402&ndash;405 MHz, Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS) band. In the proposed architecture, the complexity of the circuit input is reduced by using an enable signal, which produces a quenching current source in the Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) and Super Regenerative Oscillator (SRO) circuit. Furthermore, the receiver uses a new RC-CR network to generate eight equally shifted signals and one Flip-Flop in each path to minimize the amplitude mismatch and the number of components, respectively. This receiver has been designed and simulated in 130 nm Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) process. The power consumption of the entire receiver is 119 &micro;W for the input signal of -80 dBm, at the rate of 6 Mbps, and the Energy Per Bit of 19.8 pj/b.</p>

<p> Security is an essential criterion in all industries. This project develops a Security System that includes motion detection and face recognition. Motion detection is achieved by using the PIR (Passive Infrared) sensor, and face recognition is achieved by using the SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) algorithm.</p><p> The primary hardware components used in this system are a PIR sensor, microcontroller, relay, LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), buzzer, MAX232 IC, and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication). The system incorporates the feature extraction method, which is utilized to identify the number of objects in an image, and the proposed SIFT algorithm is used for the face recognition. These two methods, the feature extraction method and SIFT algorithm, are implemented in MATLAB. The result shows that the efficiency and the recognition time of the proposed SIFT algorithm is better than its predecessors. This system can be used for industrial, hospital, or even residential purposes.</p>

<p> Grounding of electrical power systems has and will always be one of the most essential aspects of any electrical system design. Without a proper, well designed and effective efficient grounding network personal safety is at risk, equipment protection cannot be assured, and proper system operation cannot be maintained. Because of these reasons grounding design has become well researched, with long established standards strictly dictating the construction and integration of such ground networks. However with an ever diversifying power grid generation mix, integration of new technologies has become common. The need for these diverse technologies along with their cultural and societal demand has enabled them to outrun the standards and conceptual knowledge required for their safe construction. One such area exists in the grounding design of large scale Wind Power Plants (WPP). While most generation facilities aim to reduce their landmass to the smallest possible footprint wind power plants require adequate spacing in order to optimize wind quality and power generation with construction costs. This necessitates a generation facility or power plant that can reach up to several square miles. At areas of this size and distribution, established grounding design practices become ineffective and inapplicable while current standards become insufficient due to failing assumptions. </p><p> This thesis offers an overview of grounding concepts tailored to the unique requirements of Wind Power Plants, a discussion concerning the recommended design methodology for such a network, and real world simulations of these problematic scenarios as a basis of study for WPP grounding. Currently there is very little literature and no standard or guidelines in industry for the specific challenges posed by WPP grounding. Lack of this documentation has led to debate in industry over the topic. It is hoped that this research will provide a basic WPP grounding design methodology and demonstrate the need for the further creation of a standard or guide.</p>

The effects of radiation on the operation of integrated circuits (IC) continue to take a more important role as technology feature sizes scale down, critical charge decreases, and operating frequencies increase. In space and other harsh environments, single ion strikes are more likely to affect multiple, physically-adjacent devices on a modern IC, thereby introducing formidable research problems for (1) modeling these effects and (2) designing circuits to mitigate them. While single-event transient (SET) behavior traditionally has been well characterized, single-event multiple-transients (SEMT) require a more complex and novel approach to capture reliability characteristics with tenable simulation times prior to chip manufacturing. This dissertation presents an automated method to quickly characterize modern combinational logic blocks for radiation-induced SEMT vulnerability. Radiation events are modeled based on physically-observed effects, and then integrated into an electronic design automation (EDA) functional verification flow for ease of implementation. When considering the placement of standard logic cells, SEMT modeling reveals the impact on charge sharing and diffusion, and consequently reliability of logic circuits in the presence of multiple transients. Modifications to standard cell placement are investigated, and a new EDA placement algorithm is developed and implemented to achieve reductions in SEMT-induced errors with zero cost to circuit area and minimal effects on other circuit performance characteristics.

<p> Software Defined Networks (SDNs) are an active research topic in Networking. This project proposes an approach to a load balancer with the implementation of SDN. This SDN load balancer uses the Round-Robin algorithm. The design topology consists of the SDN-switch and an Open Day Light (ODL) controller. The packet entries are kept in the flow table that are stored in the data plane. This project separates the control and data plane and regulates the controller using ODL. This separation eases the controlling of load balancers. By using this technique, the system becomes directly programmable and agile. The requests from different clients will be directed to various pre-defined servers in the Round-Robin fashion. This project successfully achieves load balancing using the SDN controller and reduces the response time as well as the latency.</p>