Cattle consuming low-quality forage may have decreased forage organic matter intake as a result of decreased nitrogen (N) intake. To date, a value has not been assigned to dried distillers' grains as a protein supplement to cattle consuming low-quality Bermudagrass forage. To address this shortcoming in the data, 13 duodenally and ruminally fistulated steers were arranged in an incomplete 13 x 4 Latin square with 13 treatments and 4 periods. Treatments were arranged as a 4 x 3 factorial plus a negative control (NC), which received no supplement. The first factor consisted of 4 levels of supplemental protein provided at 52, 104, 156, and 208 mg N/kg BW. The second factor consisted of one of three supplemental protein sources, cottonseed meal (CSM), dried distillers' grains (DDG), and dried distillers' grains plus urea (DDGU). Total digestible organic matter (TDOMI), and total organic matter intake (TOMI) increased in response to the increasing level of supplemental protein (P <0.01). Similarly, digestible neutral detergent fiber intake (DNDFI) increased as a result of supplementation (P = 0.06). Forage organic matter intake did not increase as a result of protein supplementation (P = 0.20). However, forage organic matter intake (FOMI) responded quadratically to provision of CSM (P = 0.02). In contrast, DDG and DDGU did not significantly increase FOMI. Organic matter digestibility (OMD) tended to increase (P= 0.09) as a result of protein supplementation. Ruminal ammonia concentrations increased linearly in response to increasing provision of supplemental protein and were greater than control steers (P less than 0.01). Supplementation with DDGU resulted in the greatest increase in ruminal ammonia concentrations. Plasma urea nitrogen (PUN) concentrations increased in a linear fashion in response to CSM and DDGU supplementation (P less than 0.01), while provision of DDG resulted in a quadratic response (P = 0.08). Based on these results, DDG can be utilized as a protein supplement to increase TDOMI, however, it accomplishes this without significantly impacting FOMI which is in contrast to CSM.

With the emergence of portable computing and communication systems, power consumption has become one of the major objectives during VLSI design. Furthermore, multipliers are always fundamental building blocks and the bottleneck in terms of power consumption in many DSP and multimedia applications. Therefore, it is crucial to minimize the power consumption of multipliers in the system for low-power VLSI design. Besides, energy-efficient multiplier is greatly desirable for DSP systems and computer architectures. In many of these systems, the dynamic-range of input operands for multiplier is usually very small. In addition, the least significant bits of output products are often rounded or truncated to avoid growth in word size. Based on these features, this thesis presents an approach to design low-power and reconfigurable signed pipelined multipliers. The approach dynamically detects input range of the multiplier and disables the switching operations of non-effective ranges to decrease the power consumption. Moreover, the proposed approach can reconfigure the output precision of the multiplier to save power consumption. We apply this approach to two architectures: array-based and Booth-based architecture. Experimental results show that the proposed array-based pipelined multiplier leads to up 47% power saving and Booth-based multiplier leads to up 30% power saving with a little additional area and delay overheads. Besides, in order to accord with the low cost and high profit-making goal of systematic products and shorten construction period, we have designed a low-power multiplier generator. User could use the user interface to configure the multiplier size, low power architecture and the precision that user need. The generator will create the hardware architecture of low-power multiplier automatically.

We intend to study the magneto-transport properties of two dimensional electron-hole systems in the condition of ultra-low temperature and high magnetic field by SdH measurement and QHE measurement. In these samples, the SdH oscillations show a 2DEG behavior. We observed that the sample shows negative persistent photoconductivity effect at low temperature and high field under illumination. We want to compare with results before 4 years, so we change more sets of measurement. And we want to know if these samples still show the same effect after 4 years.

Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTAs) with high linearity and wide input range characteristics have become a focus of interest for analog continuous-time circuits. In this research, we intend to develop a low distortion, wide swing CMOS OTA. The supply voltage is 5V. Simulation results show that the OTA is linear, tunable and wide swing. The transconductance can be tuned from 23£gA/V to 37£gA/V. When a 3VPP input signal with 1MHz is applied, THD of the OTA is 51dB. The OTA is used to realize a 1-MHz 7th-order Butterworth lowpass filter. When a 1VPP input signal with 100KHz is applied, THD of the lowpass filter is 50dB. All the circuits are designed based on the UMC 0.5£gm 2p2m CMOS process technology.

We developed low voltage wide swing second generation current conveyors(CCII) with the application to a insensitive Butterworth second-order low-pass filter. All circuits are designed using the parameters of TSMC 1P4M 0.35um process. The minimum supply voltage of CCII(1) circuit is |Vtp|+3Vod. The supply voltage of CCII(2) circuit is |Vtp|+2Vod. The voltage swing of the CCIIs are almost rail to rail.

A magnetic force microscope (MFM) is a special type of scanning force microscope which measures the stray field above a ferromagnetic sample with the help of a ferromagnetic cantilever. The aim of this project was to design and build a MFM head and interface it with a commercial scanning probe electronics controller with the help of an appropriate force sensor. The MFM head and the force sensor were to be designed to work at low temperatures (down to 4 K) and in high vacuum. During this work, a magnetic force microscope (MFM) head was designed. Its design is symmetrical and modular. Two dimensional views were prepared to ensure proper geometry and alignment for the various modules. Based on these views, individual parts in the various modules were manufactured and combined for the final assembly of the head. This MFM head has many essential and advanced features which were incorporated during the design process. Our MFM head has an outside diameter of 5 cm and thus has a low thermal mass. The head operates inside a 100 cm long vacuum can which is kept in a cold bath inside a superinsulated dewar. Other features of this MFM head include thermal compensation of the important parts, flexibility to use commercial MFM cantilevers and a large scan range compared to the previous designs. Some of the anticipated system specifications are: 1) room temperature scanning range of 175?? 175 ??m, 2) low temperature scanning range between 35-50 ??m, 3) smallest detectable magnetic force in the range of one pN and 4) smallest detectable magnetic force gradient in the range of 10-3 to 10 -5 N/m. This MFM head was interfaced to a commercial scanning probe electronics apparatus by designing a fiber-optic interferometer as the sensor for the detection of the cantilever deflection. The fiber-optic sensor also has features of its own such as stability, compactness and low susceptibility to noise because of all-fiber construction. With this MFM head, we hope to image many magnetic samples which were previously impossible to image at Texas A&M.

With shrinking feature size and growing integration density in the Deep Sub- Micron (DSM) technologies, the global buses are fast becoming the "weakest-links" in VLSI design. They have large delays and are error-prone. Especially, in system-onchip (SoC) designs, where parallel interconnects run over large distances, they pose difficult research and design problems. This work presents an approach for evaluating the data carrying capacity of such wires. The method treats the delay and reliability in interconnects from an information theoretic perspective. The results point to an optimal frequency of operation for a given bus dimension for maximum data transfer rate. Moreover, this optimal frequency is higher than that achieved by present day designs which accommodate the worst case delays. This work also proposes several novel ways to approach this optimal data transfer rate in practical designs.From the analysis of signal propagation delay in long wires, it is seen that the signal delay distribution has a long tail, meaning that most signals arrive at the output much faster than the worst case delay. Using communication theory, these "good" signals arriving early can be used to predict/correct the "few" signals that arrive late. In addition to this correction based on prediction, the approaches use coding techniques to eliminate high delay cases to generate a higher transmission rate. The work also extends communication theoretic approaches to other areas of VLSI design. Parity groups are generated based on low output delay correlation to add redundancy in combinatorial circuits. This redundancy is used to increase the frequency of operation and/or reduce the energy consumption while improving the overall reliability of the circuit.

In this research, a novel low temperature atmospheric pressure plasma generator is successfully developed. The developed plasma generator can generate uniform plasma discharge under the operating conditions of 5 SLM helium flow rate and 5 Watts RF power. The temperature of the plasma generator can be maintained lower than 75oC after 30 minutes of continuous operation. The low temperature property of the proposed plasma generator is feasible for the high temperature sensitive sample. Modify the polymer surface by using this plasma generator, for example, the polydimethylsiloxane. It is successfully improve the hydrophilic property, and the surface energy changed obviously. The result of ATR-FTIR detection, the variation of functional groups proved the hydrophilic property, too. Being used the plasma generator to the ion source in novel mass spectrometry. Results show that the measured ion intensity generated using the proposed plasma generator increases steadily with the increases power and increases gas flow. This confirms that this plasma generator is a good ion source in mass spectrometry and for developing a Radio Frequency Direct Analysis in Real Time (RF-DART) mass spectrometry. The blown gas signals of the chewed gum, garlic, and tobacco can be detected quickly already. The signals of the volatile compounds in the solid Chinese herbs samples can be acquired, too. Mass-spectrometer detection results reveal that the developed low-temperature AP plasma generator can directly detect the sample peaks of various samples without using complicate sample preparation processes. More importantly, this proposed analysis method will not cause the memory effect which may influence the signal peaks while analyzing sequence samples during MS operation. Keywords: Low temperature atmospheric pressure plasma; Radio Frequency Direct Analysis in Real Time(RF-DART); Mass spectrometry; Memory effect.

In this thesis, a low-power current-mode instrumentation amplifier is proposed for the portable physiological signal recording system. This proposed instrumentation amplifier is used as a front-end amplifier of physiological signal recording system. In general, the physiological signal is very small, for example, the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Therefore, the system needs a front-end amplifier to amplify small physiological signals so that it is easier to analyze the signals. Besides, the system will be operated for a longer period because of the proposed amplifier¡¦s low-power property. The circuit theorem, design process and simulation, circuit layout as well as the measurement results all have detailed description in this study. Moreover, a specific physiological signal recording system prototype is proposed. This proposed instrumentation amplifier has used TSMC 0.35 £gm 2P4M CMOS process technology.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.