<p>This project was worked on during the autumn 2005 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications. The assignment was to write a new LabVIEW programme that is to run the measurement procedure of a laser probe setup. The setup is used in characterization of surface acoustic waves(SAW). A programme was written that contained the necessary functionality and proved to operate satisfactorily. Several measurements were made on a SAW transducer, accurately picturing the wave. Fourier analysis were performed on the collected data in order to separate the propagation directions. An absolute amplitude measurement was made on a heterodyne interferometer, and the result was compared to a similar scan made using the laser probe. The work shows that the setup is ready for calibration against the heterodyne interferometer, in order to enable the laser probe to measure absolute amplitude by itself.</p>

<p>Two different processors from two FPGA vendors and an OpenCore-processor have been investigated. For this work two different boards were used, the first was the Cyclone II FPGA Altera Board, in which the Nios II Altera microprocessor and the free processor Leon2 were tested. The second board was a SUZAKU-S board, in which the Microblaze Xilinx microprocessor and the free processor Leon2 were tested. We performed two different benchmarks in these boards, the Dhrystone and the Whetstone, to compare the different velocities between the free and not free processors. Also the documentation and ease of use of the processors is considered.</p>

<p>The candidate shall study different methods for dynamic spectral management in DSL systems, with main emphasis on autonomeous methods like iterative waterfilling. The methods shall be implemented in Matlab.</p>

<p>Study of the Polarization Dependent Loss caused by the combined effect of orthogonality degradation and dynamic power fluctuations in a hybrid network, which combines circuit switching with packet switching to transmit applications with very different quality requirements on the same wavelength channel.</p>

<p>This thesis describes the work on designing and testing an antenna solution for communications between cars. The antenna that is to be used is a so called ESPAR antenna or Electronically Steerable Passive Array Radiator using monopoles over a circular ground plane. Simulations were made on the following variations of the antenna: • The number of passive monopoles and the angle between them • The radius and height of the active and passive monopoles • The height of the skirt and the radius of the ground plane • Matching schemes The antenna that was decided to be the best for this application had these characteristics: - Ground plane radius 75 mm or half a wavelength - Skirt height of 37.5 mm or a quarter wavelengths - Six parasitic monopoles with a height of 39 mm equally spaced around an active monopole of 35 mm - Distance from active monopole to parasitic monopoles of a quarter wavelengths - Half power beam width of about 90 degrees and a front to back ratio of 16 dB - Gain of about 7.5 dB and an elevation angle of 25 degrees From these results a prototype of the antenna was constructed with different heights of the active and parasitic monopoles. The measurements showed less variation between the different configurations of the antenna than the simulations indicated. The largest difference was the elevation angle of the antenna. This was found to be about 0 degrees for all configurations which is an improvement of about 25 degrees from the simulated results. The best results was found to be with an antenna that has the same configurations as the simulated one described above but with a parasitic monopole height of 37 mm. The measurements showed the following specifications: - Gain of about 9.5 dB - HPBW of 80 degrees - FTBR of about 12 dB Because of certain elements in the construction of the antenna the measurements of the matching were inconclusive, and were not weighed heavily in this thesis.</p>

<p>Non-intrusive testing of pipelines has become a growing industry, and is expected to keep growing as the demands on quality control and safety keep increasing. In order to meet the oil industry’s demands for pipe monitoring of sub sea pipelines, the SmartPipe project was initiated by SINTEF in Trondheim, Norway. One of the primary objectives of the SmartPipe project is develop a system for in-service monitoring of the pipelines that are placed on the seabed by the offshore oil industry. This thesis presents a very early step in the research required for the development of such a system. The purpose of the presented work was to carry out introductory experimental work in order to find out whether it is possible to develop relatively simple techniques for in-service testing of sub sea steel pipes. A so-called pitch-catch setup and various wedges was used in order to test the area between a pair of 5 MHz ultrasound transducers. Measuring over a distance of 1.00 m, rather than just single points on the pipe, could provide more general information about the condition of the pipe. Tests with over 4 m distance between transducers were also carried out. Measurement stability and mechanical coupling are of crucial importance in ultrasonic test systems, and useful knowledge on the subjects has been gained and are documented in this thesis. Results from measurements indicate that comprehensible results can be attained even with very simple measurement setups. Especially when using special wedges for introduction of Rayleigh waves, the received signals had high amplitudes and the signal envelope had a simple shape. The effect that the damage to the pipe had on the Rayleigh waves, was found to be equally simple and predictable. Shear waves and longitudinal waves that are less sensitive to the surrounding medium, were also shown to be applicable in flaw detection. Results and discussion include both time domain, frequency domain and energy considerations.</p>

<p>In this thesis the performance of the ALOHA and CSMA MAC protocols are analyzed in spatially distributed wireless networks. The main measurement metric used is probability of outage, a metric that is referred to in most of the related research done in this field, but has not been treated in detail thus far. Some of the research done on other performance metrics such as transmission capacity, throughput, bit error rate, spatial reuse and delay are also noted and described briefly in this report. In our system model, users/packets arrive randomly in space and time according to a Poisson point process, and are thereby transmitted to their intended destinations using a fully distributed MAC protocol (either ALOHA or CSMA). Our model allows simultaneous transmissions between many transmitter-receiver pairs in the network. An SINR-based model is considered, and a packet transmission is encountered as successful if the received SINR is above a predetermined threshold value for the entire duration of the packet. Accurate bounds on the probability of outage, which is a function of the density of transmissions, are developed for both MAC protocols. The methods used to reach the obtained analytical results are presented in detail, and the analytical results are shown to follow the simulation results tightly. We also present the methods that were used to find expressions for the outage probability, which turned out to not be as successful as desired in terms of following the simulation results tightly for all densities. Furthermore, the derived bounds for the probability of outage are used to determine the performance advantage that CSMA provides over ALOHA and also to gain insight into the design of general MAC protocols for ad hoc networks. Our final comparison results show that CSMA performs better than unslotted ALOHA, and worse than slotted ALOHA in terms of probability of outage.</p>

<p>Conventional hearing aids perform badly in environments with reverberation and noise. In this paper the use of microphone arrays as hearing aids to increase directivity and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a noisy environment are evaluated. A portable microphone array prototype is constructed to test beamforming algorithms in a real environment. Delay and sum beamforming, sub-band beamforming and an experimental type of binaural beamforming is implemented in real-time using the digital signal processor ADSP-BF533. Results from testing showed that a four microphone array using sub-band beamforming outperforms delay and sum beamforming using the same number of microphones. The results also showed that it is possible to obtain binaural impression of the array output and source localization using the proposed binaural technique called beamspreading.</p>

<p>The Lithium-ion battery is today used by close to every portable battery powered device, and this marked is constantly increasing because not only are the products the consumer have had for years getting more and more sophisticated, so he or she often “has” to replace yesterdays model with tomorrows. But as many products are furnished with new functions they use more power, hence their battery life is shortened. Because the Lithium-ion battery is so chemically advanced, it requires a sophisticated management system if it is to be fully utilized by the product. In this report, the parameters of the Lithium-ion battery which are the reason for this strict management are explained. The explanation does not look into the underlying chemistry for them because that is beyond the scope of this report. But sources for further reading on the subject are included. Different solutions for battery management are discussed and a Voltage-to-Frequency (VFC) converter is implemented in VHDL-AMS and simulated in ADVance-MS from Mentor[2]. The sources of error in the design are identified but dealt with in this report. This is not necessary before implementation in a CMOS-process has been shown possible. Simulations without component deviations are good, but once they are introduced, the converter shows that it is too sensitive for them. This can be solved utilizing digital error correction and calibration. After the ideal simulations are performed, transistor level simulations for the circuit are performed. Different solutions and requirements for the various components in the Voltage-to-Frequency converter are looked into with respect to the results found while simulating the ideal circuit. It was found that the comparator should have hysteresis to avoid unwanted chattering in its output signal. The architecture was chosen and the comparator was simulated. It was found that this architecture provided some offset-voltage, but this can easily be compensated by subtracting the offset from its reference voltage. Digital calibration can also here be utilized, but this is not looked into. Two high-gain op-amp architectures are looked into and simulated in this report, it was found that the two-stage used slightly more power than the two-stage op-amp with cascode-output, but they both provided approximately the same gain, even though the two-stage op-amp with cascode-output theoretically should provide about 100 times more gain. From this it is concluded that this architecture has a gain-limit independent of architecture used around 56dB. It is concluded that the Voltage-to-Frequency-architecture looked into is not suitable for implementation in this CMOS-process and that another architecture must be found if a Voltage-to-Frequency converter shall be made for the architecture.</p>

<p>A acquisition module for the OpenGNSS software receiver has been implemented as GNU Radio module. It has been tested and the functionality has been verified with both simulated and real signal. A number of proposals for future work and modifications to the GNU Radio framework has also been presented.</p>