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This article presents development of a UAV based frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar system for remotely sensing the water contained within snowpacks. To make the radar system compatible with the payload requirements of small UAV platforms, the radar electronics are implemented with CMOS technology, and the antenna is implemented as an extremely compact and lightweight metasurface (MTS) antenna. This article will discuss how the high absorption losses of snowpacks lead to dynamic range requirements much stricter than FMCW radars used for automotive and other sensing applications, and how these requirements are met through antenna isolation, leakage calibration and exploitation of the range correlation effect. The article discusses in detail the implementation of the radar system, the CMOS microwave and digital circuitry, and the MTS antenna. The developed radar was mounted on a drone and conducted surveys in both Idaho and Alaska during the 2022-2023 winter season. We present several of those field results.

INTRODUCTION: Emergency departments (ED) care for societys most vulnerable older adults who present with exacerbations of chronic disease at the end of life, yet the clinical paradigm focuses on treatment of acute pathologies. Palliative care interventions in the ED capture high-risk patients at a time of crisis and can dramatically improve patient-centred outcomes. This study aims to implement and evaluate Primary Palliative Care for Emergency Medicine (PRIM-ER) on ED disposition, healthcare utilisation and survival in older adults with serious illness. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This is the protocol for a pragmatic, cluster-randomised stepped wedge trial to test the effectiveness of PRIM-ER in 35 EDs across the USA. The intervention includes four core components: (1) evidence-based, multidisciplinary primary palliative care education; (2) simulation-based workshops; (3) clinical decision support; and (4) audit and feedback. The study is divided into two phases: a pilot phase, to ensure feasibility in two sites, and an implementation and evaluation phase, where we implement the intervention and test the effectiveness in 33 EDs over 2 years. Using Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data, we will assess the primary outcomes in approximately 300 000 patients: ED disposition to an acute care setting, healthcare utilisation in the 6 months following the ED visit and survival following the index ED visit. Analysis will also determine the site, provider and patient-level characteristics that are associated with variation in impact of PRIM-ER. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Institutional Review Board approval was obtained at New York University School of Medicine to evaluate the CMS data. Oversight will also be provided by the National Institutes of Health, an Independent Monitoring Committee and a Clinical Informatics Advisory Board. Trial results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03424109; Pre-results.

This article presents development of CMOS system-on-chip spectrometer processor for Spaceborne Earth Science, Planetary Science and Astronomy. The developed chip is intended for use in rotational emission spectroscopy observations from microwave to sub-millimeter wavelengths performed from Earth orbiting or deep space exploration spacecraft. The article first provides an overview of rotational spectroscopy for space sciences and highlights some of the important results achieved in Earth science, planetary science, and astronomy. The article then discusses the need for smaller and more compact spectrometer instruments across these three space science areas, which motivates this work. Then key considerations in development of spectrometer processors for space science are discussed including the significance including bandwidth, quantization efficiency and spectral channel shapes. The article then highlights detailed design of the developed spectrometer processor focusing on the many calibration techniques included to allow the chip to adapt to operations in space environments where large temperature ranges and high radiation levels are encountered. Presented measurements demonstrate the spectrometer processor operates up to 12.8 GS/s to provide up to 6.4 GHz of processing bandwidth with a frequency resolution of 8192 spectral channels and an analog resolution of 4 bits while consuming only 3960 mW of total DC power.

This paper presents a Ku -band (14-16 GHz) CMOS frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar transceiver developed to measure dry-snow depth for water management purposes and to aid in retrieval of snow water equivalent. An on-chip direct digital frequency synthesizer and digital-to-analog converter digitally generates a chirping waveform which then drives a ring oscillator-based Ku -Band phase-locked loop to provide the final Ku -band FMCW signal. Employing a ring oscillator as opposed to a tuned inductor-based oscillator (LC-VCO) allows the radar to achieve wide chirp bandwidth resulting in a higher axial resolution (7.5 cm), which is needed to accurately quantify the snowpack profile. The demonstrated radar chip is fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process. The chip consumes 252.4 mW of power under 1.1-V supply, making its payload requirements suitable for observations from a small unmanned aerial vehicle.

This paper presents an overview of a sub-orbital flight demonstration with a 183 GHz and 540–600 GHz limb-sounding instrument aboard a stratospheric ballooncraft. The 183 GHz band provides soundings of stratospheric H2O and is implemented with a hybrid CMOS-InP receiver architecture which provides excellent sensitivity while remaining compact (162 g) and offering an extremely low DC power consumption (0.62 W). The 540–600 GHz channel sounds stratospheric O3 and uses a combination of a CMOS local oscillator, GaAs Schottky mixer and micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) RF switch for calibration, again offering competitive form factor (1.4 Kg) and low DC power consumption (6.6 W) compared to prior instruments. The instrument was flown on the NASA Reck-Tang Limb-sounding Experiment (ReckTangLE) ballooncraft and performed atmospheric soundings across New Mexico and Northwestern Texas on Oct. 17 2019.

In this article, we characterized the charge trapping and detrapping behaviors of charge-trap transistors (CTTs) in standard 28-nm CMOS technology and formulated its programmable threshold voltage ( $V_{\mathrm {TH}}$ ). Both thin-oxide and thick-oxide CTT devices are measured, modeled, and analyzed. More than 50- and 100-mV continuous $V_{\mathrm {TH}}$ tuning ranges are achieved for thin and thick oxide devices, respectively. Multiple cycles of programming and erasing operations are demonstrated; however, the reliability needs to be solved in the future. To utilize the developed programmable threshold model, a nonvolatile memory (NVM) cell and an analog arithmetic unit (AAU) are proposed and simulated as two proof-of-concept CTT-based designs.

The exploration of icy body composition in the solar system has often involved spectroscopic measurements of volatiles detected with remote sensing, such measurements portray materials naturally expelled from the surface that enter the exosphere and potentially escape into space. Variations in the ratio of deuterium and hydrogen in these measurements have led to inconclusive hypotheses regarding potential cometary origins of Earth’s ocean water and/or organics. Observational biases regarding unknown previous processing of the observable ejected materials necessitates studies of more dormant, less-processed bodies. Landed missions on comets have brought focus onto the development of small, sensitive instrumentation capable of similar composition measurements of the nascent surface and near-surface materials. We present an evolution of our compact Fourier-transform millimeter-wave cavity spectrometer that is tuned for sensitivity at 80.6 and 183 GHz where HDO and H _2 O exhibit resonance features. We discuss both a low-SWaP (size–weight and power) architecture that uses custom microchip transceiver elements as well as a modular configuration using traditional GaAs-based millimeter-wave hardware. New design features for these systems including quartz-based coupling elements, system thermal management, and a separable clocking board are discussed in addition to sensitivity studies and applications in potential mission scenarios.

Digital circuits implemented in CMOS technology have been the workhorses of high performance computer processors for more than a decade, following Moore's law with exponentially increasing integration and performance. Driven by lower cost, increasing performance, and mixed-signal benefits, CMOS technology also has found increasing use in analog, and more recently, RF applications. Now, with transistor performance still improving, wires are becoming the limiting factor for speed and performance by imposing limits on communication bandwidth and latency between processing cores and memories, both off-and on-chip. Communication and circuit techniques, developed mainly for narrow band-wireless RF communication can help increase the wired communication speed in digital systems. This approach, dubbed RF Interconnect (RF-I), picks up speed for on-board and on-chip applications, changing the communication paradigm from the old parallel unidirectional time-shared bus to new transmission lines enabling reconfigurable communication using both frequency and code division multiple access techniques.

An 8-bit 600 megasamples-per-second (MSPS) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has been implemented in 0.18-[micro]m CMOS to achieve a minimum signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio (SNDR) of 40 dB and a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 45 dB with input-signal bandwidth up to 200 MHz. The ADC is also capable of sampling up to 1 gigasamples/s and maintaining 39-dB SNDR at an input-signal frequency of 55 MHz. Distributed track-and-hold (DT&H) is employed at the ADC front end to relieve the linearity burden on individual T&H subunit. Complementary resistor and capacitor averaging networks are employed before and after DT&H switches separately in order to alleviate offset- and switching-induced errors, respectively. The fabricated ADC occupies 0.5 [mm.sup.2] in chip area and consumes 207 mW from a 1.8-V supply. Index Terms--Analog-to-digital converter (ADC), averaging, distributed, track-and-hold (T&H).

We present an 8-bit 1.25-GS/s flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in 90-nm digital CMOS with wide analog input bandwidth and low power dissipation. The ADC employs two key techniques: a self-biased track-and-hold amplifier which enhances the ADC full-scale voltage and enables the converter operating under a single 1-V supply; and an improved calibration scheme based on reference pre-distortion to enhance the ADC linearity without sacrificing its sampling speed. The prototype converter thus achieves 7-, 6.9-, 6.5-bit ENOB at 1.25 GS/s for input signal frequencies of 10 MHz, 600 MHz, and 1.3 GHz, respectively, and better than 52-dB SFDR across the full Nyquist-band, while dissipating 207 mW from a single 1-V supply. Index Terms--Calibration, flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC), offset correction, source follower, unity-gain buffer.

A multibit digital--analog (D/A) differentiator is used in the forward correction path of a dual-truncation delta--sigma ([DELTA][SIGMA]) D/A converter (DAC) to obtain the desired second-order noise-shaping function for converting mismatch-induced in-band quantization noise to out-of-band frequencies. The multibit D/A differentiator can be configured by embedding binary-weighted current-steering DAC elements into digital differentiators without concern of linearity. In simulations, the newly proposed [DELTA][SIGMA] DAC is 20 dB more effective in noise reduction than widely adopted first-order noise-shaping methods under the identical mismatch conditions of DAC elements (2% in average global mismatch and 0.3% in adjacent element mismatch). This method also offers advantages of compact circuit implementation with smaller routing area and less power consumption over those of thermometer-coded or digital signal processing based counterparts with the same second-order mismatch shaping. Index Terms--Delta-sigma ([DELTA][SIGMA]) modulation, digital--analog (D/A) conversion, D/A differentiator (DAD), mismatch shaping, noise cancellation, quantization noise.

An approach for three-dimensional substrate impedance engineering of p(super -)/p(super +) Si substrate for mixed signal integrated circuit applications is presented. It is found that this technology require minimum intrusion to conventional Si CMOS processing, making them prectical and effective.

Future inter- and intra-ULSI interconnect systems demand extremely high data rates and bidirectional multiI/O concurrent service, re-configurable computing/processing architecture, and total compatibility with mainstream silicon system-on-chip and system-in-package technologies. These new interconnect schemes facilitate the use of additional multiple access techniques to increase bandwidth and channel concurrency and to reduce channel latency.

High-speed electrical connectors are essential components in all modern computing and interconnect systems such as in a display, a smartphone, an automobile, or an industrial robot. With the digitalization of industrial processes along with demand for high-speed consumer electronic products, the connector industry is expected to experience significant growth in coming years. One of the main concerns in electrical connector design is reliability. Because of the nature of physical connections, traditional mechanical connectors are unavoidably exposed to environmental hazards as well as mechanical wear from continuous usage; thus, creating connectivity with long-term reliability can be a major challenge. For instance, many daily personal computer users have experienced physically damaged USB connectors after connecting and disconnecting devices repeatedly over time. Moreover, ever-increasing data rates impose serious signal integrity challenges—especially for cost-driven consumer electronic products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extension of radio frequency complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuitry into millimeter wavelengths promises the extension of spectroscopic techniques in compact, power efficient systems. We are now beginning to use CMOS millimeter devices for low-mass, low-power instrumentation capable of remote or in situ detection of gas composition during space missions. We have chosen to develop a Flygare-Balle type spectrometer, with a semi-confocal Fabry-Perot cavity to amplify the pump power of a mm-wavelength CMOS transmitter that is directly coupled to the planar mirror of the cavity. We have built a pulsed transceiver system at 92-105 GHz inside a 3 cm base length cavity and demonstrated quality factor up to 4680, allowing for modes with 20 MHz bandwidth, with a sufficient cavity amplification factor for mW class transmitters. This work describes the initial gas measurements and outlines the challenges and next steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An 8-bit 10-GHz 8 $\times $ time-interleaved successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) incorporates an aggressively scaled digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with grouped capacitors in a symmetrical structure to afford a threefold reduction in the bottom-plate parasitic capacitance. A detailed study rigorously analyzes the effect of gradient on the proposed DAC layout. The DAC additionally implements quantized sub-radix-2 scaling with redistributed redundancy. A high-speed dual-path bootstrapped switch decouples the critical signal from the nonlinear parasitic capacitance to boost the sampling spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) by more than 5 dB. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the ADC demonstrates an SNDR of 36.9 dB at Nyquist while consuming 21 mW, yielding a figure-of-merit of 37 fJ/conv.-step, the best among state-of-the-arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Alternative models are required to meet the palliative care needs of our ageing population. • EMPallA is a trial comparing nurse-led telephonic care to outpatient palliative care. • Early data indicate that seriously ill patients are willing to engage within the program. • Within the program, nurses have had success in achieving goal-concordant care. • This innovative program is an important model for bringing palliative care directly to patients. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a profound transformation of health care delivery toward telemedicine models. We present the structure of a nurse-led telephonic palliative program and operational metrics to influence further development of tele-palliative programs. The nurses engage with seriously ill patients for 6 months with the goal of discussing advance care planning (ACP) and addressing self-identified issues related to their illness. Of the first 100 program graduates, 78% were actively engaged and 51% named a health care agent and/or engaged in ACP. Of the 18 patients who died during the study, 13 (72%) were enrolled in hospice services. Our preliminary results indicate that seriously ill patients are willing to engage with nurses and to participate with discussions on ACP. Given the gaps in health care exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this innovative program serves as an important model for bringing palliative care directly to patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a single-signal-path tri (K/Ka/V)-band receiver (RX) featuring area/cost-effective support for various millimeter-wave phased-array applications. A triple-coupling transformer (TCT) at the common-gate input stage of the RX low-noise amplifier (LNA) is proposed for triband impedance matching and gm-boosting. By augmenting each low-parasitic pMOS switched inductor load with a pMOS variable resistor in parallel, the variable-gain functionality is merged into this LNA to cover a wide input-signal range in a low-overhead manner. An active single-balanced mixer (SBM) for radio frequency (RF)-intermediate frequency (IF) downconversion is adopted to eliminate a wideband balun. Poor RF-IF and local-oscillator (LO)-IF isolations and low IIP2 normally inherited in an SBM are avoided by setting the IF particularly. The wideband response of an on-chip LO buffer is realized through input resistor coupling and output inductor peaking. Furthermore, a constant-gain phase shifter (CGPS) at IF is proposed to benefit the orthogonal gain-and-phase control preferred by beam steering. This CGPS uses an amplitude-only feedback loop to retain the gain without baseband equalization. Fabricated in a 28-nm bulk CMOS technology, this RX exhibits variable power gains of 12.5–33.2 dB (at 24 GHz), 13.4–34.6 dB (at 33 GHz), and 3.1–32 dB (at 50 GHz) with respective minimum noise figures of 4.78, 5.12, and 6.15 dB. The respective RX 3-dB bandwidths are 20–27, 30–34.6, and 42–55.5 GHz. The measured CGPS gain variation at IF (2–4 GHz) is within 0.94 dB. This RX consumes 131 mW and occupies 1.22 mm2 with pads in a silicon area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Palliative care interventions in the ED capture high-risk patients at a time of crisis and can dramatically improve patient-centered outcomes.Objective: To understand the facilitators that contributed to the success of the Primary Palliative Care for Emergency Medicine (PRIM-ER) quality improvement pilot intervention.Design: Effectiveness was evaluated through semi-structured interviews. Reach outcomes were measured by percent of all full-time emergency providers (physicians, physician assistants, nurses) who completed the intervention education components and baseline survey assessing attitudes and knowledge on end-of-life care.Participants: Emergency medicine providers affiliated with two medical centers (N = 197). Interviews conducted with six key informants at both institutions.Approach: Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using deductive and inductive approaches. Descriptive statistics include reach outcomes and baseline survey results.Key Results: Both sites successfully implemented all components of the intervention and achieved a high level (> 75%) of intervention reach. Two themes emerged as facilitators to successful effectiveness facilitators of PRIM-ER: (1) institutional leadership support and (2) leveraging established quality improvement (QI) processes. Institutional support included leveraging leadership with authority to (a) mandate trainings; (b) substitute PRIM-ER education for normally scheduled education; and (c) provide protected time to implement intervention components. Effectiveness was also enhanced by capitalizing on existing QI processes which included (a) leveraging interdisciplinary partnerships and communication plans and (b) monitoring performance improvement data.Conclusions: Capitalizing on strong institutional leadership support and established QI processes enhanced the reach and effectiveness of the PRIM-ER pilot. These findings will guide the PRIM-ER researchers in scaling up the intervention in the remaining 33 sites, as well as enhance the planning of other complex quality improvement interventions in clinical settings.Registration Details: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03424109; Grant Number: AT009844-01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology achieving multi-gigabits speed plays a significant role in beyond 5G and the next 6G wireless communication networks thanks to its huge spectrum utilization and beam-based directional transmissions. To tackle temporary ultra-high data demands of hotspot areas, three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous network (HetNet) is designed with the integration of mmWave unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to provide resilient instantaneous control and data transmissions. However, some critical beam-related issues for mmWave implementation of UAVs/drones are addressed including robust initial beam alignment, mobility-aware beam tracking and beam refinement. In this research, we aim at developing robust and efficient beam control mechanisms by implementing a prototype of 3D flying heterogeneous communications. The backhaul connections operate at mmWave frequency between airship and UAV/drone, while fronthaul links adopt lower frequency bands such as Wi-Fi for multiuser data transmissions. We evaluate system performances for our proposed beam control schemes and provide a real-time prototype of 3D on-demand flying mobile communication for mmWave HetNets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief presents a novel reconfigurable $K$ -means clustering accelerator that is suitable for integration in both IoT and data center system. The high vector dimension reconfigurability and design cost reduction is achieved through vector-streaming and adaptive overflow control to adapt distance computation using as-needed precision (dynamic 16-bit fixed-point data format). A two-stage shift-bit counted comparator is proposed. It can determine most results through only turning on the shift-bit comparator (3-bit), reducing the power consumption by $7\times $ compared to the direct full dynamic range comparison. Four vectors with two cluster centroids are processed simultaneously. Up to 8-dimension cluster vectors are stored in local buffer to reduce data exchange between the main memory and the processing engine. A prototype accelerator was implemented in TSMC 65 nm. The accelerator occupied 0.26 mm2 and can support up to 64-D vector clustering. It achieved 31.2M query vectors/s with 41-mW power consumption at 250-MHz clock (cluster number: 2, vector dimension: 64) and an energy efficiency of 0.41 TOPS/W at 30 MHz clock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The emergency department is a critical juncture in the trajectory of care of patients with serious, life-limiting illness. Implementation of a clinical decision support (CDS) tool automates identification of older adults who may benefit from palliative care instead of relying upon providers to identify such patients, thus improving quality of care by assisting providers with adhering to guidelines. The Primary Palliative Care for Emergency Medicine (PRIM-ER) study aims to optimize the use of the electronic health record by creating a CDS tool to identify high risk patients most likely to benefit from primary palliative care and provide point-of-care clinical recommendations.Methods: A clinical decision support tool entitled Emergency Department Supportive Care Clinical Decision Support (Support-ED) was developed as part of an institutionally-sponsored value based medicine initiative at the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Emergency Medicine at NYU Langone Health. A multidisciplinary approach was used to develop Support-ED including: a scoping review of ED palliative care screening tools; launch of a workgroup to identify patient screening criteria and appropriate referral services; initial design and usability testing via the standard System Usability Scale questionnaire, education of the ED workforce on the Support-ED background, purpose and use, and; creation of a dashboard for monitoring and feedback.Results: The scoping review identified the Palliative Care and Rapid Emergency Screening (P-CaRES) survey as a validated instrument in which to adapt and apply for the creation of the CDS tool. The multidisciplinary workshops identified two primary objectives of the CDS: to identify patients with indicators of serious life limiting illness, and to assist with referrals to services such as palliative care or social work. Additionally, the iterative design process yielded three specific patient scenarios that trigger a clinical alert to fire, including: 1) when an advance care planning document was present, 2) when a patient had a previous disposition to hospice, and 3) when historical and/or current clinical data points identify a serious life-limiting illness without an advance care planning document present. Monitoring and feedback indicated a need for several modifications to improve CDS functionality.Conclusions: CDS can be an effective tool in the implementation of primary palliative care quality improvement best practices. Health systems should thoughtfully consider tailoring their CDSs in order to adapt to their unique workflows and environments. The findings of this research can assist health systems in effectively integrating a primary palliative care CDS system seamlessly into their processes of care.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03424109. Registered 6 February 2018, Grant Number: AT009844-01. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analog neural network computing engine based on CMOS-compatible charge-trap transistor (CTT) is proposed in this paper. CTT devices are used as analog multipliers. Compared to digital multipliers, CTT-based analog multiplier shows significant area and power reduction. The proposed computing engine is composed of a scalable CTT multiplier array and energy efficient analog–digital interfaces. By implementing the sequential analog fabric, the engine’s mixed-signal interfaces are simplified and hardware overhead remains constant regardless of the size of the array. A proof-of-concept 784 by 784 CTT computing engine is implemented using TSMC 28-nm CMOS technology and occupies 0.68 mm2. The simulated performance achieves 76.8 TOPS (8-bit) with 500 MHz clock frequency and consumes 14.8 mW. As an example, we utilize this computing engine to address a classic pattern recognition problem—classifying handwritten digits on MNIST database and obtained a performance comparable to state-of-the-art fully connected neural networks using 8-bit fixed-point resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Palliative care is recommended for patients with life-limiting illnesses; however, there are few standardized protocols for outpatient palliative care visits. To address the paucity of data, this article aims to: (1) describe the elements of outpatient palliative care that are generalizable across clinical sites; (2) achieve consensus about standardized instruments used to assess domains within outpatient palliative care; and (3) develop a protocol and intervention checklist for palliative care clinicians to document outpatient visit elements that might not normally be recorded in the electronic heath record. Methods: As part of a randomized control trial of nurse-led telephonic case management versus specialty, outpatient palliative care in older adults with serious life-limiting illnesses in the Emergency Department, we assessed the structural characteristics of outpatient care clinics across nine participating health care systems. In addition, direct observation of outpatient palliative care visits, consultation from content experts, and survey data were used to develop an outpatient palliative care protocol and intervention checklist. Implementation: The protocol and checklist are being used to document the contents of each outpatient palliative care visit conducted as a part of the Emergency Medicine Palliative Care Access (EMPallA) trial. Variation across palliative care team staffing, clinic session capacity, and physical clinic model presents a challenge to standardizing the delivery of outpatient palliative care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a millimeter-wave (127 GHz) CMOS transceiver with a digital pre-distortion capable PAM-4 modulator for contactless communications. The transmitter upconverts PAM-4 modulated baseband signals through a free-running 127-GHz oscillator and single-balanced mixer, and it delivers PAM-4 modulated carrier signals to a folded-dipole antenna, which is designed on a FR408HR substrate. The receiver’s low-noise amplifier provides a 10-dB gain, and the self-mixer downconverts carrier-modulated PAM-4 signals to baseband signals without the necessity of carrier synchronization. The PAM-4 modulator pre-distorts the baseband signals and corrects the non-linear characteristics of the transmitter’s upconversion mixer and the receiver’s downconversion self-mixer. Designed and fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, the demonstrated system transfers 20 Gb/s of PAM-4 modulated data through a 1-mm air gap and consumes 79.5 mW (transmitter: 50.8 mW and receiver: 28.7 mW) of power under a 1.2-V supply, achieving a 3.98-pJ/bit energy efficiency. The communication distance is extended to 3 cm by inserting a dielectric waveguide between the same transceiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE 2018 IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB), chaired by IEEE Educational Activities Vice President Witold Kinsner, upon the recommendation of the EAB Awards and Recognition Committee (ARC) has named the recipients of the 2018 IEEE EAB Awards. EAB Awards recognize and honor individuals and companies for major contributions to engineering and technical education. Awards are given for meritorious activities in accreditation, continuing education, educational innovation, pre-university education, service to the IEEE EAB, standards education, employee professional development, and informal education systems, as well as related achievements that advance the practice of engineering and engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief presents a two-way time-interleaved two-step pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC) architecture built upon a new concept of virtual-ground sampling, featuring merged front-end track-and-hold, residue generation, input termination, and buffering. This architecture is investigated to alleviate the front-end performance tradeoff among the total-harmonic-distortion, bandwidth, and sampling rate (interleaving factor). A 2-GS/s 8b ADC using the new architecture was designed and fabricated in 28-nm CMOS, achieving 43-dB SNDR and 55-dB SFDR up to Nyquist frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a case of azathioprine hypersensitivity presenting as sepsis with elevated procalcitonin in a 68-year-old man with myasthenia gravis. The patient presented with fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, and headache. He developed numerous 1 cm erythematous papules over his upper torso. Infectious workup including bacteriological tests and microbial cultures was negative and a skin biopsy was performed which revealed suppurative folliculitis with eosinophils, consistent with drug hypersensitivity. Notably, acute phase reactants including C-reactive protein and procalcitonin were elevated upon presentation, likely secondary to drug hypersensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the complex matrix effects, the current approach to quantitative X‐ray diffraction (XRD) and X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses of mixtures requires calibration lines from standards, and is hence tedious and time consuming. New insights reveal that both the matrix effects and the calibration lines can be eliminated mathematically. Any complex mixture can be transformed into a set of simple binary mixtures. One straightforward formula decodes both XRD and XRF. A single XRD or XRF scan quantifies the chemical compounds or chemical elements in any mixture. The unified and simplified procedure reduces by some 80% the laboratory work associated with current practice. Five sets of experimental data are presented to verify its applications. Statistical evaluation of this new procedure gives a precision of ±5% or better, which is normally expected from XRD and XRF analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An impulse response method is carried out to analyze waveguide's information capacity within a coherent communication system. Such capability is typically estimated according to group delay variations (seconds/bandwidth/distance) after carrier-modulated data undergoes a dispersive medium. However, traditional group delay methods often ignore non-linear effects by assuming input data stream only occupies narrow bandwidth such that a propagation constant can be linearized centered at the carrier frequency. Such a constraint can be lifted with a proposed baseband equivalent impulse response method by using frequency domain convolution and multiplication. Once the impulse response in frequency domain is secured, its time domain counterpart can be calculated based on inverse Fourier transformation. Such analysis can fully reveal data pulse's broadening and gauge its inter-symbol interference by simply convolving input data with extracted impulse response, not limited to specific frequency range or type of waveguide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Touch sensing has been widely implemented as a main methodology to bridge human and machine interactions. The traditional touch sensing range is 2-D and therefore limits the user experience. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel 3-D contactless touch sensing called Airtouch system, which improves user experience by remotely detecting single/multi-finger position. A single layer touch panel with triangle-shaped electrodes is proposed to achieve multitouch detection capability as well as manufacturing cost reduction. Moreover, an oscillator-based-capacitive touch sensing circuit is implemented as the sensing hardware with the bootstrapping technique to eliminate the interchannel coupling effects. To further improve the system accuracy, a grouping algorithm is proposed to group the useful channels’ data and filter out hardware noise impact. Finally, improved algorithms are proposed to eliminate the fringing capacitance effect and achieve accurate finger position estimation. EM simulation proved that the proposed algorithm reduced the maximum systematic error by 11 dB in the horizontal position detection. The proposed system consumes 2.3 mW and is fully compatible with existing mobile device environments. A prototype is built to demonstrate that the system can successfully detect finger movement in a vertical direction up to 6 cm and achieve a horizontal resolution up to 0.6 cm at 1 cm finger-height. As a new interface for human and machine interactions, this system offers great potential in finger movement detection and gesture recognition for small-sized electronics and advanced human interactive games for mobile device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a fully synthesizable all-digital transmitter (ADTX) is first proposed. This transmitter (TX) uses Cartesian architecture and supports wide-band quadratic-amplitude modulation with wide carrier frequency range. Furthermore, the design methodology for ADTX and corresponding bandpass filter is discussed. This TX is synthesized with digital register transfer level-graphic database system flow, and can be easily implemented in any standard CMOS technology. An exemplary TX is synthesized by TSMC 28-nm standard cell library with extremely small area (0.0009 mm2) and supports carrier frequency as high as 6 GHz with excellent error vector magnitude (<−30 dB). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work on a fully synthesizable design of RF transistors, allowing easy technology migration and portability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This brief presents a wireline transmitter architecture, enabling multilevel signaling with feedforward equalization (FFE) in voltage-mode. A compact R2R-DAC-based front end is proposed and analyzed in terms of its speed, power consumption, and linearity. A voltage-mode PAM-4 transmitter with 2-tap FFE utilizing the proposed architecture is implemented in the 65-nm CMOS technology. It achieves a data rate of 34 Gb/s and an energy efficiency of 2.7 mW/Gb/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief presents a capacitor digital-to-analog converter (DAC) based technique that is suitable for pre-emphasis-enabled multilevel wireline transmitter design in voltage mode. Detailed comparisons between the proposed technique and conventional direct-coupling-based as well as resistor-DAC-based multilevel transmitter design techniques are given, revealing potential benefits in terms of speed, linearity, implementation complexity, and also power consumption. A PAM-4 transmitter with 2-Tap feed-forward equalization adopting the proposed technique is implemented in 65-nm CMOS technology. It achieves a 25-Gb/s data rate and energy efficiency of 2 mW/Gb/s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For research and development or for solving technical problems, we often need to know the chemical composition of an unknown mixture, which is coded and stored in the signals of its X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). X-ray fluorescence gives chemical elements, whereas XRD gives chemical compounds. The major problem in XRF and XRD analyses is the complex matrix effect. The conventional technique to deal with the matrix effect is to construct empirical calibration lines with standards for each element or compound sought, which is tedious and time-consuming. A unified theory of quantitative XRF analysis is presented here. The idea is to cancel the matrix effect mathematically. It turns out that the decoding equation for quantitative XRF analysis is identical to that for quantitative XRD analysis although the physics of XRD and XRF are fundamentally different. The XRD work has been published and practiced worldwide. The unified theory derives a new intensity-concentration equation of XRF, which is free from the matrix effect and valid for a wide range of concentrations. The linear decoding equation establishes a constant slope for each element sought, hence eliminating the work on calibration lines. The simple linear decoding equation has been verified by 18 experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a low overhead phase noise cancellation technique for ring oscillator (RO)-based quadrature receivers is presented. The proposed technique operates in background and extracts RO phase noise as well as supply-induced phase noise from the digital phase-locked loop. The obtained phase noise information is then used to restore the randomly rotated baseband signal in digital domain. A receiver prototype is fabricated in standard 65-nm CMOS technology. It demonstrates a phase noise reduction from −88 to −109 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset and an integrated phase noise reduction from −16.8 to −34.6 dBc when operating at 2.4 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cognitive tri-band transmitter (TX) with a forwarded clock using multiband signaling and high-order digital signal modulations is presented for serial link applications. The TX features learning an arbitrary channel response by sending a sweep of continuous wave, detecting power level at the receiver side, and then adapting modulation scheme, data bandwidth, and carrier frequencies accordingly based on detected channel information. The supported modulation scheme ranges from nonreturn to zero/Quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) to Pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) 16/256-Quadrature amplitude modulation(QAM). The proposed highly reconfigurable TX is capable of dealing with low-cost serial channels, such as low-cost connectors, cables, or multidrop buses with deep and narrow notches in the frequency domain (e.g., a 40-dB loss at notches). The adaptive multiband scheme mitigates equalization requirements and enhances the energy efficiency by avoiding frequency notches and utilizing the maximum available signal-to-noise ratio and channel bandwidth. The implemented TX prototype consumes a 14.7-mW power and occupies 0.016 mm2 in a 28-nm CMOS. It achieves a maximum data rate of 16 Gb/s with forwarded clock through one differential pair and the most energy efficient figure of merit of 20.4 \mu \textW /Gb/s/dB, which is calculated based on power consumption of transmitting per gigabits per second data and simultaneously overcoming per decibel worst case channel loss within the Nyquist frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief discusses an oscillator-based capacitive 3-D touch-sensing circuit for mobile devices. The proposed 3-D touch sensor uses correlated double sampling to achieve a high sensing resolution in the Z-direction and employs bootstrapping circuitry to reduce the mobile screen's interchannel-coupling effects. Additionally, to reduce chip area and assembly, the sensing oscillator is implemented with inverter-based active resonators instead of using either on- or off-chip inductors. The prototyped 3-D touch sensor is fabricated using 65-nm CMOS process technology and consumes an area of 2 mm2, with a 2.3-mW power consumption from a 1-V power supply. Measured together with a 3.4′′ HTC standard mobile screen, the sensor achieves an 11-cm Z-direction sensing range with a 1-cm resolution, demonstrating the potential implementation of 3-D finger position sensing in a mobile device. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the design and characterization of a 0.56 THz frequency synthesizer implemented in standard 65 nm CMOS technology. Its front end consists of triple-push Colpitts oscillators (TPCOs), followed by the first and second stage injection locking frequency dividers (ILFDs) and a divide-by-16 chain. TPCOs are used to triple their fundamental frequencies to 0.53–0.56 THz, while ILFDs and the subsequent divider chain are used to divide such frequencies to 2.7–2.9 GHz. Its back end consists of separate frequency and phase-locked loops with unique CMOS circuit designs to accomplish the desirable frequency/phase locking, including: 1) band-selection inductor switches; 2) simultaneous bulk voltage tuning over TPCOs and the first ILFD; and 3) a dual port injection architecture for the first ILFD. The resultant prototype realizes a 21 GHz frequency locking range with phase noise lower than −74 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, and consumes 174 mW dc power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]