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Over the past decade, the direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) has been considered as a potential candidate of power sources for portable electronics due to its high energy density and environmental friendly operation. However, the use of diluted fuel loading and active fuel mixer/pump limits the DMFC's efficiency and operating time dramatically. The disadvantages become more severe in microscale DMFCs which require high conversion efficiency within a small physical space to meet the strict working specifications. In this paper, a low-power micro fuel supplier with programmable concentration regulation was designed and fabricated by using microelectromechanical system technology. The prototype adopted surface-tension pumping as the primary driving force to deliver fuel at zero power consumption. In addition, a well-arranged microfluidic capillary network was used to regulate the fuel concentration. A pulse-power actuated bubbler switch was embedded in the capillary network to achieve the liquid flow control dynamically and to adjust the fuel concentration for micro-DMFC ( \muDMFC) reaction. Both electrolysis and thermal bubble actuations were investigated in this paper for their effective operations in the prototype. The advantage of precise and low-power fuel regulation within a compact system volume makes the proposed fuel delivery subsystem a suitable candidate for future on-chip \muDMFC development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial modulation (SM) and space shift keying (SSK) techniques have the unique advantages of their single-radio-frequency (RF) structures compared with conventional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques. However, the transmission rates of these techniques are decided by the maximal switching frequency or by the minimal switching time between the RF chain and transmit antennas, which has been a bottleneck for their applications in future broadband wireless communications. To alleviate this problem, we propose a class of novel offset SM (OSM) and offset SSK (OSSK) schemes, with the aid of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. Compared with conventional SM and SSK, the proposed OSM and OSSK schemes can reduce the switching frequency of the RF chain, by introducing an offset between the connected RF chain and the index of the spatial modulated antenna. In extreme conditions, the proposed OSM and OSSK can work without RF switching while maintaining the single-RF advantage of conventional SM and SSK schemes. Through theoretical analysis, we also develop the bit-error rate (BER) performance bounds for the proposed two schemes. Finally, our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed OSM and OSSK outperform their counterparts, including conventional SM, SSK, CSI-aided SM, and CSI-aided SSK, while having a simplified RF-switching structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]