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This paper proposes the design of a very low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulator in 0.18-mm CMOS technology. The proposed LDO regulator consists of voltage reference, symmetrical operational transconductance amplifier (OTA), PMOS transistor, resistive feedback network and output capacitor. The NMOS symmetrical OTA is implemented as an error amplifier and a PMOS transistor is employed as a pass device to improve gain and minimize low dropout voltage, respectively. The proposed design is simulated using Spectre simulator in Cadence software to verify its regulator performance. The simulation results show that the proposed LDO is capable to operate from a supply voltage of 1.7-2.0 V with a low dropout voltage of 19.3 mV at a maximum 50 mA load current to regulate output voltage 1.5 V. The active chip is 2.96 mm2 in size. The performance of the proposed LDO is suitable to enhance power management for system on chip (SoC) applications.

The combustion of the internal combustion engine results in high heat and pressure produce as exhaust gas. The high-temperature exhaust gas will transfer the heat to surrounding via convection, conduction, and radiation. In the combustion chamber, the exhaust valve and its seat will reach high temperatures due to hot gases exit through the engine exhaust port. This high temperature must be reduced to avoid damaging the engine. In this project, the existing material of the valve seat is tested using computational fluid dynamics simulation for heat analysis. Simulation of transient thermal is conducted to study the detailed behavior of heat transfer of the valve and valve seat in the engine. Four copper-based material of the valve seat is selected which is beryllium copper, chromium copper, brass, bronze are simulated. In the simulation, the brass valve seat has the highest heat absorbance rate which averagely 30% higher than cast iron valve seat in terms of temperature differences. Most of the copper-based valve seat can absorb averagely 10% to 30% more heat than cast iron valve seat depends on the material’s thermal conductivity.

A low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulator is the main component used in the majority of portable electronic application since it is used as power management unit in those applications. In this paper, a LDO regulator for the power management integrated circuit in 0.18-µm CMOS technology using Cadence software is presented. The error amplifier of the proposed LDO employed seven transistors for current mirror. Meanwhile, the PMOS transistor is used as a pass element transistor to control the voltage variation. The resistors are used as a feedback network circuit while the capacitor is used to minimise the variation of output voltage. The simulation results show that the proposed design provides a 2.41 V constant output voltage for the supply voltage ranges of 2.55 V to 3.55 V. The dropout voltage of 140 mV is achieved with 1.48 mW power consumption. The line regulation is 1.0 mV/V and the load regulation is 0.41 mV/A, while the layout of the proposed regulator is 27 µm x 34 µm.

This paper presents a design of 3.1-6.0 GHz CMOS ultra-wideband low noise amplifier (UWB LNA) with forward body bias technique for wireless applications. The UWB LNA is designed and simulated using 0.13-μm technology in Cadence software. The proposed UWB LNA consists of two stage common-source (CS) amplifiers with a forward body bias technique. A source degenerated inductor is used at the first stage to achieve a wideband input matching and high linearity. At the second stage, a shunt-peaking inductor is employed to enhance gain at higher frequency. The simulation results indicate that the proposed UWB LNA achieves a power gain (S21) of 10 dB, an input return loss (S11) is less than −5 dB, a minimum noise figure (NF) of 8.5 dB in the frequency range of 3.1- 6.0 GHz with power dissipation of 17.2 mW. The linearity analysis shows a 1 dB compression point (P1dB) of −9 dBm and the third-order intermodulation intercept points (IIP3) of 4 dBm are achieved. The proposed UWB LNA’s layout is 0.68 mm2.

This paper presents the design and development of an IoT-based electrical conductivity system for measuring paddy soil nutrients. Relationship between electrical conductivity (EC) and the influence of soil temperature in precision farming will be discussed. In this work, the EC algorithm was modelled and verified using MATLAB and realized on Node MCU (ESP8266) microcontroller. Results showed that the measured data from the developed system is closed to the calibration solution conductivity that is 1.413mS/cm and 12.88mS/cm. It is also noted that the recorded electrical conductivity value increases with temperature.

Objects such as vehicles are considered one of challenging obstruction on the road and very little attention has been made to address its significance on the wireless signal. As such, this paper validates the impact of vehicle obstruction on signal propagation using received signal strength indicator (RSSI) based on the wireless channel measurements of realistic environmental obstruction at 2.4 GHz frequency band. Low mobility IEEE 802.15.4 XBee S2C compliant device which is designed to collect received signal power was used and these devices were deployed at area congested with cars. The channel measurements were conducted on LOS car parking area with two scenarios; single-sided and double-sided vehicle obstruction which mimics the obstruction of metal objects. The effect of existing vehicle on the signal propagation is demonstrated based on RSSI and RMSE. The attenuation profile of vehicular obstruction on wireless signal is modeled and compared with large-scale propagation models. Results show that metal object significantly reduce transmission range and signal power. The findings may incite for future implementation of cooperative deployment program and internet of things (IoT) applications in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication.

Battery thermal management system (BTMS) plays an important thing as to control of the battery thermal behaviours. Recently, most of the manufacturer either in automobile, motorcycle, and electric vehicle (EV) industry are using this application of BTMS for their product. It is because BTMS promising the extend the period and lifespan of the battery and the battery system controlling the temperature distribution and circulation on the system. Lithium-ion battery is one of the common usages in BTMS. Lithium-ion battery promising the goals such as higher performance, better cycle stability, and improved protection are being followed with the selection and engineering of acceptable electrode materials. It also shows a goal for future such as high of the energy storage due to higher energy density by weight among other rechargeable batteries. However, there still have factor that are limiting the performance/application when using lithium-ion as battery thermal management system (BTMS). For example, the performance, cost, life, and protection of the battery. The main reason is therefore important in order to achieve optimum efficiency when working under different conditions. Hence, the best range of temperature and the cooling capacity of lithium-ion battery need to evaluate in order to increasing the lifespan of lithium-ion battery at the same time can increasing the performance of the cell. This study found that the higher the velocity of air, the higher the cooling capacity that gain from the surrounding. It also was strongly related to the dry bulb temperature of surrounding air.

MODENAS CT115 engine is a single overhead camshaft (SOHC) engine, with a rated power of 8.8 horsepower at 9000 rpm. One of the main concerns of engine research is the overheating of engines. Overheating can affects the performance of an engine by leading to a loss of strength and thermal strain. To prevent failure, thermal analysis is used to determine the flow of heat with precision to optimise temperature distribution. The investigation is done using ANSYS Thermal simulation on the CAD model of the engine cylinder head, intake and exhaust valve, and intake and exhaust valve seat insert. The comparison to the existing valve seat insert is made using three different valve seat insert materials: Beryllium-copper C17200, Bronze-copper C61300, and Brass C36000. The research results proved that Brass C36000 provides the best thermal reduction and heat transfer increment compared to the existing valve seat insert material.

Aerospace Composites Malaysia (ACM) Sdn Bhd produces one of the aircraft components, which is an aircraft composite panel. Currently, the painting of the composite aircraft panel is manually conducted by the high skilled human operator. However, there are several issues of manual painting, which are the precision of the thickness specifications, uneven spray, dust-free, microbubble, colour appearance, and contour of the aircraft composite panel. Consequently, these issues contribute to the aircraft aerodynamic performances, productivity, and index time of the aircraft composite panel’s production. Thus, the main objectives are to investigate the human painting mimicking robot incorporated with the existing painting environment. The proposed environment becomes smart precision painting systems. In conclusion, the proposed prototype will overcome the quality issue of aircraft composite panel painting faced by Boeing worldwide aircraft industries. Furthermore, the proposed prototype will increase productivity and contribute to the maintaining of the aircraft’s aerodynamic performance.

A high dc voltage is commonly used in many process industries in testing, research laboratories and others. Currently, a high voltage dc is implemented using transformer. In this paper, a novel high voltage low current transformerless step-up dc-dc converter is presented. The proposed design consists of two step-up dc-dc converters with negative feedback signal and 15 stages of Cockcroft-Walton (C-W) voltage multiplier. The dc input voltage of 5 V triggers the first step-up dc-dc converter circuit to generate 30 V dc voltage and the second step-up dc-dc converter circuit boosts up to 100 V dc voltage. Further, diode-capacitor multiplier circuit is connected at the final stage to achieve 1.6 kV dc output voltages at 200 kHz switching frequency. The simulation results indicate that the proposed dc-dc converter can generate 1.548 kV dc voltage with a load current of 0.16 mA at 10 MΩ load resistor. Meanwhile, the experiment results show that the proposed dc-dc converter can generate 1.475 kV dc voltage with 80 % efficiency. The results validate both the simulation and experimental of the proposed high dc voltage power supply module.

This paper presents a linear low-dropout (LDO) voltage regulator in 0.18-pm CMOS technology. The proposed LDO consists of voltage reference, error amplifier, pass device, output capacitor and resistive feedback network. A symmetrical operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) is implemented as an error amplifier and a PMOS transistor is used as a pass device to produce low dropout voltage and low quiescent current. The proposed design is simulated using Spectre simulator in Cadence software to verify its performances. The simulation results indicated that the LDO regulator achieves a regulated output voltage of 1.5 V with the ranges of supply voltage from 1.7 V to 2.0 V. The LDO regulator has a dropout voltage of 19.3 mV under maximum load current of 1.1 mA. The proposed LDO regulator is suitable for power management system.

In vehicular communication, signal transmission in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mode typically takes place on highways, urban, suburban and rural environments. The presence of buildings in these environments poses a challenge to model path loss (PL) due to multiple propagation mechanisms such as diffractions and reflections. However, very little attention has been made to address building effects on the performance of V2I communication links in microcell environment. This paper investigates signal propagation characteristics caused by the impact of building under micro-cellular environment whereby the base station or road-side-unit (RSU) is usually located under the rooftop of building to allow communication between RSU and mobile station or on-board-unit (OBU) on the road. The goal of this paper is to validate and discuss available path loss models based on effect of building obstruction towards RSU-OBU links specifically in residential housing area. The channel measurements are conducted based on static line-of-sight (LOS) settings of a real-world environment at 2.4 GHz frequency band using IEEE 802.15.4 XBee S2C compliant device to measure its receive power. The results are demonstrated based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and root mean square error (RMSE). The attenuation profile is validated and compared with suitable path loss models to evaluate best fit and most compatible model based on our measurements data and environment. The analysis shows that several V2I path loss models and V2V channel models are applicable to be used as a reference to model in LOS microcell environment with building obstruction. The finding shows that PL Urban yields the best fit V2I path loss model in terms of RMSE when compared to our measurement campaign at 2.4 GHz.

The amount of fertilisers affects electrical conductivity (EC), and it is one of the major causes of the paddy yield decrease. The overuse of fertilisers can lead to environmental pollution and contamination. This study designed to develop soil electrical conductivity (EC) sensing system in the paddy field using the smart farming application. In this work, the study conducted in Kampung Ladang, Kuala Perlis, and the soil samples collected from a random location at two different depths from the paddy field. The EC value for the developed system was near the calibration solutions (12880µS and 150000µS) and directly proportional to the temperature. From the laboratory soil results, the EC values of the soils were higher with fertiliser. However, the EC values for 0-10cm soil depth were higher than 10-20cm soil depth. The soil EC is inversely proportional to the depth of soil and directly proportional to the amount of nutrients. It observed that the soil EC is linearly related to the amount of nutrients and temperature. The EC value decreases with the increase of soil depth displays a low amount of salts in the deep soil, while, increases with the increase of temperature indicates high current flow.

Hybrid Floating Point/Logarithmic Number System processor is an Arithmetic Logic Unit with hybrid architecture in which its data computation involves Floating Point (FLP) and Logarithmic Number System (LNS). LNS processor has high performance but requires complicated hardware to support its function, especially LNS addition and subtraction. Therefore, hybrid processor is proposed to perform multiplication/division in LNS, addition/subtraction in FLP. Through merging FLP and LNS, data computation can be done in a faster, precise and less complicated way. The proposed research is a 32-bit Hybrid FLP/LNS processor, which involving 32-bit fixed point data format and 32-bit single precision FLP format. The EDA tools used in developing and simulating this project is based on Synopsys Design Compiler and Altera Quartus II, and the Hardware Description Language used is Verilog HDL. Logical synthesis of this project is done by using Synopsys Design Compiler and its area, timing and power are validated.

In this paper, a variety of adder and multiplier are compared to be implemented in a new logarithmic number system (LNS). Both adder and multiplier are designed with a generic very high-speed integrated circuit hardware description language (Verilog) program. This makes it possible to achieve the optimum performance in latency and area of 0.18µm CMOS technologies LNS chip. Consequently, the optimal configurations vary with speed and area of the schemes and in some cases can be compact area, O(n), fast in latency O(log2 n) or optimized. The program was scripted based on fixed-point (FXP) adders and multipliers that yet will be implemented in LNS system. The functionality of the scheme was tested before synthesized. Outcomes show that Ladner Fisher (LF) adder and modified Baugh Wooley multiplier contribute to fast in latency and consume minimal area.

Due to the increase number world population of elderly citizen, as well as those who live in solitude, there is an immediate need to develop an intelligent monitoring system at home. Many elderly live independently but living alone can be difficult, if not dangerous, for seniors with declining cognitive abilities. In this research, we present an intelligent monitoring system based on IOT to monitor the elderly. The proposed home health care and monitoring architecture or ICE (IOT Cares for Elderly) will be based on Intel Edison platform. There are sensors integrated in the system to measure human vital sign, sleeping and movement pattern. The output readings will be transmitted to a main ICE central system to detect any abnormalities, give health advises, and even call for help if elderly is in emergency. Moreover, output readings are also transmitted to cloud storage where it is able to provide real time information for close family member and care takers through the development of ICE web and telephone application. This proposed system has many potential and would allow elderly to live healthily and safely despite being alone at home.

This paper presents a driving cycle construction methodology in Malaysia's urban road system by utilizing on-road data collection from Kuala Lumpur. Micro trip cycle construction approach is use in this study to construct driving cycle for Malaysia's urban road system. The driving cycle constructed using this approach is a transient driving cycle similar to WLTC, JC08 and FTP-75 driving cycles, which is experimental based and are more reflecting the actual driving conditions hence has more representatives comparing to polygonal driving cycles such as NEDC and J10–15 mode driving cycles. It was found that the characteristic of the newly developed driving cycle in Malaysia's urban road system has small relative percentages when compared to the target parameters (whole database) hence it is best represent the driving condition in Kuala Lumpur. The cycle construction methodology proposed in this study is appropriate for developing urban driving cycles, though some improvements need to be considered to increase the representativeness of the driving cycle.

This paper presents an assessment for an asset tracking system deployment using XBEE S2 by comparing both the indoor localization with a possible outdoor localization system given that the environmental factors such as weather, Line Of Sight and furniture interference are kept fixed for both location. The characterization of wireless point-to-point channel for wireless networks application in an indoor office, on grass fields and on tar road are compared and analyzed for future asset tracking system development. These comparison and analysis may leads to a greater efficiency and development in an asset tracking system in the future. From this experiment, an indoor localization based on the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) system was developed and analyzed accordingly in order to study the performance and accuracy that the system may have. After the completion of the indoor localization system, a signal propagation study was done for outdoor area on the grass fields and on tar road in order to analyze its performance in coherent to the indoor localization. The result shows that the outdoor localization by using XBEE S2 may not be as efficient as an indoor localization as it more complex, not cost efficient, high power consumption and less durable while other device can be used for greater efficiency such as Radio Frequency Identification reader and tags, Lora WAN, MEMSIC and WLAN.

Advancement of the complexity digital design has inadvertently forces the pre-silicon verification to become an exceedingly important to find the bugs at infancy in an application of integrated chip design cycle. The complexity of the designs poses significance of the RTL validation to allow the bottleneck to be seen at the infancy in the design cycle and produces quality IC. As AMBA is one of the leading busing system used in high performance of SoC design that has been developed to become a family with different bus protocol such as ASB, APB, AHB, AXI and et al. Thus, this study shows the RTL validation platform of the fives digital IPs whose integrated together on the AMBA bus based on the APB and AHB protocol. The verification strategies of the module level is proposed in this paper and presents the strategies at the system level. Therefore, the result shows the percentage on the functionality of RTC covered by proposed techniques.

Air-Conditioning systems based on vapor compression system consuming a lot of energy. Meanwhile, Valeriy Maisotsenko has improved evaporative cooling system where just consume a small amount of fan power. The resulting cycle is called as Maisotsenko Cycle where dew point as the limitation rather than wet bulb temperature. This developed the dew point cooling system with very low power consumption. The aims of this project are to identify dew point cooling system suitability for cooling at high humidity region, to find a solution at high humidity region and to stimulate temperature distributions in a small room that equipped with the dew point cooling system.

This paper studies on the performance of semiconductor optical amplifiers and microfiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the loop mirror of multi-wavelength Brillouin fibre laser configuration. The microfiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer is designed by the using the Optisystem and OptiBPM software. This project has shown that the proposed configuration with semiconductor optical amplifiers and Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the loop mirror has the ability to generate multiple signals. Input BP power of 4dBm has been identified as optimum input power for this configuration since it resulted higher number of output signals generation compared to other input BP power which is from -6dBm, -5dBm to 8dBm The configuration also has the capability to generate up to 19 dominant overall number of output signals at injected SOA current of 0.8A, whereas the minimum SOA current of 0.5A is only required to initiate first signal at input BP power - 6dBm. In conclusion, this paper has successfully demonstrates that of semiconductor optical amplifiers and microfiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer in loop mirror multi-wavelength Brillouin fibre laser configuration can effectively act to generated multiple signals. This multi-wavelength Brillouin fibre laser configuration can be utilized in many applications, especially in optical sensing and for optical communication, since this two field need large scale of number of signals in order to accommodate better results.

This paper describes the design of aquaponics water monitoring system using Arduino microcontroller. Arduino Development Environment (IDE) software is used to develop a program for the microcontroller to communicate with multiple sensors and other hardware. The circuit of pH sensor, temperature sensor, water sensor, servo, liquid crystal displays (LCD), peristaltic pump, solar and Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) are constructed and connected to the system. The system powered by a rechargeable battery using solar energy. When the results of pH, temperature and water sensor are out of range, a notification message will be sent to a mobile phone through GSM. If the pH of water is out of range, peristaltic pump is automatic on to maintain back the pH value of water. The water sensor is fixed in the siphon outlet water flow to detect water flow from grow bed to the fish tank. In addition, servo is used to auto feeding the fish for every 12 hours. Meanwhile, the LCD is indicated the pH, temperature, siphon outlet water flow and remaining time for the next feeding cycle. The pH and temperature of water are set in the ranges of 6 to 7 and 25 °C to 30 °C, respectively.

Wireless sensor network technology holds great promise for application in agriculture to improve crop yield, improve quality, and reduce costs. This paper presents wireless sensor network coverage measurements in a mixed crop farmland. As one of its key contributions, this study shows that general vegetation attenuation models do not apply to low power wireless sensor networks. A log-linear model is proposed in this paper and validated for application in mixed crop environment. Unlike in mono-crop environment, this study shows that the network coverage is heterogeneous with asymmetric channel between communicating node pair. Crop specific parameters of the log-linear model are derived and used to simulate network coverage in a 7 acre test-bed farm. An adaptive energy consumption model for each sensor node is proposed and used to compute energy consumption in the network. A cluster head and two antenna heights deployment model is also proposed and simulated to alleviate short network lifetime due to vegetation attenuation of signals. The results show that this network deployment model extends the lifetime of the network by a factor of more than 20 compare to a deployment where cluster heads are not used.

This work proposed a low noise figure 2.4 GHz down-conversion CMOS mixer for wireless sensor network (WSN) application using 0.13-µm Silterra technology. The proposed down-conversion mixer converts a high radio frequency (RF) signal from 2.4 GHz to an intermediate frequency (IF) of 100 MHz through the use of a local oscillator signal (LO) of 2.3 GHz. The proposed mixer employs a double balance Gilbert-cell topology with integrated input matching at the input stage and a low pass filter at the IF stage. The simulation results indicate that the proposed mixer obtains lower noise figure (NF) of 5.21 dB with an input third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 0 dB. Furthermore, the conversion gain (CG) of 8.6 dB is achieved with the power consumption of 1.57 mW at 1.8 V supply voltage.

Connected car has become one of emerging technology in the automotive industries and vehicular communication studies on the other hand, has become one heavily researched topic in academia which focuses on the performance of various parameters upon vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication-based in the IEEE 802.11p vehicular communication studies. In urban environment, obstructions from existence of building, trees, street’s layout and other obstruction or objects can strongly influence the receive signal levels at 2.4 GHz frequency band. To ensure reliable and stable communication link for efficient future deployments of cooperative RSUs deployments, will require analyses on the signal strength upon environments that generally characterized by challenging propagation conditions. This article presents the results of experimental field testing of signal characteristics of different types of road topology such as grass, gravel and tar surface on open field environment. The results show that road topology or streets layout have an effect on V2I communication and the attenuation resulted from certain types of road’s surface can give significant impact on signal propagation.

Fever is happened when the human having infection or other illness which the body temperature is higher than normal body temperature. The heat load released during the fever cause the uncomfortable condition to the human. Thermoelectric is used in the design of heat exchanger to provide cooling by using electricity which reliefs the fever uncomfortable. The thermal comfort zone for human and the analysis of the heat load from the human head surface are determined. The analysis focuses on the fever teenagers aged range from 15 to 25. The range of the thermal comfort zone is from 20 °C to 25 °C whereas the range for the total heat load from the head surface is from 10.56 W to 16.39 W. The findings from the analysis will be used in the design of heat exchanger that suites the requirement from the analysis result. The fluid flow effect of the working fluid and thermal effect of the heat exchanger are simulated by ANSYS Fluent. In addition, the different types of Peltier plate and fluid as well as the different materials of heat exchanger and tube have applied into heat exchanger design model for observing the effect of the fluid flow in heat exchanger. Using ANSYS Fluent, the temperature contours are compared and found that the combination of alumina Al2O3 nanofluid, copper heat exchanger have better performance due to high heat transfer rate while the tube materials show no effect. The best performance of cooling in the design of the heat exchanger is proposed. These design criteria include the selection of the material of heat exchanger, tube and fluid as well as the selection of the device such as Peltier plate, battery, cooler fan and pump.

Demands for localization system has been growing rapidly in the last several years both for an outdoor and indoor area. In conjunction with this, the capability and reliability of this system to precisely locate and track objects of interest for the indoor area has catered researchers and study on how to do so. One of the major ideas on making it more advance is by incorporating the use of wireless devices into the system. There are numbers of issues that could interrupt the efficiency and success of the system. One of the main problems is the signal loss mainly caused by the attenuation of the signal as they propagate through from the transmitter to the receiver. These attenuations are mostly due to the surface types the signal are traveling on and the objects that are in the Line of Sight in between the transmitter and receiver. In order to ensure the most reliable and efficient wireless connection between transmitter and receiver, a propagation study on the signal is needed for us to analyze and find the best way to trade off the signal attenuation based on the environment surrounding the system. By doing so, a thorough system that has models that can work efficiently even if we are to consider the attenuation factors. The system consists of nodes installed inside the research institute that acts as both transmitter and receivers. The transmitter and receiver will then process the signal that will then determine their location. The receiver is connected to the laptop in order to get a real-time reading so that we will be able to locate the transmitter. A networked of nodes are installed inside the research institute for experiment and the layout of the research is conferred for future references. Data from the experiment are then analyzed and a model for the signal propagation alongside the research institute is created. This model will be able to apprehend the signal attenuation despite the surrounding environment such as furniture and walls. A completed asset tracking system with models of signal attenuation will be built in the future for a more efficient signal transmission.

The distribution of the liquid and gas flows in multi-pass channel that illustrate a compact evaporator for air-conditioning system was experimentally studies. The dividing header are design horizontal with a square cross section of 20mm x 20mm and length is 290mm, also ten curve multi-pass channel with length of 300mm each connected between the circle cross section 50mm combination tank. The distance between the dividing header and combing tank were 120mm. The test was conduct under uniform backpressure conditions; additionally, the working fluid used was water and air. This experiment conducted to examine the influence of inlet-flow at the header entrance (stratified flow and annular-mist flow) under uniform backpressure condition to improve the uniform of the water distribution inside every curve channels. It was found that the inlet-flow condition at the entrance header has relatively influence the water distribution. By comparison between two flow conditions, great value of uniformity for water distribution in each channel is improved under annular-mist flow condition.

At present, the development of autonomous vehicle has altered the outlook of modern transportation worldwide. The state-of-the-art vehicular communication for transportation system is advancing, especially in vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication. An effective communication between vehicle and infrastructure has become a significant part of autonomous transportation criteria. The necessity for high quality of service communication inspire for good planning and preparation in communication process. Per se, this paper proposes vegetation attenuation models for advance planning of communication process between vehicle to infrastructure, defined mainly by plants, trees and vegetation along the roadways in Malaysia. The channel measurement performed in Universiti Malaysia Perlis test-bed having large tall trees and low shrubs along the routes resulted in several interesting results which would shape the planning of CAV communication. It is observed that communication close to low plantation or shrub requires high power consumption as the range is significantly reduced. It is also learned that certain types of plantations allows for different level of signal attenuation depending on the antenna heights. The research also found out that the attenuation profile follows strictly the log normal distribution and as such certain planning could be made to reshape the communication process to cater for this.

Dramatic rises in power density and die sizes inside system-on-chip (SoC) design have led to the thermal issue. High temperatures or uneven temperature distributions may result not only in reliability issues, also has become the biggest issue that can limit the system performance. This paper presents the design and simulation of a temperature-based digital signal processing unit for modern system-on-chip design using the Verilog HDL. This design provides continuous monitoring of temperature and reacts to specified conditions. The simulation of the system has been done on Synopsys Software. The result showed that temperature monitoring process is within the temperature range due to the incorporation of an interrupt-based system and with an advantage of minimum chip area required.

Rice is source of food calories and protein. This second most widely grown cereal crop is the staple food for more than half the world’s population especially in developing countries. The ability of global rice production to meet population demands (now estimated at more than 5 billion and projected to rise to 8.9 billion by 2050) remains in uncertainty in the near future unless challenges in rice production are properly addressed [1-3]. This paper proposed an IoT (Internet of things)-based paddy productivity monitoring and advisory system Using Dash7 Wireless Network Protocol. All collected data will be stored in a database management system to enable users to retrieve data either from tablets, smartphones or computers. The heart of the system is the ATmega328p microcontroller that will control the payload of the wireless network of dash7 and read data from sensor nodes. Results show all data from sensor nodes in representation of graph for analysis purpose.

In this paper, a Real Time Clock (RTC) system for a dedicated microcontroller is proposed to provide the customized microcontroller its own time and date system. The RTC is developed using Verilog Hardware Description Language (HDL) and simulated using Synopsys software. This RTC is developed with standard Advance Peripheral Bus (APB) to be interfacing with the microcontroller through Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA). This RTC will be used as an on-chip RTC in the microcontroller system to provide precise time and date which can be used for various applications. The basic architecture of RTC, APB standard for interfacing the RTC with AMBA bus, and the result in term of RTL, waveform, and layout will be discussed in this documentation. For this research, the part covered is on the logic part of the RTC that is bus interface, register, frequency divider and counter.

Biological sequence alignment is time-consuming tasks. This is due to its repetitive alignment matrix scores calculations. The SSEARCH35 is the well-known ‘software-only’ sequence homology search tool. However, its sequential execution requires quadratic time complexity even when the software is executed in a sophisticated computer. Alternatively, sequence alignment is executed in hardware such as FPGA. FPGA allows for realization of systolic array (SA) architectures on its sea of logic gates. SA has been proven to address the aforementioned issues, whereby time required to compute alignment matrix scores in an n by n matrix significantly improved from n2 to 2n−1. However, SA requires more hardware resources as the processing element (PE) is replicated to increase performance throughput. This paper presents an optimized and parameterizable PE architecture targeting for DNA sequence alignment with both affine and linear gap penalty score. The PE was designed and synthesized in the Quartus II design environment. The DNA sequence alignment core was implemented on ALTERA Cyclone II FPGA with device number EP2C70F896C6. The functionality of PE has been successfully tested and verified against the SSEARCH35 software. Results have shown that, the core able to operate more than 50 MHz when implemented in FPGA. With less than 1% area utilization/PE, the FPGA device can generate more than 200 PEs for single pass processing.

IoT technology has improved the quality of life as well as provides intelligence and comforts to the user. A Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technology is one of the powerful technologies that enable IoT objects to communicate with each other. Device-Free Localization (DFL) system exploits changes in radio signals across different environments aims to detect and track entities without requiring them to carry any additional RF devices or to be cooperatively participating with the localization process. This paper proposes a received signal strength indicator (RSSI) — based DFL system that can be used to detect human presence in an area of interest (AoI) using changes in signal strength measurements. The main objective of this paper is to design a DFL system that can be easily deployed and configured using IRIS mote from MEMSIC based on ‘plug and play’ concept and operates in real time. The system is deployed in CEASTech's Research Room by using the IRIS mote as the communication module in the network. The principle behind this is that the human body and motion have strong impact on the signal strength of indoor wireless links being transmitted from a transmitter to one or more base stations by either shadowing or diffraction, or by scattering. Result shows that signal strength fluctuate by 3.97dBm and from 10 to 15dBm with the presence of stationary human and moving human respectively.

Due to increase embedded computer technology, it has been increasingly used in many research field including area of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The principle of embedded technology is flexible but low operational cost. Nowadays, embedded system technology is chosen because it offers brilliant solutions from many possibilities combined with its nature of economic and feasibility of advanced. This paper presents the way to minimize storage needed for WSN that deals with voice signal. Since the embedded computer is used as aggregator node and able to do extract voice signal using feature extraction, results show that size needed for storing and transmitting of high quality voice signal will significantly decrease after doing feature extraction.

In this paper, we demonstrated a ring cavity multiwavelength Brillouin Raman fiber laser exploiting different Fiber Bragg grating reflectivity. The 10 km length of single mode fiber are used as gain medium that has the capability to generate Stimulated Brillouin Scattering and Stimulated Raman Scattering effect. The ring cavity multi-wavelength Brillouin Raman fiber laser is operated in S-band region which is from1460nm to 1530nm. The laser input Brillouin pump power is varied from 2dBm to 20dBm. Meanwhile, Raman pump wavelength is varied from 1460nm to 1530nm and the Raman power is injected at 16 dBm, respectively. The output bidirectional coupler ratio is varied at 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% and 90%. Meanwhile, the fiber Bragg grating reflectivity value from 0.4 to 0.99 are tested differently to obtain the best output. As a result, the high number Brillouin Stokes signal of 7 are generated at 80% output coupling ratio, fiber Bragg grating reflectivity of 0.9 and Brillouin pump power of 12dBm, respectively.

Herbs have been widely used in food preparation, medicine and cosmetic industry. Knowing which herbs to be used would be very critical in these applications. Nevertheless, the current way of identification and determination of the types of herbs is still being done manually and prone to human error. Designing a convenient and automatic recognition system of herbs species is essential since this will improve herb species classification efficiency. This research focus on recognition approach to the shape and texture features of the herbs leaves. It aims to realize the computerized method to classify the herbs plants in a very convenient way. Portable herb leaves recognition system through image and data processing techniques is implemented as automated herb plant classification system. It is very easy to use and inexpensive system designed especially for helping scientist in agricultural field. The proposed system employs neural networks algorithm and image processing techniques to perform recognition on twenty species of herbs. One hundred samples for each species went through the system and the recognition accuracy was at 98.9%. Most importantly the system is capable of identifying the herbs leaves species even though they are dried, wet, torn or deformed. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing and classifying the different herbs species is demonstrated by experiments.

Stingless bees are usually common in tropical and subtropical region of the world especially in the tropical dry and humid forest. As stingless bee honey gaining reputation for its medicinal value, stingless bees keeping has been very popular in these regions of the world. In Malaysia, keeping stingless bee has only been very popular only in the last few years. The bee honey industry is a very lucrative industry and in 2013 alone Malaysia imported RM50 million ringgit worth of honey products. Although stingless bee keeping seem to be straight forward, there are a number of issues that could hinder the success. One of the main problems is colony loss which could be attributed to a number of reasons. However, the most important cause for this is stingless bees’ habitat quality. In order to prevent colony loss and honey production impact, an integrated wireless sensing solution is being implemented at stingless bee test-farm to monitor the habitat environmental requirement for healthy and productive colonies. The system consists of sensor structures placed inside and outside of stingless bee hives for monitoring internal and external environmental parameters including hazardous gases. Sensors are connected to wireless sensor networks node places close to the hives and data collected are transmitted to base station wirelessly. A networked of hives with sensor attachment are constructed around the farm to provide sufficient data for comprehensive monitoring. Data from base station are then transmitted to farmer’s mobile device for status update. This integrated system ensures changes to stingless bee hives and colonies development could be monitored real time and necessary steps and actions could be taken to prevent colony or yield loss. In this preliminary implementation comparison between environmental parameters from productive and non-productive hives are looked at especially temperature, humidity, and light intensity data.

This paper reviews improvement of intake port for Modenas CT115s by using CATIA software for the design and ANSYS software for the simulation result. Intake port is referring to the passage in the cylinder head which connect the intake manifold to the intake valve through which the fuel-air mixture proceeds on its way to the cylinders. The results obtained has been analysed and interpreted in formed of plotted graph. From the analysis, increasing the inlet of the intake port size can increasing the volume flow rate. The main impact is high angle of intake port that can give high torque and power. The decision to choose the proper angle for the each design is important because it will affect the major result for the simulation. Thus, it can be concluded that the increase of the inlet size and using the best angle of the intake port can increase the engine performance which allow higher fuel-air mixture entrance during the combustion process.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the fuel consumption of passenger cars in Malaysia by using 1D-simulation. The analysis of fuel consumption will focus on common model of cars in Malaysia and will be carried out by using existing driving cycle. New European Driving Cycle (NEDC), Federal Test Procedure (FTP75) Driving Cycle, and Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTC) Driving Cycle were used as the established driving profiles. The new local driving cycle which was developed by UniMAP Motorsport Technology Research Unit (MoTECH) was used as the main driving profile for the simulation. A 1.3L Perodua Myvi 2012 with manual transmission was been selected as the vehicle model for the project. The simulation results were compared with the established driving cycles. The results show the average fuel consumption and emissions of passenger cars is critically affected by the driving behaviors' and vehicle engines condition. The aggressive driving gives the higher rate of fuel consumption and also the cold start-up engine affecting the fuel devours and emissions rate. In addition, comparison of the obtained simulation results with manufacturer's published data showed a good agreement thus indicating suitability of the model to be used in further research.

Cam profile plays a critical role which adjusts the valve lift to allow the air fuel mixture flow in into cylinder in order to obtain the optimum performance of engine. This paper reviews the effect of valve lift overlap by analyzing charge flow in various cam profiles for and determine the optimum overlapping valve lift to enhancement of cam performance. By using Ansys software, the parameters like volumetric efficiency, mass flow rate and velocity will be measured which ultimately make impact up on the engine power and torque. Therefore, for this study 0.5mm to 3mm are tested to figure out the effects in combustion process. Overall, by considering the discussion, the results shows that valve lift adjustment of 2mm for both intake and exhaust valve has the best performance among others.

This paper presents a critical review of effect of intake manifold flow to four stroke single cylinder engine performances. Intake manifold and its components play critical role in deciding the performance of engine. Engine can be easily breathing related to flow pattern by best design of intake manifold that can contribute to performance. Flow pattern of intake manifold affect the volumetric efficiency, mass flow rate and velocity which ultimately makes impact up on the engine power & torque. This paper reviews work done by various prominent researchers in the field of intake tuning and variable intake manifold. It can be easily concluded that for getting best flow pattern of intake manifold throughout the engine operating speed the intake geometry need to be changed.