Engineering topics

Britton, Charles

Publications and source records attributed to Britton, Charles.

4 records

DOE OSTI2018

A Digitally Interfaced Analog Correlation Filter System for Object Tracking Applications

This study reports a 24×57 correlation filter system for object tracking applications. While digital interfacing of the input and output data enabled a standard and flexible way of communication with pre- and post-processing digital blocks, the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations were performed in the analog domain to save power and area. The proposed system utilizes non-volatile floating-gate memories to store filter coefficients. The chip was fabricated in a 0.13- μm CMOS process and occupies 3.23 mm 2 of silicon area. The system dissipates 388.4 μW of power at a throughput of 11.3 kVec/s, achieving an energy efficiency of 25.2 pJ/MAC. Finally, experimental results for a custom filter designed to detect vehicles are presented.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2018

A Charge Sensitive Pre-Amplifier for Smart Point-of-Care Devices Employing Polymer Based Lab-on-a-Chip

With increasing emphasis on implantable and portable medical devices, low-power, small-chip-area sensor readout system realized in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platform is gaining more and more importance these days. The main building blocks of the LOC system include a front-end transducer that generates an electrical signal in response to the presence of an analyte of interest, signal processing electronics to process the signal to comply with a specific transmission protocol and a low-power transmitter, all realized in a single integrated circuit platform. Low power consumption and compactness of the components are essential requirements of the LOC system. This paper presents a novel charge sensitive pre-amplifier developed in a standard 180-nm CMOS process suitable for implementing in an LOC platform. The pre-amplifier converts the charge generated by a pyroelectric transducer into a voltage signal, which provides a measurement of the temperature variation in biological fluids. The proposed design is capable of providing 0.8-mV/pC gain while consuming only 2.1 μW of power. Finally, the pre-amplifier composed of integrated components occupies an area of 0.038 mm 2 .

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2017

Battery Technologies for Unattended Monitoring Systems: Recommendations for current and future systems

A review of battery technologies was undertaken to identify those that could be used as part of the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) for an Unattended Monitoring System (UMS). The costs associated with servicing and replacing batteries is a significant contribution to overall IAEA expenses. The current suite of batteries in use must be replaced every 2 years; this adds effort, shipping and disposal costs. An extension of the battery lifetime by a factor of at least three would reduce costs and allow for expanded UMS deployment. The results of this study clearly show that this is possible for some batteries.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

DOE OSTI2016

A computational workflow for designing silicon donor qubits

Developing devices that can reliably and accurately demonstrate the principles of superposition and entanglement is an on-going challenge for the quantum computing community. Modeling and simulation offer attractive means of testing early device designs and establishing expectations for operational performance. However, the complex integrated material systems required by quantum device designs are not captured by any single existing computational modeling method. We examine the development and analysis of a multi-staged computational workflow that can be used to design and characterize silicon donor qubit systems with modeling and simulation. Our approach integrates quantum chemistry calculations with electrostatic field solvers to perform detailed simulations of a phosphorus dopant in silicon. We show how atomistic details can be synthesized into an operational model for the logical gates that define quantum computation in this particular technology. In conclusion, the resulting computational workflow realizes a design tool for silicon donor qubits that can help verify and validate current and near-term experimental devices.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗