Physical Characteristics, Sensors and Applications of 2D/3DIntegrated CMOS Photodiodes

Two-dimensional photodiodes are reversely biased at a reasonable voltage whereas 3D photodiodes are likely operated at the Geiger mode. How to design integrated 2D and 3D photodiodes is investigated in terms of quantum efficiency, dark current, crosstalk, response time and so on. Beyond photodiodes, a charge supply mechanism provides a proper charge for a high dynamic range of 2D sensing, and a feedback pull-down mechanism expedites the response time of 3D sensing for time-of-flight applications. Particularly, rapid parallel reading at a 3D mode is developed by a bus-sharing mechanism. Using the TSMC 0.35μm 2P4M technology, a 2D/3D-integrated image sensor including P-diffusion_N-well_P-substrate photodiodes, pixel circuits, correlated double sampling circuits, sense amplifiers, a multi-channel time-to-digital converter, column/row decoders, bus-sharing connections/decoders, readout circuits and so on was implemented with a die size of 12mm×12mm. The proposed 2D/3D-integrated image sensor can perceive a 352×288-pixel 2D image and an 88×72-pixel 3D image with a dynamic range up to 100dB and a depth resolution of around 4cm, respectively. Therefore, our image sensor can effectively capture gray-level and depth information of a scene at the same location without additional alignment and post-processing. Finally, the currently available 2D and 3D image sensors are discussed and presented

A review of advances in pixel detectors for experiments with high rate and radiation

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments ATLAS and CMS have established hybrid pixel detectors as the instrument of choice for particle tracking and vertexing in high rate and radiation environments, as they operate close to the LHC interaction points. With the High Luminosity-LHC upgrade now in sight, for which the tracking detectors will be completely replaced, new generations of pixel detectors are being devised. They have to address enormous challenges in terms of data throughput and radiation levels, ionizing and non-ionizing, that harm the sensing and readout parts of pixel detectors alike. Advances in microelectronics and microprocessing technologies now enable large scale detector designs with unprecedented performance in measurement precision (space and time), radiation hard sensors and readout chips, hybridization techniques, lightweight supports, and fully monolithic approaches to meet these challenges. This paper reviews the world-wide effort on these developments.Comment: 84 pages with 46 figures. Review article.For submission to Rep. Prog. Phy

Building real-time embedded applications on QduinoMC: a web-connected 3D printer case study

Single Board Computers (SBCs) are now emerging with multiple cores, ADCs, GPIOs, PWM channels, integrated graphics, and several serial bus interfaces. The low power consumption, small form factor and I/O interface capabilities of SBCs with sensors and actuators makes them ideal in embedded and real-time applications. However, most SBCs run non-realtime operating systems based on Linux and Windows, and do not provide a user-friendly API for application development. This paper presents QduinoMC, a multicore extension to the popular Arduino programming environment, which runs on the Quest real-time operating system. QduinoMC is an extension of our earlier single-core, real-time, multithreaded Qduino API. We show the utility of QduinoMC by applying it to a specific application: a web-connected 3D printer. This differs from existing 3D printers, which run relatively simple firmware and lack operating system support to spool multiple jobs, or interoperate with other devices (e.g., in a print farm). We show how QduinoMC empowers devices with the capabilities to run new services without impacting their timing guarantees. While it is possible to modify existing operating systems to provide suitable timing guarantees, the effort to do so is cumbersome and does not provide the ease of programming afforded by QduinoMC.http://www.cs.bu.edu/fac/richwest/papers/rtas_2017.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Viewfinder: final activity report

The VIEW-FINDER project (2006-2009) is an 'Advanced Robotics' project that seeks to apply a semi-autonomous robotic system to inspect ground safety in the event of a fire. Its primary aim is to gather data (visual and chemical) in order to assist rescue personnel. A base station combines the gathered information with information retrieved from off-site sources. The project addresses key issues related to map building and reconstruction, interfacing local command information with external sources, human-robot interfaces and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The VIEW-FINDER system is a semi-autonomous; the individual robot-sensors operate autonomously within the limits of the task assigned to them, that is, they will autonomously navigate through and inspect an area. Human operators monitor their operations and send high level task requests as well as low level commands through the interface to any nodes in the entire system. The human interface has to ensure the human supervisor and human interveners are provided a reduced but good and relevant overview of the ground and the robots and human rescue workers therein

Belle II Technical Design Report

The Belle detector at the KEKB electron-positron collider has collected almost 1 billion Y(4S) events in its decade of operation. Super-KEKB, an upgrade of KEKB is under construction, to increase the luminosity by two orders of magnitude during a three-year shutdown, with an ultimate goal of 8E35 /cm^2 /s luminosity. To exploit the increased luminosity, an upgrade of the Belle detector has been proposed. A new international collaboration Belle-II, is being formed. The Technical Design Report presents physics motivation, basic methods of the accelerator upgrade, as well as key improvements of the detector.Comment: Edited by: Z. Dole\v{z}al and S. Un

Portable and Scalable In-vehicle Laboratory Instrumentation for the Design of i-ADAS

According to the WHO (World Health Organization), world-wide deaths from injuries are projected to rise from 5.1 million in 1990 to 8.4 million in 2020, with traffic-related incidents as the major cause for this increase. Intelligent, Advanced Driving Assis­ tance Systems (i-ADAS) provide a number of solutions to these safety challenges. We developed a scalable in-vehicle mobile i-ADAS research platform for the purpose of traffic context analysis and behavioral prediction designed for understanding fun­ damental issues in intelligent vehicles. We outline our approach and describe the in-vehicle instrumentation

System on fabrics utilising distributed computing

The main vision of wearable computing is to make electronic systems an important part of everyday clothing in the future which will serve as intelligent personal assistants. Wearable devices have the potential to be wearable computers and not mere input/output devices for the human body. The present thesis focuses on introducing a new wearable computing paradigm, where the processing elements are closely coupled with the sensors that are distributed using Instruction Systolic Array (ISA) architecture. The thesis describes a novel, multiple sensor, multiple processor system architecture prototype based on the Instruction Systolic Array paradigm for distributed computing on fabrics. The thesis introduces new programming model to implement the distributed computer on fabrics. The implementation of the concept has been validated using parallel algorithms. A real-time shape sensing and reconstruction application has been implemented on this architecture and has demonstrated a physical design for a wearable system based on the ISA concept constructed from off-the-shelf microcontrollers and sensors. Results demonstrate that the real time application executes on the prototype ISA implementation thus confirming the viability of the proposed architecture for fabric-resident computing devices

Thermal-Aware Networked Many-Core Systems

Advancements in IC processing technology has led to the innovation and growth happening in the consumer electronics sector and the evolution of the IT infrastructure supporting this exponential growth. One of the most difficult obstacles to this growth is the removal of large amount of heatgenerated by the processing and communicating nodes on the system. The scaling down of technology and the increase in power density is posing a direct and consequential effect on the rise in temperature. This has resulted in the increase in cooling budgets, and affects both the life-time reliability and performance of the system. Hence, reducing on-chip temperatures has become a major design concern for modern microprocessors. This dissertation addresses the thermal challenges at different levels for both 2D planer and 3D stacked systems. It proposes a self-timed thermal monitoring strategy based on the liberal use of on-chip thermal sensors. This makes use of noise variation tolerant and leakage current based thermal sensing for monitoring purposes. In order to study thermal management issues from early design stages, accurate thermal modeling and analysis at design time is essential. In this regard, spatial temperature profile of the global Cu nanowire for on-chip interconnects has been analyzed. It presents a 3D thermal model of a multicore system in order to investigate the effects of hotspots and the placement of silicon die layers, on the thermal performance of a modern ip-chip package. For a 3D stacked system, the primary design goal is to maximise the performance within the given power and thermal envelopes. Hence, a thermally efficient routing strategy for 3D NoC-Bus hybrid architectures has been proposed to mitigate on-chip temperatures by herding most of the switching activity to the die which is closer to heat sink. Finally, an exploration of various thermal-aware placement approaches for both the 2D and 3D stacked systems has been presented. Various thermal models have been developed and thermal control metrics have been extracted. An efficient thermal-aware application mapping algorithm for a 2D NoC has been presented. It has been shown that the proposed mapping algorithm reduces the effective area reeling under high temperatures when compared to the state of the art.Siirretty Doriast