Módulo de aprendizaje para diseñar placas de circuito impreso para dispositivos basados en el IoT

[ES] El taller sobre Tecnologías Disruptivas de la Información y la Comunicación para la Innovación y la Transformación Digital, organizado en el ámbito del proyecto DISRUPTIVE (disruptive.usal.es) y celebrado el 12 de septiembre de 2022 en Valladolid, tiene como objetivo debatir sobre los problemas, retos y beneficios del uso de tecnologías digitales disruptivas, a saber, Internet de las Cosas, Big data, computación en la nube, sistemas multiagente, aprendizaje automático, realidad virtual y aumentada y robótica colaborativa, para apoyar la transformación digital en curso en la sociedad. El programa del taller incluyó 6 papers técnicos aceptados, 2 charlas de invitados y una sesión de networking. Este volumen contiene 6 de las ponencias presentadas en el taller sobre Tecnologías Disruptivas de la Información y la Comunicación para la Innovación y la Transformación Digital. Este taller fue organizado por ICE (Instituto para la Competitividad Empresarial de Castilla y León), UVa (Universidad de Valladolid) y apoyado principalmente por el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) a través del Programa Interreg España-Portugal V-A (POCTEP) bajo la subvención 0677_DISRUPTIVE_2_E (Dinamización de los Digital Innovation Hubs dentro de la región PocTep para el impulso de las TIC disruptivas y de última generación a través de la cooperación en la región transfronteriza).[EN] The workshop on Disruptive Information and Communication Technologies for Innovation and Digital transformation, organized under the scope of the DISRUPTIVE project (disruptive.usal.es) and held on September 12, 2022 in Valladolid, aims to discuss problems, challenges and benefits of using disruptive digital technologies, namely Internet of Things, Big data, cloud computing, multi-agent systems, machine learning, virtual and augmented reality, and collaborative robotics, to support the on-going digital transformation in society. The main topics included: Intelligent Manufacturing Systems; Industry 4.0 and digital transformation; Internet of Things; Cyber-security; Collaborative and intelligent robotics; Multi-Agent Systems; Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems; Virtualization and digital twins; Predictive maintenance; Virtual and augmented reality, Big Data and advanced data analytics; Edge and cloud Computing; Digital Transformation. The workshop program included 6 accepted technical papers, 2 invited talks and a networking session. This volume contains 6 of the papers presented at the Workshop on Disruptive Information and Communication Technologies for Innovation and Digital Transformation. This workshop was organized by ICE (Institute for Business Competitiveness of Castilla y León), UVa (University of Valladolid) and mainly supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Interreg Spain-Portugal V-A Program (POCTEP) under grant 0677_DISRUPTIVE_2_E (Intensifying the activity of Digital Innovation Hubs within the PocTep region to boost the development of disruptive and last generation ICTs through cross-border cooperation)

Small Satellite Industrial Base Study: Foundational Findings

This report documents findings from a Small Satellite (SmallSat) Industrial Base Study conducted by The Aerospace Corporation between November 2018 and September 2019. The primary objectives of this study were a) to gain a better understanding of the SmallSat communitys technical practices, engineering approaches, requirements flow-downs, and common processes and b) identify insights and recommendations for how the government can further capitalize on the strengths and capabilities of SmallSat offerings. In the context of this study, SmallSats are understood to weigh no more than 500 kg, as described in State of the Art Small Spacecraft Technology, NASA/TP-2018- 220027, December 2018. CubeSats were excluded from this study to avoid overlap and duplication of recently completed work or other studies already under way. The team also touched on differences between traditional space-grade and the emerging mid-grade and other non-space, alternate-grade EEEE (electrical, electronic, electromechanical, electro-optical) piece part categories. Finally, the participants sought to understand the potential effects of increased use of alternate-grade parts on the traditional space-grade industrial base. The study team was keenly aware that there are missions for which non-space grade parts currently are infeasible for the foreseeable future. National security, long-duration and high-reliability missions intolerant of risk are a few examples. The team sought to identify benefits of alternative parts and approaches that can be harnessed by the government to achieve greater efficiencies and capabilities without impacting mission success

On the design of an Ohmic RF MEMS switch for reconfigurable microstrip antenna applications

This paper presents the analysis, design and simulation of a direct contact (dc) RF MEMS switch specified for reconfigurable microstrip array antennas. The proposed switch is indented to be built on PCB via a monolithic technology together with the antenna patches. The proposed switch will be used to allow antenna beamforming in the operating frequency range between 2GHz and 4GHz. This application requires a great number of these switches to be integrated with an array of microstrip patch elements. The proposed switch fulfills the switching characteristics as concerns the five requirements (loss, linearity, voltage/power handling, small size/power consumption, temperature), following a relatively simple design, which ensures reliability, robustness and high fabrication yiel

Piezoelectric Response of Ferroelectric Ceramics under Mechanical Stress

Manufacturers are constantly developing increasingly miniature, ferroelectric multi-layer ceramic capacitors, survivable under progressively harsher mechanical stresses. However, the piezoelectric response of the bulk Barium Titanate-based dielectric in such capacitors has not yet been addressed for shocks above 3,000 g. Thus, the current research developed a finite element capacitor model and modified an established constitutive relationship to calculate the capacitive response under high-g drop impact. Scanning electron microscope and impedance analyzer data confirmed the flexural mode of mechanical failure, while the newly applied RC capacitance measurement technique detected discreet partial and complete electrode separation from the terminal, corresponding to the board oscillation frequency. The experiments detected an up to 10% increase in capacitance during 24,000 g shocks, while the numerical model predicted the electromechanical response to within 2% of the nominal capacitance value, closely matching in waveform to the experimental data. When the flexural failures were completely prevented and the capacitance response was reduced by 81% with completely restricted board exure, the electromechanical response was still detectable during drop impacts generating 3,000 g peak accelerations. While preventing board oscillations may reduce mechanical failure probability, unaddressed piezoelectric response of ferroelectric capacitors may still cause significant intermittent reliability issues above commercially relevant conditions

Integrating Power Engineering Topics and Applications in Non-Power Courses

This paper investigates integrating power engineering material over the breadth of an electrical engineering curriculum. Electrical engineering curricula have a large number of required courses and many subareas for students to study. By introducing power concepts in a variety of courses, students may be motivated to take additional courses in the power area and are better prepared for the diverse background which will be required of them as practising power engineers. The important interrelationships between subareas of electrical engineering are better understood by students when cross discipline applications are discussed. This paper describes the introduction of power concepts and applications in courses such as linear systems, digital systems, microprocessors, digital signal processing, electronic system design and electrical materials

Embedded Electronic Systems for Electronic Skin Applications

The advances in sensor devices are potentially providing new solutions to many applications including prosthetics and robotics. Endowing upper limb prosthesis with tactile sensors (electronic/sensitive skin) can be used to provide tactile sensory feedback to the amputees. In this regard, the prosthetic device is meant to be equipped with tactile sensing system allowing the user limb to receive tactile feedback about objects and contact surfaces. Thus, embedding tactile sensing system is required for wearable sensors that should cover wide areas of the prosthetics. However, embedding sensing system involves set of challenges in terms of power consumption, data processing, real-time response and design scalability (e-skin may include large number of tactile sensors). The tactile sensing system is constituted of: (i) a tactile sensor array, (ii) an interface electronic circuit, (iii) an embedded processing unit, and (iv) a communication interface to transmit tactile data. The objective of the thesis is to develop an efficient embedded tactile sensing system targeting e-skin application (e.g. prosthetic) by: 1) developing a low power and miniaturized interface electronics circuit, operating in real-time; 2) proposing an efficient algorithm for embedded tactile data processing, affecting the system time latency and power consumption; 3) implementing an efficient communication channel/interface, suitable for large amount of data generated from large number of sensors. Most of the interface electronics for tactile sensing system proposed in the literature are composed of signal conditioning and commercial data acquisition devices (i.e. DAQ). However, these devices are bulky (PC-based) and thus not suitable for portable prosthetics from the size, power consumption and scalability point of view. Regarding the tactile data processing, some works have exploited machine learning methods for extracting meaningful information from tactile data. However, embedding these algorithms poses some challenges because of 1) the high amount of data to be processed significantly affecting the real time functionality, and 2) the complex processing tasks imposing burden in terms of power consumption. On the other hand, the literature shows lack in studies addressing data transfer in tactile sensing system. Thus, dealing with large number of sensors will pose challenges on the communication bandwidth and reliability. Therefore, this thesis exploits three approaches: 1) Developing a low power and miniaturized Interface Electronics (IE), capable of interfacing and acquiring signals from large number of tactile sensors in real-time. We developed a portable IE system based on a low power arm microcontroller and a DDC232 A/D converter, that handles an array of 32 tactile sensors. Upon touch applied to the sensors, the IE acquires and pre-process the sensor signals at low power consumption achieving a battery lifetime of about 22 hours. Then we assessed the functionality of the IE by carrying out Electrical and electromechanical characterization experiments to monitor the response of the interface electronics with PVDF-based piezoelectric sensors. The results of electrical and electromechanical tests validate the correct functionality of the proposed system. In addition, we implemented filtering methods on the IE that reduced the effect of noise in the system. Furthermore, we evaluated our proposed IE by integrating it in tactile sensory feedback system, showing effective deliver of tactile data to the user. The proposed system overcomes similar state of art solutions dealing with higher number of input channels and maintaining real time functionality. 2) Optimizing and implementing a tensorial-based machine learning algorithm for touch modality classification on embedded Zynq System-on-chip (SoC). The algorithm is based on Support Vector Machine classifier to discriminate between three input touch modality classes \u201cbrushing\u201d, \u201crolling\u201d and \u201csliding\u201d. We introduced an efficient algorithm minimizing the hardware implementation complexity in terms of number of operations and memory storage which directly affect time latency and power consumption. With respect to the original algorithm, the proposed approach \u2013 implemented on Zynq SoC \u2013 achieved reduction in the number of operations per inference from 545 M-ops to 18 M-ops and the memory storage from 52.2 KB to 1.7 KB. Moreover, the proposed method speeds up the inference time by a factor of 43 7 at a cost of only 2% loss in accuracy, enabling the algorithm to run on embedded processing unit and to extract tactile information in real-time. 3) Implementing a robust and efficient data transfer channel to transfer aggregated data at high transmission data rate and low power consumption. In this approach, we proposed and demonstrated a tactile sensory feedback system based on an optical communication link for prosthetic applications. The optical link features a low power and wide transmission bandwidth, which makes the feedback system suitable for large number of tactile sensors. The low power transmission is due to the employed UWB-based optical modulation. We implemented a system prototype, consisting of digital transmitter and receiver boards and acquisition circuits to interface 32 piezoelectric sensors. Then we evaluated the system performance by measuring, processing and transmitting data of the 32 piezoelectric sensors at 100 Mbps data rate through the optical link, at 50 pJ/bit communication energy consumption. Experimental results have validated the functionality and demonstrated the real time operation of the proposed sensory feedback system

The Enhancement of the Goodyer Skin Rheometer by means of a Microcontroller Based PCB.

GSI Ltd designs and manufactures low volume high cost specialist Test and Measurement Equipment, mainly concentrating on systems for use by the cosmetics industry, and for use in prototype vehicles. The FUSE project involved the design, evaluation and production of a micro-controller based data acquisition system to log data from, and to control, a Skin Rheometer used by the cosmetics industry to determine the effectiveness of skin creams, which work by changing the hydration levels in the skin. Hydration levels can be inferred by measuring the change in skin elasticity. The system measures the elasticity of human skin in-vivo using a micromechanical motor/lead screw arrangement that moves a lateral probe attached to the hand or forearm of a subject, under force feedback closed loop control. The existing product used a PC, the new design uses four PC104 cards; · an analogue card with extensive facilities, · a PC replacement card with 486 and 20Mb memory, · a VGA interface card, and · a display card with full colour camcorder type LCD display. The budget was 57,000 ECUs and duration 12 months. The project started on 1st March 1996 and was completed on 31st March 1997. The payback period was 12 months and the return on investment 3- fold over the life of the product

Electrical termination techniques

A technical review of high reliability electrical terminations for electronic equipment was made. Seven techniques were selected from this review for further investigation, experimental work, and preliminary testing. From the preliminary test results, four techniques were selected for final testing and evaluation. These four were: (1) induction soldering, (2) wire wrap, (3) percussive arc welding, and (4) resistance welding. Of these four, induction soldering was selected as the best technique in terms of minimizing operator errors, controlling temperature and time, minimizing joint contamination, and ultimately producing a reliable, uniform, and reusable electrical termination

Small-size MEMS accelerometer encapsulated in vacuum using Sigma-Delta modulation

A vacuum encapsulated MEMS accelerometer using Sigma-Delta modulation is here presented. Three different modulation orders (second, third, and fourth) were implemented in a field-programable gate array (FPGA), enabling flexibility for tuning the loop parameters in real-time. Three devices were measured, and the results are in good agreement with simulations performed in Simulink. A noise figure of 123 μg/√Hz for a bandwidth of 400 Hz and a range of at least ±1 g was experimentally measured. A figure of merit considering device size and bandwidth is proposed, highlighting the relevance of the results for the current state of the art.FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PDE/BDE/114563/2016