Solid State Circuits Technologies

The evolution of solid-state circuit technology has a long history within a relatively short period of time. This technology has lead to the modern information society that connects us and tools, a large market, and many types of products and applications. The solid-state circuit technology continuously evolves via breakthroughs and improvements every year. This book is devoted to review and present novel approaches for some of the main issues involved in this exciting and vigorous technology. The book is composed of 22 chapters, written by authors coming from 30 different institutions located in 12 different countries throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe. Thus, reflecting the wide international contribution to the book. The broad range of subjects presented in the book offers a general overview of the main issues in modern solid-state circuit technology. Furthermore, the book offers an in depth analysis on specific subjects for specialists. We believe the book is of great scientific and educational value for many readers. I am profoundly indebted to the support provided by all of those involved in the work. First and foremost I would like to acknowledge and thank the authors who worked hard and generously agreed to share their results and knowledge. Second I would like to express my gratitude to the Intech team that invited me to edit the book and give me their full support and a fruitful experience while working together to combine this book

The Potential of Electrospinning to Enable the Realization of Energy-Autonomous Wearable Sensing Systems

The market for wearable electronic devices is experiencing significant growth and increasing potential for the future. Researchers worldwide are actively working to improve these devices, particularly in developing wearable electronics with balanced functionality and wearability for commercialization. Electrospinning, a technology that creates nano/microfiber-based membranes with high surface area, porosity, and favorable mechanical properties for human in vitro and in vivo applications using a broad range of materials, is proving to be a promising approach. Wearable electronic devices can use mechanical, thermal, evaporative and solar energy harvesting technologies to generate power for future energy needs, providing more options than traditional sources. This review offers a comprehensive analysis of how electrospinning technology can be used in energy-autonomous wearable wireless sensing systems. It provides an overview of the electrospinning technology, fundamental mechanisms, and applications in energy scavenging, human physiological signal sensing, energy storage, and antenna for data transmission. The review discusses combining wearable electronic technology and textile engineering to create superior wearable devices and increase future collaboration opportunities. Additionally, the challenges related to conducting appropriate testing for market-ready products using these devices are also discussed

Advance in Energy Harvesters/Nanogenerators and Self-Powered Sensors

This reprint is a collection of the Special Issue "Advance in Energy Harvesters/Nanogenerators and Self-Powered Sensors" published in Nanomaterials, which includes one editorial, six novel research articles and four review articles, showcasing the very recent advances in energy-harvesting and self-powered sensing technologies. With its broad coverage of innovations in transducing/sensing mechanisms, material and structural designs, system integration and applications, as well as the timely reviews of the progress in energy harvesting and self-powered sensing technologies, this reprint could give readers an excellent overview of the challenges, opportunities, advancements and development trends of this rapidly evolving field

Biomedical Engineering

Biomedical engineering is currently relatively wide scientific area which has been constantly bringing innovations with an objective to support and improve all areas of medicine such as therapy, diagnostics and rehabilitation. It holds a strong position also in natural and biological sciences. In the terms of application, biomedical engineering is present at almost all technical universities where some of them are targeted for the research and development in this area. The presented book brings chosen outputs and results of research and development tasks, often supported by important world or European framework programs or grant agencies. The knowledge and findings from the area of biomaterials, bioelectronics, bioinformatics, biomedical devices and tools or computer support in the processes of diagnostics and therapy are defined in a way that they bring both basic information to a reader and also specific outputs with a possible further use in research and development

A Feasibility Study of Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers Functionalized for Ethanol Dectection

The chemical sensing system plays an important role in medical and environmental monitoring. Gases exhaled by humans include nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The VOCs are important and provide valuable information for non- invasive diagnosis. For instance, ethanol detection is beneficial for checking blood alcohol. In time blood alcohol level checking before checking can prevent a person from unsafe driving. Due to the extremely low concentration of the target gases, a gas sensor with high sensitivity, selectivity and low detection limit is required. There is a high demand for low cost, fast, accurate and easy-to-use self-check diagnosis devices. With low cost and high portability, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors have been extensively studied for chemical sensing, which provide a cheap self-diagnosis solution. Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (CMUTs) and Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer (PMUTs), which both work based on the mass-loading effect, are considered as the promising types of MEMS sensors for gas sensing. Since they are fabricated in a batch manner with the similar process of silicon-based integrated circuits, CMUTs and PMUTs are able to provide massive parallelism, easy integration with microelectronic circuits, and a higher quality factor. In this research, studied the feasibility of using PMUTs and CMUTs fabricated by our lab for ethanol detection through simulation and experiments. Models for are built via COMSOL for PMUT and CMUT respectively. The simulation results of a single sensing element demonstrated that both CMUTs and PMUTs show great potential for gas sensors. The chemical experiments through frequency response measurement exhibit that both the PMUTs and CMUTs are effective for ethanol detection based on the mass-loading effect. When the gas analyte is attached to the sensing layer, a higher resonance frequency of the transducer induces a higher frequency shift, which means the higher resonance frequency of transducer, the higher sensitivity of a gas sensor is and the lower concentration of ethanol can be detected. Additionally, a CMUT array is also applied to ethanol detection. It provides a good preliminary study of the CMUTs functionalized with more sensing materials for chemical detection in future

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information

Proceedings of the Scientific-Practical Conference "Research and Development - 2016"

talent management; sensor arrays; automatic speech recognition; dry separation technology; oil production; oil waste; laser technolog

Smart dressings based on bacterial cellulose for chronic wounds healing and monitoring

In recent years, there has been an upward trend for novel biomass based green materials for dressing chronic wounds, which can assist in wound healing and monitoring. This research focuses on candidate components for smart chronic wound dressings based on bacterial cellulose (BC), which is comprised of two parts: antimicrobial BC nanocomposites for wound dressing, and a BC-derived pH sensor for monitoring chronic wounds. This research demonstrates a novel ability to utilise BC and BC-derived nanocomposites in potential applications for smart wound dressings. In the chapter regarding BC production, samples grown in static from four different Acetobacter bacterial strains are characterized and compared for the first time. SEM and BET results demonstrate a large surface area (>100 m2/g) and XRD analysis reveals high crystallinity (>60%). In vitro cell tests indicate potential biocompatibility. In the BC based pH sensor chapter, a pyrolyzed BC (p-BC) aerogel was incorporated with polyaniline (PANI) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), exhibiting near-Nernst pH sensitivity (50.4 mV/pH). In the chapter on antimicrobial BC nanocomposites, the inorganic BC/silver nanoparticle (BC/AgNP) and organic BC/lysozyme, BC/eggshell membrane (BC/ESM), BC/methylglyoxal (BC/MGO) nanocomposites were fabricated and characterized, with BC/ESM and BC/MGO nanocomposites proposed for the first time. The antimicrobial properties were tested via a disk diffusion method, with BC/MGO exhibiting the greatest antimicrobial activity, with diameters of inhibition zone (DIZ) up to 17.1 ± 0.6 mm against S. aureus and 15.5 ± 0.5 mm against E. coli. Tensile tests show the nanocomposites still retain the high tensile strength of plain BC (>2 MPa). These results indicate that BC and BC-derived nanocomposites are promising candidate materials for smart wound dressings. The future work will focus on more detailed in vitro biocompatibility tests and in vivo wound healing assays