Global modeling approach to the design of an MMIC amplifier using Ohmic Electrode-Sharing Technology

An innovative technique for high--density, high-frequency integrated circuit design is proposed.The procedure exploits the potentialities of a global modeling approach,previously applied only at device level,enabling the circuit designer to explore flexible layout solutions imed at important reduction in chip size and cost.The new circuit design technique is presented by means of an example consisting of a wide-band amplifier,implemented with the recently proposed Ohmic Electrode-Sharing Technology (OEST).The good agreement between experimental and simulated results confirms the validity of the proposed MMIC design approach

Millimeter-wave FET modeling based on a frequency extrapolation approach

An empirical distributed model, based on electromagnetic analysis and standard S-parameter measurements up to microwave frequencies, is shown to be capable of accurate small-signal predictions up to the millimeter-wave range. The frequency-extrapolation approach takes advantage from a physically-expected, smooth behavior of suitably defined elementary active devices connected to a passive distributed network. On this basis, small-signal millimeter-wave FET modeling becomes an affordable task in any laboratory equipped with a standard microwave vector network analyzer and electromagnetic simulation capabilities. In the paper, wide experimental validation of the proposed model up to 110GHz is presented for PHEMT devices with different sizes and bias conditions

Learning With Few Examples the Semantic Description of Novel Human-Inspired Grasp Strategies From RGB Data

Data-driven approaches and human inspiration are fundamental to endow robotic manipulators with advanced autonomous grasping capabilities. However, to capitalize upon these two pillars, several aspects need to be considered, which include the number of human examples used for training; the need for having in advance all the required information for classification (hardly feasible in unstructured environments); the trade-off between the task performance and the processing cost. In this letter, we propose a RGB-based pipeline that can identify the object to be grasped and guide the actual execution of the grasping primitive selected through a combination of Convolutional and Gated Graph Neural Networks. We consider a set of human-inspired grasp strategies, which are afforded by the geometrical properties of the objects and identified from a human grasping taxonomy, and propose to learn new grasping skills with only a few examples. We test our framework with a manipulator endowed with an under-actuated soft robotic hand. Even though we use only 2D information to reduce the footprint of the network, we achieve 90% of successful identifications of the most appropriate human-inspired grasping strategy over ten different classes, of which three were few-shot learned, outperforming an ideal model trained with all the classes, in sample-scarce conditions

System Level Analysis of Millimetre-wave GaN-based MIMO Radar for Detection of Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The detection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) of micro/nano dimensions, is becoming a hot topic, due to their large diffusion, and represents a challenging task from both the system architecture and components point of view. The Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar architecture in a Multi-Input Multi-Output configuration has been identified as the most suitable solution for this purpose, due to both its inherent short-range detection capability and compact implementation. This paper describes the operation and technology challenges inherent to the development of a millimeter-wave FMCW MIMO radar for small UAVs detection. In particular it analyzes the sub-systems specifications and the expected system performance with respect to a chip set designed and developed in GaN at 37.5 GHz applications

Enhanced transfection of cell lines from Atlantic salmon through nucoleofection and antibiotic selection

Background Cell lines from Atlantic salmon kidney have made it possible to culture and study infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAV), an aquatic orthomyxovirus affecting farmed Atlantic salmon. However, transfection of these cells using calcium phosphate precipitation or lipid-based reagents shows very low transfection efficiency. The Amaxa Nucleofector technology™ is an electroporation technique that has been shown to be efficient for gene transfer into primary cells and hard to transfect cell lines. Findings Here we demonstrate, enhanced transfection of the head kidney cell line, TO, from Atlantic salmon using nucleofection and subsequent flow cytometry. Depending on the plasmid promoter, TO cells could be transfected transiently with an efficiency ranging from 11.6% to 90.8% with good viability, using Amaxa's cell line nucleofector solution T and program T-20. A kill curve was performed to investigate the most potent antibiotic for selection of transformed cells, and we found that blasticidin and puromycin were the most efficient for selection of TO cells. Conclusions The results show that nucleofection is an efficient way of gene transfer into Atlantic salmon cells and that stably transfected cells can be selected with blasticidin or puromycin

A Highly Linear Mixer For Zero-IF Bluetooth Receiver

In this paper a compact and highly linear monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) suitable for zero-IF Bluetooth receiver is described. The prototype is designed in order to overcome the drawbacks that homodyne receivers present, like flicker noise, LO leakage and sensitivity to the 2-nd, 3-rd order intermodulation products. For these tasks a passive sub-harmonic topology has been utilized. The fabricated prototype exhibites a 3-rd order intercept point of +30dBm, 2-nd order intercept point of +98dBm, conversion loss of 8dB, 1-dB compression point of +4 dBm and better than 50dB small signal isolation RF and LO ports