A Novel Three-Point Modulation Technique for Fractional-N Frequency Synthesizer Applications

This paper presents a novel three-point modulation technique for fractional-N frequency synthesizer applications. Convention modulated fractional-N frequency synthesizers suffer from quantization noise, which degrades not only the phase noise performance but also the modulation quality. To solve this problem, this work proposes a three-point modulation technique, which not only cancels the quantization noise, but also markedly boosts the channel switching speed. Measurements reveal that the implemented 2.4 GHz fractional-N frequency synthesizer using three-point modulation can achieve a 2.5 Mbps GFSK data rate with an FSK error rate of only 1.4 %. The phase noise is approximately -98 dBc/Hz at a frequency offset of 100 kHz. The channel switching time is only 1.1 μs with a frequency step of 80 MHz. Comparing with conventional two-point modulation, the proposed three-point modulation greatly improves the FSK error rate, phase noise and channel switching time by about 10 %, 30 dB and 126 μs, respectively

Cracking pressure control of parylene checkvalve using slanted tensile tethers

MEMS check valves with fixed cracking pressures are important in micro-fluidic applications where the pressure, flow directions and flow rates all need to be carefully controlled. This work presents a new surface-micromachined parylene check valve that uses residual thermal stress in the parylene to control its cracking pressure. The new check valve uses slanted tethers to allow the parylene tensile stress to apply a net downward force on the valving seat against the orifice. The angle of the slanted tethers is made using a gray-scale mask to create a sloped sacrificial photoresist with the following tether parylene deposition. The resulted check valves have both the cracking pressures and flow profiles agreeable well with our theoretical analysis

Chest Compression-Only Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

The survival rate of out-of-cardiac arrest (OHCA) was very low, which was mainly due to the victims who do not receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) immediately. It was estimated that if people who quickly get chest compression-only CPR while awaiting medical treatment have double or even triple the chance of surviving. In the true world, many individuals are unwilling to do mouth-to-mouth breathing due to fear of infections or unable to do mouth-to-mouth breathing at the same time in the situation of only one bystander. This article has performed an extensive review in order to update the concept of chest compression-only CPR

Parylene stiction

This paper presents a preliminary study into stiction between parylene C and substrate surfaces for biocompatible check-valve applications. During fabrication, parylene C is used as the structural material for the check-valve. The substrate surfaces studied include Au, Al, Si, parylene C, XeF_2 treated Si, and silicon dioxide. Stiction between different surfaces is created after sacrificial photoresist etching. Then, the stiction is measured using blister tests, and stiction mechanisms for different materials are investigated. The devices are released with different recipes to examine their effects. Finally, the results of the study reveal methods to control the cracking pressure of parylene check-valves

Energy-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Transmission under Reliability and Finite Blocklength Constraints

This paper investigates an energy-efficient non-orthogonal transmission design problem for two downlink receivers that have strict reliability and finite blocklength (latency) constraints. The Shannon capacity formula widely used in traditional designs needs the assumption of infinite blocklength and thus is no longer appropriate. We adopt the newly finite blocklength coding capacity formula for explicitly specifying the trade-off between reliability and code blocklength. However, conventional successive interference cancellation (SIC) may become infeasible due to heterogeneous blocklengths. We thus consider several scenarios with different channel conditions and with/without SIC. By carefully examining the problem structure, we present in closed-form the optimal power and code blocklength for energy-efficient transmissions. Simulation results provide interesting insights into conditions for which non-orthogonal transmission is more energy efficient than the orthogonal transmission such as TDMA.Comment: accepted by IEEE GlobeCom workshop on URLLC, 201

Solar cell with MXene electrode.

A solar cell (100) includes a p-type silicon layer (105) having a first side and a second side and an n-type silicon layer (110) having a first side and a second side. The first side of the n-type silicon layer is arranged on the second side of the p-type silicon layer. The solar cell also includes a first metal electrode (115) arranged on the first side of the p-type silicon layer and a second metal electrode (120) arranged on the second side of the n-type silicon layer. The second metal electrode includes an MXene

Distributed Scheduling of Unstructured Collective Communication on the CM-5 (1993)

Parallelization of many irregular applications results in unstructured collective communication. In this paper we present a distributed algorithm for scheduling such communication on parallel machines. We describe the performance of this algorithm on the CM-5 and show that the scheduling algorithm has very small overhead and gives a significant improvement over naive methods

Bridging the Digital Divide: A Case Study of Middle-age Women in Taiwan

This article reports a study of how middle-age and elder women adopt ICT through the social intervention and support from the non-profit organizations (NPOs) which they are associated with. By interviewing 30 participants of the Taiwan Women Up project, we reveal the barriers that may hinder women from learning ICT and the forces which can facilitate women in their adoption of ICT at three levels: individual, family and social group. Our findings show that, for our participants who are middle-class housewives over 40, their bonding with the NPOs serves as the main force for them to join the Taiwan Women Up project and adopt ICT. When ICT related difficulty occurs, they approach to the members of the NPOs and receive support from them while their families turn them down initially. After this project, the participants develop confidence and, accordingly, the digital divide is narrowed. Yet, there is little sign that any change of the traditional gender role has occurred

ANALYZING MEDICAL TRANSACTION DATA BY USING ASSOCIATION RULE MINING WITH MULTIPLE MINIMUM SUPPORTS

The quick development of IS has a huge impact on the healthcare industry. almost all the existing hospitals, clinics and other healthcare-related institutes have adopted a functionally powerful and highly integrated Hospital Information System (HIS) for management of clinic or medical-related affairs. The medical data stored in the HIS are collected from many different medical subsystems, However, problems of failed data sharing and inconsistent data content often occur among these subsystems, resulting in many hospitals collect a large amount of medical data, but not the ability to process and analyse these data properly, letting the valuable data in the HIS all go to waste. In this study, we made a practical visit to a certain hospital in Taiwan and collected radioimmunoassay (RIA) data from the Laboratory Information System (LIS) and the Departmental Registration System (DRS) of this hospital. Further, we proposed a method of the association rule mining in combination with the concept of multiple minimum supports to analyse and find valuable association rules from the RIA data. The analytical results found the method we proposed can indeed find association rules that would not be able to be found with the traditional association mining methods. It is very helpful in improving doctor-patient relationship and upgrading health care quality