Design, Fabrication and Characterization of a Piezoelectric Microgenerator Including a Power Management Circuit

We report in this paper the design, fabrication and experimental characterization of a piezoelectric MEMS microgenerator. This device scavenges the energy of ambient mechanical vibrations characterized by frequencies in the range of 1 kHz. This component is made with Aluminum Nitride thin film deposited with a CMOS compatible process. Moreover we analyze two possible solutions for the signal rectification: a discrete doubler-rectifier and a full custom power management circuit. The ASIC developed for this application takes advantage of diodes with very low threshold voltage and therefore allows the conversion of extremely low input voltages corresponding to very weak input accelerations. The volume of the proposed generator is inferior to 1mm3 and the generated powers are in the range of 1$\mu$W. This system is intended to supply power to autonomous wireless sensor nodes.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/EDA-Publishing

Modeling Evolution of Crosstalk in Noisy Signal Transduction Networks

Signal transduction networks can form highly interconnected systems within cells due to network crosstalk, the sharing of input signals between multiple downstream responses. To better understand the evolutionary design principles underlying such networks, we study the evolution of crosstalk and the emergence of specificity for two parallel signaling pathways that arise via gene duplication and are subsequently allowed to diverge. We focus on a sequence based evolutionary algorithm and evolve the network based on two physically motivated fitness functions related to information transmission. Surprisingly, we find that the two fitness functions lead to very different evolutionary outcomes, one with a high degree of crosstalk and the other without.Comment: 18 Pages, 16 Figure

Method of computation of energies in the fractional quantum Hall effect regime

In a previous work, we reported exact results of energies of the ground state in the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) regime for systems with up to $N_{\text{e}} = 6$ electrons at the filling factor $\nu = 1/3$ by using the method of complex polar coordinates. In this work, we display interesting computational details of the previous calculation and extend the calculation to $N_{\text{e}} = 7$ electrons at $\nu = 1/3$. Moreover, similar exact results are derived at the filling $\nu = 1/5$ for systems with up to $N_{\text{e}} = 6$ electrons. The results that we obtained by analytical calculation are in good agreement with their analogues ones derived by the method of Monte Carlo in a precedent work.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur