Modeling Emerging Semiconductor Devices for Circuit Simulation

Circuit simulation is an indispensable part of modern IC design. The significant cost of fabrication has driven researchers to verify the chip functionality through simulation before submitting the design for final fabrication. With the impending end of Moore’s Law, researchers all over the world are looking for new devices with enhanced functionality. A plethora of promising emerging devices has been proposed in recent years. In order to leverage the full potential of such devices, circuit designers need fast, reliable models for SPICE simulation to explore different applications. Most of these new devices have complex underlying physical mechanism rendering the model development an extremely challenging task. For the models to be of practical use, they have to enable fast and accurate simulation that rules out the possibility of numerically solving a system of partial differential equations to arrive at a solution. In this chapter, we show how different modeling approaches can be used to simulate three emerging semiconductor devices namely, silicon- on- insulator four gate transistor(G4FET), perimeter gated single photon avalanche diode (PG-SPAD) and insulator-metal transistor (IMT) device with volatile memristance. All the models have been verified against experimental /TCAD data and implemented in commercial circuit simulator

A priority based energy harvesting scheme for charging embedded sensor nodes in wireless body area networks.

This research work proposes a novel priority aware schedule based charging algorithm that uses wireless power transfer (WPT) technique in order to charge embedded sensor nodes (SNs) in a wireless body area network (WBAN). Implanted sensor nodes in WBANs require energy for both information extraction and data transmission to the remote controller unit. Thus, energy shortage of these SNs deteriorates due to the data transmission process of the patient health monitoring system. However, continuous operation by means of electromagnetic induction for energy harvesting, obtained from ambient sources, reduces the overall efficiency of the primary unit. With this paradigm in sight, an algorithm demonstrating the modeling of a priority-based mechanism is proposed in order to ensure proper sensor voltage level and to reduce the transmission losses. Medium access control (MAC) protocols are used for inductive powering from the primary unit to the secondary unit in a collision-free centralized scheduling scheme. Therefore, the proposed wireless charging algorithm for implanted SNs in WBAN is designed as per carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique. Because of this, the overall power consumption of SNs for certain operation periods, successful charging probabilities for multiple SNs, and instantaneous power requirements are considered as key performance measures of analysis. It is assumed that proper energy storage in both transmitters and receivers can handle channel interference and traffic contention. Simulation results verify that a significant reduction in power consumption for the proposed priority aware algorithm will maintain almost similar output. For this reason, saturating class-C as well as class-E driver circuits have been used to justify the performance in two different circuit topologies. Effects of priority with respect to the full charge period have also been observed for the multi-node system. Furthermore, from performance analysis, it has been demonstrated that the scheduling scheme causes both single MOSFET composed saturating class-C and Lchoke modeled class-E associated driver circuits to be considerably more loss efficient than corresponding existing ones

Minimizing the Energy Hole Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Wedge Merging Approach

The Energy hole problem, a common phenomenon in wireless sensor networks, significantly decreases the lifetime of any deployed network. Some of the popular techniques to minimize such problems are using mobile sinks instead of static sinks, extending the transmission range dynamically, and deploying redundant sensor nodes near the base station/sink. The major drawback to these techniques are that energy holes may still be created at some point due to their static nature of deployment, despite having the overall residual energy very high. In this research work, we adopt a new approach by dividing the whole network into equiangular wedges and merging a wedge with its neighboring wedge dynamically whenever individual residual energy of all member nodes of a wedge fall below a threshold value. We also propose an efficient Head Node (HN) selection scheme to reduce the transmission energy needed for forwarding data packets among Head Nodes. Simulation results show that WEMER, our proposed WEdge MERging based scheme, provides significantly higher lifetime and better energy efficiency compared to state-of-the-art Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (PEGASIS) and contemporary Concentric Clustering Scheme (CCS), and Multilayer Cluster Designing Algorithm (MCDA)