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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220608T093000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220608T103000
DTSTAMP:20260623T111836
CREATED:20221103T183939Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221103T183939Z
UID:5918-1654680600-1654684200@ece.northeastern.edu
SUMMARY:Ziyue Xu's PhD Proposal Review
DESCRIPTION:“High Efficiency RF Energy Harvesting and Power Management Circuits Techniques for IoT Application” \nAbstract: \nAs the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is continuing to grow\, there is a need that a significant percentage these devices operate at ultra-low power (ULP) levels\, either using harvested energy or using a small battery with a long lifetime. Energy harvesting techniques can help to achieve long lifetimes\, but the system should be able to operate efficiently with a small amount of harvested energy and often from low voltages. Energy harvesting from solar\, thermal\, vibration\, and radio-frequency (RF) are increasingly being used to realize batteryless operation for IoT and biomedical applications. A typical multi-input energy harvesting system including multiple energy transducers\, maximum power point tracking (MPPT)\, matching network (MN)\, and DC-DC converter. Solar cells and thermoelectric generators have a few mV to hundreds of mV open-circuit voltage that require maximum power tracking to make sure the optimal power extraction is achieved. The piezoelectric transducer is modeled as AC source with internal resistance from 10s Ω to kΩ that requires AC-DC conversion\, known as rectification to better use the energy. And the following DC-DC regulation stage is to regulate the output voltage to deal with the sudden change of the load or the input voltage drop. Among these techniques\, RF energy harvesting system is particularly promising for biomedical and IoT devices where other sources are not readily available. Several of these applications are utilizing widely used WiFi and Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) communication standards. These applications along with the wirelessly-powered neural implantable medical devices (n-IMD) for neural stimulation and recording are also benefiting from ultra-low power (ULP) circuits and systems design advancements. Since the available RF power decreases rapidly with distance\, it is desirable to design rectifiers that are able to operate with low incident power. This Ph.D. proposal presents a simplified design approach and analysis of RF energy harvesting rectifiers for different design objectives. The proposal also includes the design of a new self-biased gate (SBG) rectifier with a non-linear gate biasing technique. At lower power levels\, the SBG rectifier drops the entirety of output voltage to create a higher gate bias. However\, to address the issue of leakage at higher input power levels\, the gate-biasing technique drops only a fraction of the output voltage. This approach helps to realize high efficiency across input power range. The fully integrated\, high-efficiency SBG-based RF energy harvesting circuit can also provide a high output voltage of 9.3 V with a 30% end-to-end efficiency (PHE). Further\, to enhance the available RF energy to a remotely located RF energy receiver\, the proposal presents a highly efficient distributed RF beamforming technique. To improve the power delivery in the downstream power management circuits\, a boost converter architecture that can reduce switching noise injection by changing its switching frequency is also presented. The associated power management system includes a boost converter operating in DCM\, FVC and a digital control loop. The system is capable of providing a stable 1V supply for RF receiver front-ends with very low performance impact. \n  \nCommittee Members: \nProf. Aatmesh Shrivastava (Advisor) \nProf. Marvin Onabajo \nProf. Nian X. Sun
URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu/event/ziyue-xus-phd-proposal-review/
LOCATION:432 ISEC\, 360 Huntington Ave\, Boston\, MA\, 02115\, United States
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220616T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220616T130000
DTSTAMP:20260623T111836
CREATED:20221103T183733Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221103T183733Z
UID:5914-1655380800-1655384400@ece.northeastern.edu
SUMMARY:Hussein Hussein's PhD Proposal Review
DESCRIPTION:“Parametric Circuits for Enhanced Sensing and RF Signal Processing” \nAbstract: \nMassive deployments of wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) that continuously detect physical\, biological or chemical parameters are needed to truly benefit from the unprecedented possibilities opened by the Internet‑of‑Things (IoT). Just recently\, new sensors with higher sensitivities have been demonstrated by leveraging advanced on‑chip designs and microfabrication processes. Yet\, WSNs using such sensors require energy to transmit the sensed information. Consequently\, they either contain batteries that need to be periodically replaced or energy harvesting circuits whose low efficiencies prevent a frequent and continuous sensing\, even impacting the maximum range of communication. Here\, we discuss a new battery-less and harvester-free remote sensing tag\, namely the subharmonic tag (SubHT)\, leveraging unique nonlinear characteristics to fundamentally break any previous paradigms for passive WSNs. SubHT can sense and transmit information without requiring supplied or harvested DC power. Also\, it transmits the sensed information at a difference frequency from the one of its interrogation signal\, rendering its reader immune from multi-path\, from clutter and from its own self‑interference. Also\, even though SubHT may not require any advanced and expensive manufacturing\, its unique nonlinear response enables extraordinary high sensitivities and dynamic ranges that can even surpass those achieved by the most advanced on-chip sensors. More interestingly\, SubHT can be even configured to operate in a “threshold sensing” mode\, making it able to respond to any interrogation signal only when the sensed parameter has exceeded a remotely reprogrammable threshold\, as well as to memorize any violation in a sensed parameter without requiring any memory components. In this talk\, the first SubHT prototypes for temperature sensing will be showcased. Even more\, we will show how including high quality factor (Q) resonators in a SubHT’s network allows to implement even more functionalities\, such as the long-range identification or tracking of any items or localization and navigation in a GPS denied environment. Yet\, the dynamics exploited by SubHT can also be leveraged to address various needs along radio-frequency (RF) chains. In this regard\, we show how the SubHT’s nonlinear dynamics can be leveraged to build components\, such as parametric filters\, frequency selective limiters and signal to noise enhancers\, that improve the stability of RF frequency synthesizers and instinctually suppress co-site or self-interferes\, paving an unprecedented path towards integrated radios with improved performance and longer battery-life time. \nCommittee: \nProf. Cristian Cassella (Advisor)\nProf. Marvin Onabajo\nProf. Matteo Rinaldi\nProf. Andrea Alù
URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu/event/hussein-husseins-phd-proposal-review/
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220627T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220627T150000
DTSTAMP:20260623T111836
CREATED:20221103T183838Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20221103T183838Z
UID:5916-1656338400-1656342000@ece.northeastern.edu
SUMMARY:Xiaolong Ma's PhD Dissertation Defense
DESCRIPTION:“Towards Efficient Deep Neural Network Execution with Model Compression and Platform-specific Optimization” \nAbstract: \nDeep learning or deep neural network (DNN)\, as one of the most powerful machine learning techniques\, has become the fundamental element and core enabler of the artificial intelligence. Many incredible\, bleeding-edge applications\, such as community/shared virtual reality experiences and self-driving cars\, will crucially rely on the ubiquitous availability and real-time executability of the high-quality deep learning models. Among the variety of the AI-associated platforms\, mobile and embedded computing devices have become key carriers of deep learning to facilitate the widespread of machine intelligence. In this talk\, I will first focus on a compression-compilation co-design method that deploy a unique sparse model on an off-the-shelf mobile device with real-time execution speed. This method advances the state-of-the-art by introducing a new dimension\, fine-grained pruning patterns inside the coarse-grained structures\, revealing a previously unknown point in the design space. The designed patterns are interpretable\, and can be obtained by a fully automatic pattern-aware pruning framework that achieves pattern library extraction\, pattern assignment (pruning) and weight training simultaneously. With the higher accuracy enabled by fine-grained pruning patterns\, the unique insight is to use the compiler to re-gain and guarantee high hardware efficiency. We take a step forward by considering a more practical scenario\, that the deployment-execution mode for AI tasks no longer satisfy the user preference\, and enabling edge training becomes inevitable since it promotes much better personalized intelligent services while strengthen users’ privacy by avoiding data egress from their devices. To this end\, I will demonstrate my approaches that use sparsity to achieve fast and efficient training on the edge devices. I will evaluate the static lottery ticket sparse training\, and then demonstrate a high-accuracy and low-cost dynamic sparse training framework that makes the edge training possible. It successfully incorporates the pattern-based sparsity into sparse training\, and also exploit the data-level sparsity to further improve the acceleration. I will conclude by using our sparse training method on a distributed training scenario\, which demonstrates the state-of-the-art accuracy and great flexibility for modern AI model training. \nCommittee: \nProf. Yanzhi Wang (Advisor) \nProf. Xue Lin \nProf. David Kaeli
URL:https://ece.northeastern.edu/event/xiaolong-mas-phd-dissertation-defense/
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