Bernhard Boser (Advisor)

The growing need for pointofcare applications in global health and personalized medicine motivates a significant reduction in the size and cost of present technologies. Current solutions use fluorescent or enzymatic labels with complex optical instrumentation that has proven difficult to miniaturize. Recently, magnetic bead labeling has emerged as an alternative solution enabling portable and low...

To meet demands for mobile electronic, power has become limiting factor for most ADC design. In pipelined ADC structure, Inter-stage Gain circuits are the most power hungry building block. Conventionally, Inter-stage gain circuits are implemented using feedback an OTA with a less-than-1 feedback factor (i.e. 1/2 to 1/3). This approach is costly because these OTAs drive not only the load capacitors, but also the sampling and feedback capacitors. As a result, the power consumption of these amplifiers is a feedback factor (i.e., 2 to 3X) worse than their counterparts in unity gain...

High-performance gyroscopes are key elements of inertial navigation systems. Miniaturization of these sensors is desirable to achieve low manufacturing cost, low weight, small size, and low energy consumption. Although miniaturized gyroscopes have been used in a wide range of applications such as gaming and image stabilization, their low performance prevents their implementation in inertial navigation systems. The main goal of this research is to identify, analyze, and characterize parameters that limit the performance of frequency-modulated (FM) gyroscopes and develop extremely high-...