Publications

CMOS Based Chemical Sensors

Dharmesh Bhalchandra Jani
Kristofer S.J. Pister
1995
Detection of chemical species using solid state sensors is of great practical importance. The niche for chemical microsensors exists in places where continuous measurement of a chemical concentration is required from a number of locations. Microsensors...

Chip-scale Lidar

Behnam Behroozpour Baghmisheh
Bernhard E. Boser
Ming C. Wu
Liwei Lin
2017

The superiority of lidar compared to radiofrequency and ultrasonic solutions in terms of depth and lateral resolution has been known for decades. In recent years, both application pull such as 3D vision for robotics, rapid prototyping, selfdriving cars, and medical diagnostics, as well as technology developments such as integrated optics and tunable lasers have resulted in new activities

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Crystal-Free Wireless Communication with Relaxation Oscillators and its Applications

David C. Burnett
Kristofer S.J. Pister
Ali M. Niknejad
Lance J. Kriegsfeld
2019

For the last decade, the size of complete 2.4GHz wireless modules containing everythingbut power have stagnated at ~1cm x 1cm. This is despite continued advances in semiconductorprocesses due to components needed by the core communication IC. Breaking this size barrier (which also sets a power and cost barrier) by eliminating all off-chip components is the goal of the Single-Chip Mote project, of which this dissertation is a part. The major componentsto be eliminated are antenna, battery, and crystal...

Biochemical Microflow System / Microfabricated Optical Chopper

Michael T. Ching
Richard M. White
Albert P. Pisano
1993

The application of micromechanics to biochemical instrumentation yields many improvements in size, efficiency, and power consumption. The microdevices have small volumes which are compatible with many biochemical reactions. With the addition of integrated sensors, ...

A CMOS Magnetic Sensor Chip for Biomedical Applications

Peng Liu
Bernhard E. Boser
Seth Sanders
Yuri Suzuki
2012

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...

Articulated Mechanisms and Electrostatic Actuators for Autonomous Microrobots

Richard Yeh
Kristofer S.J. Pister
Roger T. Howe
Dorian Liepmann
2001

Enabled by advances in both integrated circuit technology and micro electromechanical systems (MEMS), the continuing miniaturization and integration of electronics, sensors, and actuators and mechanisms will make it feasible to create insect-sized autonomous microrobots. We propose to create a class of autonomous crawling microrobots the size on the order f 1cm^3 and equipped with a power source, low-power CMOS controller, sensors, wireless communications devices and motorized articulated legs. The work presented here demonstrates how articulated insect legs could be created from rigid...

A Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Device to Measure the Fracture Strain of Polycrystalline Silicon

Peter Truxtun Jones
Roger T. Howe
1995

The past decade has witnessed the establishment of a new field of technology concerned with the manufacture of microscopic sensors and actuators, known as Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS). The field of MEMS is based on the use of integrated circuit fabrication techniques to create...

Adaptive Control Strategies for MEMS Gyroscopes

Sungsu Park
Roberto Horowitz
Roger T. Howe
Bernhard E. Boser
2000
This dissertation presents adaptive control strategies for MEMS z-axis gyroscopes. Specifically, a unified methodology is proposed for designing and analyzing the performance of control algorithms that can identify and, in an adaptive fashion, compensate for most fabrication defects...

A Self-Nucleating Evaporator: An Experimental Study of Low-Superheat Pool Boiling via Injection of Gaseous By-Products from the Thermal Decomposition of Azobis-Isobutyronitrile

Christopher William Hogue
Albert P. Pisano
Van P. Carey
2008

For the purpose of exploring a novel heat transfer concept to radically enhance the evaporator performance of the microColumnated Loop Heat Pipe (μLHP) system, an experimental investigation into the feasibility of a lowsuperheat, passive, selfnucleating evaporator surface was performed. The evaporator test surfaces were treated...

A MEMS Thin Film AlN Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Valve

Ya-Mei Chen
Albert P. Pisano
Liwei Lin
Tsu-Jae King Liu
Tarek Zohdi
2011
In this thesis, a new piezoelectric valve system with bi-chevron aluminum nitride (AlN) actuator is described. The intended application of the new piezoelectric valve is for the advanced printing technology with supercritical carbon dioxide as the solvent. With supercritical carbon dioxide as the solvent, the ink dissolved will start to nucleate with a micronozzle and generate extremely small and uniform ink particles due to rapid expansion of supercritical...