Publications

Monolithic Wireless Transceiver Design

Filip Maksimovic
Kristofer S.J. Pister
2020

Recently, there has been an increasing push to make everything wireless. In contrast to high-performance cellular communication, where the demand for enormous quantities of data is skyrocketing, these small wireless sensor and actuator nodes require low power, low cost, and a high degree of system integration. A typical CMOS system-on-chip requires a number of off-chip components for proper operation, namely, a crystal oscillator to act as an accurate frequency reference, and an antenna. The primary goal of this thesis is to address the hurdles associated with operating without these...

Co-planar Optoelectrowetting (OEW) Device for Droplet Manipulation

Jodi Loo
2020

Lab-on-a-chip technologies have seen great advances and development over the past few decades in addressing applications such as biochemical analysis, pharmaceutical development, and point-of-care diagnostics. Miniaturization of biochemical operations performed on lab-on-a-chip platforms benefit from reduced sample, reagent and waste volumes as well as increased parallelization and automation. This enables more cost-effective operations along with higher throughput and sensitivity for faster and more efficient analysis and detection.

The research presented in this dissertation...

Design, Fabrication, and Assembly of Multi-chip Walking Silicon Microrobots

Hani Gomez
2020

Microrobots can someday be used as a tool to further expand investigative capabilities– for example, archeologists could use them to research buried cities such as the one in Tiwanaku, Bolivia, or emergency response workers could send robots ahead in search-and- rescue operations. The anatomy of a microrobot can be broken down into its body, brain and power. Typically, each subsystem is fabricated using a different process, creating the need for multi-chip assembly. Microrobots in the literature are often assembled post-process using methods such as wire bonding, silver epoxy, and flip-...