Office of Technology Transfer – University of Michigan
151-200 of 237 technologies within Semiconductor & Electronics RSS ATOM

Shrinkage Techniques for Nanoscale Patterning

4549 – Nanolithography tools suffer two major shortcomings: low throughput and high maintenance cost. These issues make them undesirable for mass-production of nanoscale devices, where this mass-production is often already the bottleneck in nanotechnology fields. Examples can be found in nano-cantilever chemical sensor array and zero-mode waveguides for resolving single-molecular dynamics.... Read More

Tensor Transmission-Line Metamaterials

4528 – Transmission-line (TL) meta-materials are artificially structured media with unusual electromagnetic properties, which are found of great interest with numerous applications. Particularly, the ability of TL meta-materials to control the electromagnetic field along a surface/radiating aperture allows immediate applications in antenna design. TL meta-materials possessing effective material... Read More

A Micromachined In-plane Silicon Accelerometer with a Combined Surface and Bulk Micromachining Technology

2491 – Applications of microaccelerometers cover a wide range from those which require low/medium sensitivity sensors, to those used in inertial navigation/guidance systems, seismometry, or microgravity measurements, which demand high sensitivity with very low noise floor. Among various sensing methods, the capacitive sensing technique has recently gained attention as it provides high... Read More

Low-Power Area-Efficient SAR ADC

4494 – In the monitoring of neural activity, simultaneous, real-time monitoring of multiple neural sites in 3 dimensional electrode arrays is ideal. Towards this end, recent development in neural probes includes the implementation of multichannel neural interface systems. In microsystems, the neural signals are often amplified and converted into digital signals for transmission via wired/... Read More

Novel Artificial Electro-ferromagnetic, Tunable Electromagnetic Band-gap, and Bi-anisotropic Composite Media Utilizing Wire Configuration: Concept, Analysis and Applications

2444 – Metamaterials are composite materials made on a macroscopic level, and provides physical properties that cannot be afforded by naturally occurring materials. In particular, metamaterials can extend the range of electromagnetic properties in materials, as to provide enhanced permittivity and permeability, or negative refractive index. To date, these materials have been explored for use in... Read More

A Method for Low-temperature Sealing of Microcavities at Wafer-Level

2111 – Packaging is one of the most challenging and costly processes in the integrated circuits (IC) and sensor industry, and remains a bottleneck for IC commercialization. With moving components, the already challenging packaging task is complicated further for MEMS devices. Thus far, packaging methods reported in the literature are application-specific, and there is a lack of standardization... Read More

Wafer-Level Vacuum Packaging Technology for MEMS

2457 – Low-cost vacuum packaging has become one of the most important challenges in the MEMS industry for a number of emerging applications including resonant sensors and radiofrequency MEMS. Some essential features of a MEMS package include small size, vacuum/ hermetic capability, integrated sealed feedthroughs, wafer level processing, stability in harsh environmental conditions, and low cost.... Read More

Neutron Irradiative Methods and Systems

2959 – There has been an increasing need to permit the quick, non-invasive, non-destructive analysis of the chemical compositions of materials, especially when such materials are concealed, such as illicit materials or explosives, or otherwise spaced a considerable distance from the detection system, such as to improve personnel safety in the event of an explosion. Thermal neutron activation... Read More

Reconfigurable Frequency Selective Surface with Miniaturized Elements

3598 – Traditional Frequency selective surface (FSS) structures have been used for variety ap-plications over the years. With the development of efficient computational methods, more sophisticated approaches based on genetic algorithm have been proposed for optimization of the fixed parameters in FSS design. The demand for FSS structures with miniaturized elements, on the other hand, is on the... Read More

Miniaturized Radio Repeater

4449 – In a wireless network, the path loss between the transmitter and receiver is a critical factor that determines the possible range of communication between the two nodes. Complex environments such as urban canyons and building interiors often contain numerous obstacles that impede the line-of-sight communication and increase the path loss. In these environments, and especially at high... Read More

Power Scavenger Architecture for Low-Frequency Ambient Vibration

4362 – Wireless sensors, implantable devices, and other low-power gadgets typically obtain operational power in one of two ways: 1) by using electrochemical batteries or micro fuel cells and 2) by energy scavenging from environmental sources such as ambient heat, light, and vibration. Although electrochemical batteries and fuel cells can provide more power, they are not desirable for some... Read More

Slot Spiral Antenna with Integrated Balun and Feed

1172 – Spiral antennas are particularly known for their ability to produce very broadband, almost perfectly circularly-polarized radiation over their full coverage region. Because of this polarization diversity and broad spatial and frequency coverage, many different applications exist, ranging from military surveillance, ECM, and ECCM uses, to numerous commercial and private uses, including the... Read More

Dynamic Reconfiguration of a Large-Scale Battery System

4302 – Electric vehicles powered with large-scale battery packs are gaining popularity as gasoline price soars. Large-scale battery packs usually consist of an estimated 12,000 battery cells connected in series and parallel, which are susceptible to battery cell failures. Currently available battery-management systems are often dedicated to micro-scale batteries based on static configuration,... Read More

Complimentary Zn0\ZnTe Polycrystalline Thin Film Transistor Circuits

4337 – Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed complementary circuits based on ZnO and ZnTe polycrystalline transistors targeted towards low cost and large area electronics. Typically, low cost and large area electronics for applications such as flat panel displays and flexible electronics are based on amorphous silicon or organic semiconductors. However, amorphous silicon and... Read More

High-Power Magnetron for microwave and terahertz radiation generation

4369 – A highly efficient, low-cost magnetron capable of generating THz radiation with watts of output power has been developed using a simple planar geometry. THz generation is difficult to achieve with conventional emission techniques such as semiconductor diodes or atomic transitions. To achieve high power THz emission, YAG laser and non-linear crystal systems have traditionally been... Read More

Dynamic Nano Inscribing Process and Apparatus

4394 – The increasing demands in nanoscale grating and channel structures in bio-, optical, and data storage industries have stimulated many emerging technologies such as laser interference lithography, nano ruling, and nanoimprint lithography. Among them, roll-to-roll based nanoimprint lithography (R2RNIL) provides greatly enhanced throughput while keeping resolution inherent to NIL. However,... Read More

Dense Horizontally-Aligned Carbon Nanotube Assemblies

4235 – Studies have shown that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) may be able to replace copper in both vertical and horizontal microelectronic interconnects. This can be established by taking advantage of smaller interconnect dimensions, while keeping delay and crosstalk noise constant, thus increasing the bandwidth density of global interconnects. To date, operation of a single large diameter multi-wall... Read More

BioBolt

4265 – Neural activity interface systems can access and monitor brain activities in the form of single neuron (action potential or spike) or ensemble of many neurons. Access of this information enables better understanding and prediction of neuronal behavior. One of the most important issues in developing the neural interface system is long-term durability and reliability as well as the safety... Read More

Server Idle Power Elimination

4184 – It is becoming more common for computers and other electronics to utilize low power quiescent modes during periods of inactivity. In particular, power consumed in a typical data center by servers is wasted by idle servers that are powered on, but not performing useful work. Several approaches, including certification, single voltage supplies, DC distribution, and dynamic load sharing are... Read More

Differential Current Discharge-Based Pressure Sensor

4281 – Cochlear implants for the deaf are the most successful neural prostheses; however, pitch perception remains relatively poor. Thin-film arrays can offer significant advantages over conventional wires by increasing pitch specificity, allowing greater pitch range, and reducing cost. However, in order for thin-film arrays to overtake wire-bundle technology they must be robust enough for safe... Read More

Post-Silicon Validation System for Modern Microprocessors

4143 – Verification remains an integral and crucial phase of today’s microprocessor design and manufacturing process. However, with soaring design complexities and decreasing time-to-market windows, today’s verification approaches are incapable of fully validating a microprocessor before its release to the public. Increasingly, post-silicon validation is deployed to detect complex functional... Read More

Low-Power, Low-Noise Open-Loop CMOS Preamplifier

4194 – With advances in CMOS technology, there has been a significant progress in implementing multichannel implantable neural systems. However, long-term monitoring of the brain activities remains a challenge due to stringent constraints in power, noise and area for hardware implementation. To establish the reliable monitoring of vulnerable neural signals, front-end preamplifier have been... Read More

Bio-Artificial Neuro Muscular Interface Device

4018 – Chronic implantation of electrodes and neural prosthetic devices in the central nervous system may be associated with tissue injury and inflammation. The encapsulation of implanted electrodes by glia and immune cells often lead to neuronal loss in the vicinity of the electrode, and prevention of signal transduction. Improved biocompatibility and associated electrical functionality of the... Read More

Hybrid Nanostructure Arrays

3961 – Energy harvesting and storing techniques are sought after in many applications where long-term, remote, and self-powered operation are required. These mechanisms are often integrated in small devices such as sensors, electronics, and radiofrequency devices. In this regard, nanostructures including carbon nanotubes, metal and oxide nanowires, and superlattice and branched heterostructures,... Read More

Protecting Bus-Based Hardware IP by Secret Sharing

3948 – As designs become more complex and on-chip transistor counts reach into the billions, the designer’s skills, methodologies, and tools are the invaluable assets of semiconductor design houses. This is particularly true for the small and medium-sized fabless design companies. The current trust models and royalty agreements do not fully protect the rights of the designers. The hardware IP... Read More

A Method for Compact Multilevel Electrical Integration of Microsystems

3898 – Many applications in neuroscience and neural prosthetics would benefit from having three-dimensional arrays of electrodes to allow the simultaneous monitoring of interactions among networks of neurons spanning multiple layers of brain. However, creating practical three-dimensional arrays has remained a challenge. Typically, neural probes are batch fabricated using planar processing... Read More

Quality Factor Boosting Via Mechanically Coupled Arraying

3716 – To date, oscillators comprised of several mechanically-coupled resonators combined with sustaining transistor circuits have been demonstrated with phase noise performance commensurate with GSM cellular phone specifications for reference oscillators. These oscillators owe their performance largely to the sheer Q of their constituent resonators. However, there are other applications, such... Read More

Frequency Scanning Radar

3641 – Radio detection and ranging (radar) is used to sense angle, range, and velocity of (moving) scatterers in the environment. Radar sensor capabilities of merit include maximum range and solid angle, as well as angular, range, and velocity resolution. Range and velocity are typically detected through pulse delay ranging and the Doppler effect, or through the frequency modulated continuous... Read More

Systems and Methods for Regulation of Engine Variables

3644 – In order to meet performance, efficiency, emission and other possible requirements over a wide range of operating conditions and environments, an automotive system may have more input variables than output variables. The input variables to a plant, controlled using actuators, are used to control the output variables of the plant process. For example, a conventional gasoline engine will... Read More

Electrical Impedance Tomography of Nanoengineered Thin Films

3599 – As a means to mitigate the economic burden of structural maintenance and the risk of catastrophic failures, the field of structural health monitoring (SHM) offers a diverse suite of sensing and algorithmic technologies that identify structural degradation so as to facilitate timely repairs. While many SHM techniques have been proposed, the majority relies on correlating changes in global... Read More

Chip-Scale Semiconductor All-Optical Buffer Using Phase Change Memory Technique

3595 – With the current device architectures, slower-speed electronics and complex optical electrical-optical (O/E/O) conversion are required to perform computation. Despite the development of several all-optical logic gate architectures, the lack of a practical optical information storage technology makes sequential binary operations using these devices very difficult and thus severely limits... Read More

Voltage Program Type Pixel Electrode Circuit for AMOLED with Threshold Voltage Compensation

3570 – Amorphous silicon technology has drawn much attention as a competitive candidate for active-matrix organic light emitting display (AM-OLED) due to the benefit of using existing active matrix liquid crystal display (AM-LCD) infrastructures thus maintaining low investment and manufacturing cost. However, amorphous silicon thin film transistor (a-Si:H TFT) has long term stability problems,... Read More

Ultra Low-Cost Defect Protection for Microprocessor Pipelines

3525 – As silicon technologies move into the nanometer regime, there is growing concern for the reliability of transistor devices. Device scaling may aggravate a number of long standing silicon failure mechanisms, and it may introduce a number of new non-trivial failure modes. Unless these reliability concerns are addressed, component yield and lifetime may soon be compromised. ... Read More

Wire-grid Polarizers Fabricated by Web-based Imprinting

3395 – Nanolithography is a crucial step in the field in nanotechnology as it enables the patterning and fabrication of nanostructures. Traditional lithography relies on modification of the physical or chemical properties of a material by electrons or photons to form a pattern. Nanoimprint lithography relies on the direct mechanical deformation of a material to form the patterns and overcomes... Read More

Semi-transparent Electrodes Fabricated by Web-based Imprint and Metal Coating

3403 – Nanolithography is a crucial step in the field in nanotechnology as it enables the patterning and fabrication of nanostructures. Traditional lithography relies on modification of the physical or chemical properties of a material by electrons or photons to form a pattern. Nanoimprint lithography relies on the direct mechanical deformation of a material to form the patterns and overcomes... Read More

Distributed Method for Mapping Sensor Data and Location

3374 – More than 1 million Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes have been deployed in 2005 alone, with an expected increase in deployment approaching 300%. Over 100 OEMs and service providers worldwide currently offer or are developing WSN products. For monitoring and control applications using WSN, the key enabling technology is the automatic localization of every sensor in the network. Sensor... Read More

A Low Loss Rotman Lens for Multibeam Phased Arrays

3375 – Rotman lens has been used to achieve low cost, reliable, multibeam phased arrays. However, the Rotman lens is not an efficient power dividing component because losses of nearly 3 dB may be attributed to the non-perfect focusing of the rays within the lens. In the ideal situation, all power emanating from a particular beam port would be divided and coupled to each array port. However, in... Read More

Field-Repairable Control Logic

3510 – Microprocessor design houses perform extensive validation of their designs before production and release to the marketplace. The success of this process may be important to the survival of the company, as the financial impact of microprocessor bugs can be devastating. Designers address correctness concerns through verification, the process of extensively validating all the functionalities... Read More

Coherent Network-Chirped Pulse Amplifier

3330 – Optical pulse amplifiers usually comprise a laser cavity. Within the laser cavity, a bulk is pumped by a laser diode generating a pulse signal. The pulse signal is amplified by the bulk and an output high energy pulse signal is generated. Such technology is for example used for obtaining high energy laser, such as a megajoule Laser. However, such an optical pulse amplifier suffers the... Read More

A Compact Dual Polarized Multibeam Phased Array

3181 – Recent advances in radar imaging and sensor systems have led to demands for compact, low cost, and robust phased array front ends. For example, radars for automotive adaptive cruise control systems comprise of phased arrays which detect targets in a range of up to 150 meters, while maintaining a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, high performance phased array systems have typically been... Read More

Trapped-Fluid Micromachined Capacitive Acoustic Sensor

3233 – The typical human cochlea operates over a two and a half decade frequency band, from 20 Hz-20 kHz, covers 120 dB of dynamic range, and can distinguish tones which differ by less than 0.5%. Sounds as quiet as 0 dB SPL (20 .mu.Pa RMS) can be heard. Humans are also able to discriminate sounds temporally with spacing as small as 10-20 .mu.s. The human cochlea is small, occupying a volume of... Read More

Vibrating Micromechanical Resonators

3230 – Capacitively transduced vibrating micromechanical resonators have recently been demonstrated with resonant frequencies in the GHz range with Q’s larger than 11,000, making them very attractive as on-chip frequency control elements for oscillators and filters in wireless communications. Although solutions now exist to many of the issues that once hindered deployment of these devices in RF... Read More

Whole Spectrum Fluorescence Detection

3046 – Fluorescence measurements are an invaluable tool for a wide variety of applications in various fields, including chemistry, biomedical science, and clinical research. A primary advantage of measuring fluorescence over absorption is its high selectivity and sensitivity. One of the most important considerations for a fluorescence detection system is to separate fluorescence signals from... Read More

Crossed Field Device

3189 – Although crossed field devices, such as magnetrons and crossed field amplifiers, have been used in a variety of different applications ranging from microwave ovens to military radar equipment, certain technical challenges still exist. For example, some crossed field devices are unable to produce high frequency electromagnetic (EM) emissions at elevated power levels. Generally, very small... Read More

Stretching and Compression of Laser Pulses

3035 – Chirped gratings with variable period, or spatial frequency, are well known in optical science and are widely used for spectral filtering and analysis. However, the main part of the chirped gratings is made in fiber geometry. The use of volume chirped gratings is restricted by the lack of available photosensitive materials which provide high sensitivity, low losses, and stability of... Read More

Wireless Communication Scheme

3030 – Despite the advances made to support wireless sensor communications in biohazardous or harsh conditions, the transmitter electronics required for each sensor device can act as an application limiting factor in a number of ways, including cost, size, power consumption and, thus, operational lifetime. The transmitter, antenna, and other components necessary for wireless communication may... Read More

Frequency Tuning of Vibrating Micro Mechanical Resonators

2887 – The progress of the wireless transceiver industry has been shaped by both cost and size consideration, with RF/IF bandpass filters competing for space and function at the board-level. Methods to appease these restriction have focused on removing the IF filter and placing more of the load on the circuit complexity and performance, which could be detrimental in future expansive endeavors.... Read More

Q-Control at RF Frequency in Micromechanical Mixer-Filters

2841 – The uses of handheld wireless instruments have grown considerably in recent year, with demands for voice, image, and data all on one device. This increasing demand has been the catalyst for miniature technology development and the MEMS research field has responded strongly. Both highly selective filtering and low-loss low-noise mixing are important for the function of communication... Read More

Imprinting of Supported and Free-standing 3-D Micro or Nano Structures

2815 – Nanoimprint lithography is a technique used to create nanoscale patterns, and has been explored in a wide variety of applications. Unlike some of the current photolithography techniques which can achieve small patterns but are cost-inhibitive for mass production, imprinting techniques are simpler, faster, and are less expensive for processing. In addition, imprinting can lend itself to... Read More

Microelectromechanical High Voltage Generator

2795 – The need for high voltage has limited the adoption of many micromachined devices into integrated microsystems. Miniaturized high voltage sources have been proposed but their adoption would require complicated power management and distribution maneuvers. This invention describes a DC powered high voltage generator that neither uses transistors nor requires a clock signal for its... Read More

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