Electrical/​Electronics

A method has been developed for continuous cell voltage balancing for rechargeable batteries (e.g. lithium ion batteries). A resistor divider chain is provided that generates a set of voltages representing the ideal cell voltage (the voltage of each cell should be as if the cells were perfectly balanced). An...

Using a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal, physicists have built a working transistor, laying the groundwork for a quantum computer that is smaller than today's silicon-based machines, and may one day function in nanoscale environments. Quantum computers may make it possible to quickly simulate...

A Stanford University research team has designed a high-efficiency charging system that uses magnetic fields to wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils placed several feet apart. The long-term goal of the research is to develop an all-electric highway that...

The frequency to voltage converter analog front end evaluation prototype (F2V AFE) is an evaluation board designed for comparison of different methods of accurately extracting the frequency of a sinusoidal input signal. A configurable input stage is routed to one or several of five separate,...

Faults in wiring systems are a serious concern for the aerospace and aeronautic (commercial, military, and civilian) industries. Circuit failures and vehicle accidents have occurred and have been attributed to faulty wiring created by open and/or short circuits. Often, such circuit failures...

Clock compensation for Gigabit Ethernet is necessary because the clock recovered from the 1.25 Gb/s serial data stream has the potential to be 200 ppm slower or faster than the system clock. The serial data is converted to 10-bit parallel data at a 125 MHz rate on a clock recovered from the...

Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are used in scientific and communications instruments on all spacecraft. As data rates get higher, and as the transition is made from parallel ADC designs to high-speed, serial, low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) designs, the need...

One day in 2010, a Rutgers physicist watched a store employee showcase a kitchen gadget that vacuum-seals food in plastic. The simple concept – an airtight seal around pieces of food – just might apply to his research: developing flexible electronics using lightweight organic semiconductors for...

detect minute amounts of emitted electromagnetic energy. Calibration of these receivers is vital to the accuracy of the measurements. Traditional calibration techniques depend on calibration reference internal to the receivers as reference for the calibration of the observed...

A novel cognitive computing architecture is conceptualized for processing multiple channels of multi-modal sensory data streams simultaneously, and fusing the information in real time to generate intelligent reaction sequences. This unique architecture is capable of...

For the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Command and Data Handling subsystem consisted of several electronic hardware assemblies that were connected with SpaceWire serial links. Electronic hardware would be commanded/controlled and telemetry data was obtained using the SpaceWire links. Prior...

An existing three-channel analog servo loop controller has been redesigned for piezoelectric-transducer-based (PZTbased) etalon control applications to a digital servo loop controller. This change offers several improvements over the previous analog controller, including software control over...