A new type of chemical sensor to detect explosive related compounds has been designed and fabricated with an organic photovoltaic cell as the active element. The detection of chemical molecules is performed by optically exciting the cell while its photovoltaic open-circuit voltage is continuously sampled. Upon exposure to compounds like nitroaromatics, the sensors exhibit a significant increase...

A new circuit is proposed for a steep step-up of the line voltage. It integrates a switched-capacitor (SC) circuit within a boost converter. An SC circuit can achieve any voltage ratio, allowing for a boost of the input voltage to high values. It is unregulated to allow for a very high efficiency. The boost stage has a regulation purpose. It can operate at a relatively low duty cycle, thus avoi...

This work presents the fabrication and investigation of thermoelectric cells based on composite of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and silicone adhesive. The composite contains CNT and silicon adhesive 1∶1 by weight. The current-voltage characteristics and dependences of voltage, current and Seebeck coefficient on the temperature gradient of cell were studied. It was observed that with increase in tempe...

With the dramatic increase in the number of transistors on a chip and the increasing needs for battery-powered applications, low-voltage circuit design techniques have been widely studied in recent year. However, these low supply voltage research efforts have been focused mainly on digital circuits, especially on high density memory circuits. Reported success in achieved high performance low vo...

In recent years, steady improvement on both performance and energy efficiency of LSI systems by virtue of the miniaturization of CMOS process has been harder. However, lower power devices are still demanded, especially in growing IoT market. Although near-/sub-threshold voltage operation is one of promising ultra-low-power techniques, there are critical issues on exponential performance degrada...

Experimental results of an active filter based onchip hybrid voltage converter are described in this paper. The area of the voltage converter is significantly less than the area of a conventional passive filter based DC-DC voltage converter or a low-dropout (LDO) regulator. Hence, the proposed circuit is appropriate for point-of-load voltage regulation for the noise sensitive portions of an int...

This work introduces a new and simple method for adjusting the gain of current mirror. The major advantage of the proposed architecture is that, unlike the conventional variable gain current mirror, it does not need the change of the biasing current to adjust current gain. Therefore, the power dissipation remains constant in all of the gain settings. In addition, the proposed variable gain curr...