2012 Summer Research

This summer I'm working with this year's capstone award winning team that produced the MuscleMate electromyographic gesture recognition system. We are attempting to bring the device closer to  commercialization. Over the course of a fourth year project it is difficult to even complete one prototype, let alone produce a prototype that could go into mass production. The work that we're undertaking this summer fine tunes the design and is replacing some major subsystems within our overall product.

Capstone Project 2011-2012

An electromyography hardware acquisition unit was designed using commodity components with a view towards future full-scale ASIC integration. Surface electromyography was accomplished at forearm muscle sites using both dry and Ag/AG-CL differential electrodes. The acquired signal was amplified differentially and then processed using a combination of a bandpass filter and a dual notch filter. The filters were implemented using eighth-order switch capacitor filters with a reference clock frequency of 20 kHz. The bandpass filters retained the salient electromyographic frequencies of 20 Hz to 120 Hz. The notch filters were placed at the problematic 60 Hz and 120 Hz powerline interference frequencies. The processed analog signals were digitized using an eight bit analog-to-digital converter and then further processed for frequency content within a microcontroller. Bluetooth was used to transfer data from the microcontroller to a variety of Bluetooth enabled hardware devices including smart phones and laptops. Gesture recognition software implemented using support vector machines interpreted both the muscle activity intensity and the sequencing of muscle activation thereby providing gesture recognition. The system was designed to accommodate up to six sensors but the number of sensors can be increased by multiplexing inputs. Due to the inherent train-ability of support vector machines, the implemented gesture recognition algorithm may be trained for various applications as well as for different users of the implemented system.

New Book: Distributed CMOS Bidirectional Amplifiers

One of my graduating Ph.D. students, Dr. Ziad El-Khatib, along with myself and my colleague Dr. Samy Mahmoud, has a new book. As Springer describes it, the book describes methods to design distributed amplifiers useful for performing circuit functions such as duplexing, paraphrase amplification, phase shifting power splitting and power combiner applications. A CMOS bidirectional distributed amplifier is presented that combines for the first time device-level with circuit-level linearization, suppressing the third-order intermodulation distortion. It is implemented in 0.13μm RF CMOS technology for use in highly linear, low-cost UWB Radio-over-Fiber communication systems.

You will find that the book:

• Describes CMOS distributed amplifiers for optoelectronic applications such as Radio-over-Fiber systems, base station transceivers and picocells;
• Presents most recent techniques for linearization of CMOS distributed amplifiers;
• Includes coverage of CMOS I-V transconductors, as well as CMOS on-chip inductor integration and modeling;
• Includes circuit applications for UWB Radio-over-Fiber networks.

Content Level » Research

Keywords » Analog Circuits - Analog Circuits and Signal Processing - CMOS Bidirectional Distributed Amplifier - CMOS Distributed Amplifier - Distributed Amplifier - Distributed Circuit Design - Linearized CMOS Distributed Amplifier - On-chip Inductor Integration - Radio over Fiber -UWB Radio over Fiber