Department of Electrical Engineering

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Band to band tunneling in semiconductors fundamentally depends of the complex bandstructure of the semiconductor within its bandgap. In this work, the orientation dependent complex bandstructure of InSb, InAs, GaSb, InP and GaAs, and the orientation dependent probability of band to band tunneling in these materials have been computed using an sp3d5s* tight binding model. These direct bandgap III-V materials are attractive candidates for Tunnel FETs. Comparison of our results with Kane's two-band model commonly used in TCAD simulation, demonstrates the inaccuracies of the latter. Our results will be useful in the design of better performing Tunnel FETs in these materials. © 2012 SPIE.

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Complex bandstructure of direct bandgap III-V semiconductors: Application to tunneling

In this work, we study the phenomenon of Direct Tunneling(DT) in Metal-nGaN Schottky junctions. We first compare tunneling current densities computed using quantum (NEGF) and the semi-classical (WKB) transport formulations, based on a single band parabolic approximation to the complex GaN bandstructure. We then estimate current densities using the WKB transport formulation, with complex bandstructures extracted from the two band k·p and four band k·p theories of the wurtzite GaN. We find that a WKB transport formulation is quite reliable for low bias values. We also find that the use of multi-band k·p models for calculating tunneling effective mass is necessary to estimate tunneling current densities accurately. © 2012 IEEE.

World University root node

2012 International Conference on Emerging Electronics, ICEE 2012

Comparison of direct tunneling in Metal-GaN Schottky junctions using different k·p models for the complex bandstructure

Band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) determines the on-current in tunnel FETs (TFETs). There is a need to review and recalibrate BTBT models used in TCAD tools, which were developed when BTBT was essentially a leakage phenomenon. Here, we consider the process of BTBT through staggered heterojunctions which find application in the design of TFETs having high on-currents. We use a simple 1-D system and compare the estimates of BTBT computed with a semi-classical WKB approach and that obtained from a solution of Schrödinger's equation by a wavefunction matching procedure. We show that the WKB method significantly overestimates the tunneling current through heterojunctions. © 2012 IEEE.

2012 15th International Workshop on Computational Electronics, IWCE 2012

Band to band tunneling in heterojunctions: Semi-classical versus quantum computation

Mechanical systems with rolling constraints form a class of nonholonomic systems. In this paper we derive the dynamic model of a spherical robot, which has been designed and realized in our laboratory, using Lagrangian reduction theory defined on symmetry groups. The reduction is achieved by applying Hamilton's variation principle on a reduced Lagrangian and then imposing the nonholonomic constraints. The equations of motion are in the Euler-Poincaré form and are equivalent to those obtained using Lagrange-d'Alembert's principle. © 2012 IFAC.

IFAC Proceedings Volumes (IFAC-PapersOnline)

The euler-poincaré equations for a spherical robot actuated by a pendulum

We report the first demonstration of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors with Eu 2O

IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices

High-performance metal-insulator-metal capacitors using europium oxide as dielectric

Thermodynamic properties of the troposphere, particularly water vapor content and temperature, change in response to physical mechanisms, including frictional drag, evaporation, transpiration, heat transfer, pollutant emission and flow modification due to terrain. The planetary boundary layer (PBL) is characterized by a greater rate of change in the thermodynamic state of the atmosphere than at higher altitudes in the troposphere. Measurement of these changes, such as large horizontal gradients in water vapor and vertical profiles, provides very important data for improved weather prediction. Sensitivity studies for severe storm prediction indicate that a lack of accurate observations of water vapor densities throughout the lower troposphere limits the forecasting of severe storms. Therefore, measurements of water vapor density using microwave radiometers may help to improve accuracy of severe weather prediction. The HUMidity EXperiment 2011 (HUMEX11) was conducted to validate remote sensing of tropospheric humidity using ground-based scanning Compact Microwave Radiometers for Humidity profiling (CMR-H). A network of microwave radiometers was deployed to measure an atmospheric volume using various scanning patterns near the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) Climate Research Facility. Scientific objectives of HUMEX11 included the measurement of water vapor profiles in the lower troposphere with high vertical and temporal resolution.

Ninth International Symposium on Tropospheric Profiling

Tropospheric humidity retrieval using a ground-based network of scanning compact microwave radiometers

The R-peak detection is crucial in all kinds of electrocardiogram (ECG) applications. However, almost all existing R-peak detectors suffer from the non-stationarity of both QRS morphology and noise. To combat this difficulty, we propose a new R-peak detector, which is based on the new preprocessing technique and an automated peak-finding logic. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the proposed preprocessor with a Shannon energy envelope (SEE) estimator is better able to detect R-peaks in case of wider and small QRS complexes, negative QRS polarities, and sudden changes in QRS amplitudes over that using the absolute value, energy value, and Shannon entropy features. Then we justify the simplicity and robustness of the proposed peak-finding logic using the Hilbert-transform (HT) and moving average (MA) filter. The proposed R-peak detector is validated using the first-channel of the 48 ECG records of the MIT-BITH arrhythmia database, and achieves average detection accuracy of 99.80%, sensitivity of 99.93% and positive predictivity of 99.86%. Various experimental results show that the proposed R-peak detection method significantly outperforms other well-known methods in case of noisy or pathological signals. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Biomedical Signal Processing and Control

A novel method for detecting R-peaks in electrocardiogram (ECG) signal

The lack of spectrum for communication and for research is a bottleneck as far as technology and business development is considered. It is a fact that the availability of useful spectrum is limited by hardware constraints. The studies conducted by the Federal Communications Commission found that that there are many areas of the radio spectrum which are not fully utilized in different geographical areas of the country and FCC recommended locating and utilizing these unused spectrum spaces by other users. This is where spectrum sensing comes into use. From then on different spectrum sensing algorithms were developed. The paper implements four of those major sensing spectrum algorithms in MATLAB-Simulink and also does a performance comparison among them.

Procedia Engineering

Spectrum sensing implementations for software defined radio in simulink

In this paper, we study a set of histogram and higher-order statistical (HOS) features for automatically identifying the presence of large background in the magnitude MR images. The robustness and discriminative power of each individual feature and combining feature sets are investigated using different MR images including brain, cardiac, breast, spine, stomach and noisy images corrupted by Rician noise with different standard deviations, σ={5,10,15,20,25,30,35}. The performances of the identification approaches are evaluated in terms of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. Experimental results obtained on 2544 MR images show that an approach based on the kurtosis and histogram peak ratio (HPR) features outperforms significantly as compared to that of other approaches reported in this work. The proposed approach can be used for selection of distribution model (Rayleigh or Gaussian) for accurate estimation of Rician noise level in MR images having large or little background regions. © 2012 IEEE.

2012 International Conference on Advances in Computing and Communications

A New Framework to Automatically Select Noise Model for Rician Noise Estimation in MR Images

In this paper, we present a constructive method for the design of any order sliding surface using the necessary conditions for the existence of sliding surfaces for single-input affine nonlinear control systems. These conditions are a set of PDEs whose general solution will help in arriving at the sliding surfaces. The constructive design procedure is demonstrated on the cart-beam system to obtain a third-order sliding surface and on the inertia wheel pendulum system to obtain a fourth-order sliding surface. We validate the fourth-order terminal sliding mode control on inertia wheel pendulum with experimental result. © 2011 IFAC.