• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.311-318
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• 2006

Ionizing radiation is a both a natural and man-made phenomena that plays a major role in contemporary applications. The detection of this radiation has evolved over the past several decades from simple observations to precise measurements in space, time, and energy, even in harsh environmental conditions. Tn this paper, we present a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in radiation measurement technology, highlighting the major applications and detector developments.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.11
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• pp.4215-4219
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• 2022

The Cd_0.95Mn_0.05Te_0.98Se_0.02 (CMTS) ingot was grown by the vertical Bridgman technique at low pressure. All wafers showed high resistivity, which suggests potential as a room-temperature semiconductor detector. The resistivity of the CMTS planar detector was 1.47 × 10¹⁰ Ω·cm and mobility lifetime product of electrons was 1.29 × 10^-3 cm²/V. The spectroscopic property with Am-241 and Co-57 was evaluated. The energy resolution about 59.5 keV gamma-ray of Am-241 was 11% and the photo-peak of 122 keV gamma-ray from Co-57 was clearly distinguished. The result shows the first detector-grade CMTS in the world and proves CMTS's potential as a radiation detector operating at room temperature.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.51-57
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• 2002

An electronic personal dosimeter(EPD) with hybrid type preamplifier adopting a semiconductor detector as a radiation detector has been developed, manufactured and test-evaluated. The radiation detection characteristics of this EPD has been performance-tested by using a reference photon radiation field. After several test-irradiations to a $^{137}Cs$ gamma radiation source the radiation detection sensitivity of this EPD appeared to be $3.8\;cps/Gy{\cdot}h^{-1}$. The linearity of radiation response was kept within 8% of the dose equivalent ranges of $10{\mu}Sv{\sim}4Sv$ and the angular dependence was under less than 4% in angles of ${\pm}60^{\circ}$. It was confirmed that the energy response range was in $60{\sim}1,250keV$ given in the ISO standard. This EPD satisfied the international criteria for the EPD in the mechanical and the environmental performance test for 9 test categories according to IEC 61526.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.9
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• pp.287-292
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• 2012

In this paper, design of a conductivity detector using a synchronous demodulation is presented to detect the electric conductivity of liquids with low noise. For the purpose, the detector is constructed by the combination of a carrier generator, conductivity detecting cell, and synchronous demodulator. The signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) of the detector is improved by adjusting the frequency bandwidth of the demodulator, whereby infinitesimal conductivity signals can easily be measured under various noise environments. As an application example, a conductivity detector, which is applied to the air monitoring in a fabrication process of semiconductor chips, is designed using the synchronous demodulation. The validity of the design technique is verified by experiments. Since experimental results are shown to approach the design performance of the detector, the synchronous demodulation proves to be useful to the design of a conductivity detector for measuring the infinitesimal electric conductivity of liquids.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.255-260
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• 2016

In this paper, a full-wave rectifier (FWR) with a simple vibration detector suitable for use with vibrational energy harvesting systems is presented. Conventional active FWRs where active diodes are used to reduce the diode voltage drop and increase the system efficiency are usually powered from the output. Output-powered FWRs exhibit relatively high efficiencies because the comparators used in active diodes are powered from the stable output voltage. Nevertheless, a major drawback is that these FWRs consume power from the output storage capacitor even when the system is not harvesting any energy. To overcome the problem, a technique using a simple vibration detector consisting of a peak detector and a level converter is proposed. The vibration detector detects whether vibrational energy exists or not in the input terminal and disables the comparators when there is no vibrational energy. The proposed FWR with the vibration detector is designed using a $0.35-{\mu}m$ CMOS process. Simulation results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. By using the proposed vibration detector, a decrease in leakage current by approximately 67,000 times can be achieved after the vibration disappears.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.524-533
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• 2017

This paper presents a novel reset scheme for mm-scale sensing systems with stringent volume and area constraints. In such systems, multi-layer structure is required to maximize the silicon area per volume and minimize the system size. The multi-layer structure requires wirebonding connections for power delivery and communication among layers, but the area overhead for wirebonding pads can be significant. The proposed reset scheme exploits already existing power wires and thus does not require additional wires for system-wide reset operation. To implement the proposed reset scheme, a power management unit is designed to impose reset condition, and a reset detector is designed to interpret the reset condition indicated by the power wires. The reset detector uses a coupling capacitor for the initial power-up and a feedback path to hold the developed supply voltage. The prototype reset detector is fabricated in a $180-{\mu}m$ CMOS process, and the measurement results with the prototype mm-scale system confirmed robust reset operation over a wide range of temperatures and voltages.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.1645-1652
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• 2013

In this paper, a new piezoelectric transducer for high performance ultrasonic flaw detector used in non-destructive test (NDT) is implemented. Here, the goals for some major characteristics such as piezoelectric strain constant and electro-mechanical coupling factor are fixed in advanced. Then, the parameters obtained by finite element analysis (FEA) are exploited to design and implement the piezoelectric transducer. As a result of experiments using manufactured samples, it is proved that the new PZT ceramics satisfy the goals very well. It has much improved impedance characteristic at the resonant frequency and generation of ultrasonic signals. In addition, ultrasonic flaw detector with the new transducer provides increased flaw detecting gain than the conventional one. Thus, it is considered that the new flaw detector contributes significantly to improve reliability of the NDT.

• Transactions on Semiconductor Engineering
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.17-20
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• 2024

This paper presents a novel lightweight object detection model tailored for low-powered edge devices, addressing the limitations of traditional resource-intensive computer vision models. Our proposed detector, inspired by the Single Shot Detector (SSD), employs a compact yet robust network design. Crucially, it integrates an 'enhancer block' that significantly boosts its efficiency in detecting smaller objects. The model comprises two primary components: the Light_Block for efficient feature extraction using Depth-wise and Pointwise Convolution layers, and the Enhancer_Block for enhanced detection of tiny objects. Trained from scratch on the Udacity Annotated Dataset with image dimensions of 300x480, our model eschews the need for pre-trained classification weights. Weighing only 5.5MB with approximately 0.43M parameters, our detector achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 27.7% and processed at 140 FPS, outperforming conventional models in both precision and efficiency. This research underscores the potential of lightweight designs in advancing object detection for edge devices without compromising accuracy.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.16-21
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• 2001

A new technique to measure low level capacitance variations of a gyroscope is proposed. It is based on the improved CVC(capacitance to voltage converter) biased by a d.c. current source and the peak detector without any low pass filter. This setup of the measurement system makes it possible to provide higher speed of measurement and wide operation range. The d,c, drift of the conventional CVC and stray capacitances are automatically compensated. Key parameters that affect the performance of the measurement system are illustrated and computer simulation results are presented. The demonstrated measurement system for micromachined gyroscope applications shows a linearity of 0.99972 and a resolution of 0.67fF from 10 fF to 120 fF at 10 kHz.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.255-266
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• 2015

In this paper, a low-complexity and low-power soft output multiple input multiple output (MIMO) symbol detector is proposed for mobile devices with two transmit and two receive antennas. The proposed symbol detector can support both the spatial multiplexing mode and spatial diversity mode in single hardware and shows the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) performance. By applying a multi-stage pipeline structure and using a complex multiplier based on the polar-coordinate, the complexity of the proposed architecture is dramatically decreased. Also, by applying a clock-gating scheme to the internal modules for MIMO modes, the power consumption is also reduced. The proposed symbol detector was designed using a hardware description language (HDL) and implemented using a 65nm CMOS standard cell library. With the proposed architecture, the proposed MIMO detector takes up an area of approximately $0.31mm^2$ with 183K equivalent gates and achieves a 150Mbps throughput. Also, the power estimation results show that the proposed MIMO detector can reduce the power consumption by a maximum of 85% for the various test cases.