Programmable Prototype Research Articles

3D Printed Micro‐Electrochemical Energy Storage Devices

AbstractMicro‐electrochemical energy storage devices (MEESDs) including micro‐supercapacitors (MSCs), micro‐batteries (MBs), and metal‐ion hybrid micro‐supercapacitors (MIHMSCs) are critical components of electronic systems, especially in the expanding field of the Internet of Things (IoT). In recent years, three‐dimensional (3D) printing techniques also known as additive manufacturing (AM) techniques have emerged as promising approaches to overcome the limitations of conventional fabrication procedures. Employing advanced manufacturing techniques to fabricate MEESDs offers potential benefits, including mass production and programmable prototyping. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements in the applications of 3D printing techniques for MEESDs such as MBs, MSCs, and MIHMSCs. First, this review discusses the fundamental of micro/nano energy storage devices by 3D printing technology. Further, we examine the critical properties of the printable inks used in these processes. We also highlighted the current developments in 3D printing‐based MEESDs including various types of MBs, pseudocapacitive and electrochemical double‐layer‐based MSCs, and a range of MIHMSCs. Additionally, this review addresses the challenges and future prospects of 3D printing based MEESDs, including material limitations, printing resolution, manufacturing scalability, mechanical properties, and cost. Overall, this review presents a unique and valuable contribution by providing a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements in 3D printing based MEESDs.

VirtLAB: A Low-Cost Platform for Electronics Lab Experiments.

The recent SARS-CoV2 pandemic has put a great challenge on university courses. Electronics teaching requires real laboratory experiences for students, which cannot be realized if access to physical infrastructures is prohibited. A possible solution would be to distribute to students, at home, electronics equipment suitable for laboratory experiments, but no reasonable product is currently available off-the-shelf. In this paper, the design and development of a very-low-cost experimental board tailored to these needs is presented. It contains both programmable prototyping circuitry based on a microcontroller and an FPGA and a set of measurement instruments, similar to the ones found on a typical lab desk, such as a digital storage oscilloscope, multimeter, analog signal generator, logic state analyzer and digital pattern generator. A first board, suitable for analog and digital electronics experiments, has been designed and manufactured, and is described in this paper. The board has been successfully used in master’s degrees and PhD courses.

New silicon revives an old algorithm: Optimo chip breaks up big optimization problems into bite-size bits - [News

Engineers at Georgia Tech say they've come up with a programmable prototype chip that efficiently solves a huge class of optimization problems, including those needed for neural network training, 5G network routing, and MRI image reconstruction.

Tool wear monitoring of a retrofitted CNC milling machine using artificial neural networks

Predictive maintenance, in contrast to preventive maintenance, raises the manufacturing quality and reliability, where the integrity is monitored continuously in service. To prevent cost intensive reengineering of outdated production plants, a retrofitting approach is presented to enable older machines towards Industry 4.0. The tool wear of a CNC milling machine is monitored using a programmable prototyping platform equipped with built-in senors. An artificial neural network is trained with acceleration data in order to classify the tool state. This demonstrative example proves the feasibility of retrofitting older machines, supported by the strongly growing field of computational intelligence and big data analysis.

Classical emulation of a quantum computer

This paper describes a novel approach to emulate a universal quantum computer with a wholly classical system, one that uses a signal of bounded duration and amplitude to represent an arbitrary quantum state. The signal may be of any modality (e.g. acoustic, electromagnetic, etc.) but this paper will focus on electronic signals. Individual qubits are represented by in-phase and quadrature sinusoidal signals, while unitary gate operations are performed using simple analog electronic circuit devices. In this manner, the Hilbert space structure of a multi-qubit quantum state, as well as a universal set of gate operations, may be fully emulated classically. Results from a programmable prototype system are presented and discussed.

Prototyping Hardware and Software Environment for Teaching Digital Circuit Design

In the paper, we present our latest achievements and experience in undergraduate teaching of digital circuits, integrated circuits and embedded systems by exploiting our prototyping hardware and software environment. The hardware environment is based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) modules that provide sufficient flexibility and support a broad scope of digital design applications. In addition, the designed software environment supports user-friendly hardware verification of the logic circuits implemented on the hardware system. We describe some typical applications and student projects implemented on the programmable prototyping system.