Increasing the Efficiency and Level of Environmental Safety of Pro-Environmental City Heat Supply Technologies by Low Power Nuclear Plants

In connection with the current prospect of decarbonization of coal energy through the use of small nuclear power plants (SNPPs) at existing TPPs as heat sources for heat supply to municipal heating networks, there is a technological need to improve heat supply schemes to increase their environmental friendliness and efficiency. The paper proves the feasibility of using the heat-feeding mode of ASHPs for urban heat supply by heating the network water with steam taken from the turbine. The ratio of electric and thermal power of a “nuclear” combined heat and power plant is given. The advantage of using a heat pump, which provides twice as much electrical power with the same heat output, is established. Taking into account that heat in these modes is supplied with different potential, the energy efficiency was used to compare these options. To increase the heat supply capacity, a scheme with the use of a high-pressure heater in the backpressure mode and with the heating of network water with hot steam was proposed. Heat supply from ASHPs is efficient and environmentally friendly even in the case of significant remoteness of heat consumers.

An Ultra-Low-Power Embedded EEPROM for Passive RFID Tags

An ultra-low-power,256-bit EEPROM is designed and implemented in a Chartered 0.35μm EEPROM process. The read state power consumption is optimized using a new sense amplifier structure and an optimized control circuit. Block programming/erasing is achieved using an improved control circuit. An on silicon program/erase/read access time measurement design is given. For a power supply voltage of 1.8V,an average power consumption of 68 and 0.6μA for the program/erase and read operations,respectively,can be achieved at 640kHz.

A 1.45GHz LNA with Low Power,Wide Variable Gain Range and Ultra Low Noise Degradation

A LNA with a novel variable gain solution is presented.Compared with the conventional variable gain solutions of LNA,which have more noise degradations when in low gain mode,this solution gives about 25dB variable gain range in 3dB steps,which would cause ultra low noise figure degradation by 0 3～0 5dB.In addition,extra power consumption is not needed by this solution compared with other solutions.

A Novel Ultra Low Power High Performance Atto-Ampere CMOS Current Mirror with Enhanced Bandwidth

A novel CMOS atto-ampere current mirror （AACM） is proposed which reaches the minimum yet reported current range of 0.4 aA. Operation of this circuit is based on the source voltage modulation instead of the conventionally used gate voltage modulation which interestingly prevents usage of commonly required voltage shifting in those circuits. The proposed circuit has a simple structure prohibiting large chip area consumption which consumes extremely low power of 1.5 μW. It is thus the best choice for ultra low power low voltage （ULPLV） applications. By using a very simple frequency compensation technique, its bandwidth is widened to 15.8 kHz. Simulation results in SMIC （Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation） 0.18 μm CMOS technology with Hspice are presented to demonstrate the validation of the proposed current mirror.

Low-noise,low-power-consumption seafloor vector magnetometer

The seafloor vector magnetometer is an effective tool for marine geomagnetic surveys and seafloor magnetotelluric(MT)detection.However,the noise,power consumption,cost,and volume characteristics of existing seafloor vector magnetometers are insufficient for practical use.Therefore,a low-noise,low-power-consumption seafloor vector magnetometer that can be used for data acquisition of deep-ocean geomagnetic vector components is developed and presented.A seafloor vector magnetometer mainly consists of a fluxgate sensor,data acquisition module,acoustic release module,glass sphere,frame,burn-wire release,and anchor.A new low-noise data acquisition module and a fluxgate sensor greatly reduce power consumption.Furthermore,compact size is achieved by integrating an acoustic telemetry module and replacing the acoustic release with an external burn-wire release.The new design and magnetometer characteristics reduce the volume of the instrument and the cost of hardware considerably,thereby improving the integrity and deployment efficiency of the equipment.Theoretically,it can operate for 90 days underwater at a maximum depth of 6000 m.The seafloor vector magnetometer was tested in the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea and obtained high-quality geomagnetic data.The deep-water environment facilitates magnetic field data measurements,and the magnetometer has an approximate noise level of 10 pT/rt(Hz)@1 Hz,a peak-to-peak value error of 0.2 nT,and approximate power consumption of 200 mW.The fluxgate sensor can measure the magnetic field in the lower frequency band and realize geomagnetic field measurements over prolonged periods.

Soft transmission of 3D video for low power and low complexity scenario

Thanks to the rapid development of naked-eye 3D and wireless communication technology,3D video related applications on mobile devices have attracted a lot of attention.Nevertheless,the time-varying characteristics of the wireless channel is very challenging for conventional source-channel coding based transmission strategy.Also,the high complexity of source-channel coding based transmission scheme is undesired for low power mobile terminals.An advanced transmission scheme named Softcast was proposed to achieve efficient transmission performance for 2D image/video.Unfortunately,it cannot be directly applied to wireless 3D video transmission with high efficiency.This paper proposes a more efficient soft transmission scheme for 3D video with a graceful quality adaptation within a wide range of channel Signal-to-Noise Ratio(SNR).The proposed method first extends the linear transform to 4 dimensions with additional view dimension to eliminate the view redundancy,and then metadata optimization and chunk interleaving are designed to further improve the transmission performance.Meanwhile,a synthesis distortion based chunk discard strategy is developed to improve the overall 3D video quality under the condition of limited bandwidth.The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the 3D video transmission performance over the wireless channel for low power and low complexity scenarios.

Improved RF power performance of InAlN/GaN HEMT by optimizing rapid thermal annealing process for high-performance low-voltage terminal applications

Improved radio-frequency(RF)power performance of InAlN/GaN high electron mobility transistor(HEMT)is achieved by optimizing the rapid thermal annealing(RTA)process for high-performance low-voltage terminal applications.By optimizing the RTA temperature and time,the optimal annealing condition is found to enable low parasitic resistance and thus a high-performance device.Besides,compared with the non-optimized RTA HEMT,the optimized one demonstrates smoother ohmic metal surface morphology and better heterojunction quality including the less degraded heterojunction sheet resistance and clearer heterojunction interfaces as well as negligible material out-diffusion from the barrier to the channel and buffer.Benefiting from the lowered parasitic resistance,improved maximum output current density of 2279 mA·mm^(-1)and higher peak extrinsic transconductance of 526 mS·mm^(-1)are obtained for the optimized RTA HEMT.In addition,due to the superior heterojunction quality,the optimized HEMT shows reduced off-state leakage current of 7×10^(-3)mA·mm^(-1)and suppressed current collapse of only 4%,compared with those of 1×10^(-1)mA·mm^(-1)and 15%for the non-optimized one.At 8 GHz and V_(DS)of 6 V,a significantly improved power-added efficiency of 62%and output power density of 0.71 W·mm^(-1)are achieved for the optimized HEMT,as the result of the improvement in output current,knee voltage,off-state leakage current,and current collapse,which reveals the tremendous advantage of the optimized RTA HEMT in high-performance low-voltage terminal applications.

Study of a GaAs MESFET Model with Ultra-Low Power Consumption

A model of enhancement mode GaAs MESFET (EFET) for low power consumption and low noise applications has been obtained by using a small signal equivalent circuit whose component values are derived from the physical parameters and the bias condition. The dependence of the RF performance and DC power consumption on physical, material and technological parameters of EFET is also studied. The optimum range of the physical parameters is given which is useful for the design of active device of ultra low power consumption MMIC.

Ultra-Low Power Pipeline Structure Exploiting Noncritical Stage with Circuit-Level Timing Speculation

With the increase of the clock frequency and silicon integration, power aware computing has become a critical concern in the design of the embedded processor and system-on-chip （SoC）. Dynamic voltage scaling （DVS） is an effective method for low-power designs. However, traditional DVS methods have two deficiencies. First, they have a conservative safety margin which is not necessary for most of the time. Second, they are exclusively concerned with the critical stage and ignore the significant potential free slack time of the noncritical stage. These factors lead to a large amount of power waste. In this paper, a novel pipeline structure with ultra-low power consumption is proposed. It cuts off the safety margin and takes use of the noncritical stages at the same time. A prototype pipeline is designed in 0.13 μm technology and analyzed. The result shows that a large amount of energy can be saved by using this structure. Compared with the fixed voltage case, 50% of the energy can be saved, and with respect to the traditional adaptive voltage scaling design, 37.8% of the energy can be saved.

Collaborative robust dispatch of electricity and carbon under carbon allowance trading market

The launch of the carbon-allowance trading market has changed the cost structure of the power industry.There is an asynchronous coupling mechanism between the carbon-allowance-trading market and the day-ahead power-system dispatch.In this study,a data-driven model of the uncertainty in the annual carbon price was created.Subsequently,a collaborative,robust dispatch model was constructed considering the annual uncertainty of the carbon price and the daily uncertainty of renewable-energy generation.The model is solved using the column-and-constraint generation algorithm.An operation and cost model of a carbon-capture power plant(CCPP)that couples the carbon market and the economic operation of the power system is also established.The critical,profitable conditions for the economic operation of the CCPP were derived.Case studies demonstrated that the proposed low-carbon,robust dispatch model reduced carbon emissions by 2.67%compared with the traditional,economic,dispatch method.The total fuel cost of generation decreases with decreasing,conservative,carbon-price-uncertainty levels,while total carbon emissions continue to increase.When the carbon-quota coefficient decreases,the system dispatch tends to increase low-carbon unit output.This study can provide important guidance for carbon-market design and the low-carbon-dispatch selection strategies.

Ultra-Low Power Small Size 5.8 GHz RF Transceiver Design for WiMAX/4G Applications

A state of the art ultra-low power small sized transceiver design has been proposed.This device consists of four blocks,including a frequency synthesizer(FS),a crystal oscillator(XO),transmitter and receiver attached with an antenna.It has been seen that wireless information technology and systems have played a vital role in the transformation of society in different aspects of life.Mobile wireless communications including WiMAX/4G have attracted researchers and developers.WiMAX/4G applications need a transceiver that can be used in the worst channel conditions,but with low power consumption and low input voltage at the 5.8 GHz frequency.The proposed transceiver operates on 1.2 V.The operating frequency,noise figure(NF)and receiver gain are 5.8 GHz,4.0 dB and 90 dB respectively.It is a highly compatible transceiver with all the 4G technologies.Implementation details and results have revealed that the proposed transceiver is much more efficient than the previously proposed transceivers in literature.

Ultra-Low Power Designing for CMOS Sequential Circuits

Power consumption is the bottleneck of system performance. Power reduction has become an important issue in digital circuit design, especially for high performance portable devices (such as cell phones, PDAs, etc.). Many power reduction techniques have also been proposed from the system level down to the circuit level. High-speed computation has thus become the expected norm from the average user, instead of being the province of the few with access to a powerful mainframe. Power must be added to the portable unit, even when power is available in non-portable applications, the issue of low-power design is becoming critical. Thus, it is evident that methodologies for the design of high-throughput, low-power digital systems are needed. Techniques for low-power operation are shown in this paper, which use the lowest possible supply voltage coupled with architectural, logic style, circuit, and technology optimizations. The threshold vol-tages of the MTCMOS devices for both low and high Vth are constructed as the low threshold Vth is approximately 150 - 200 mv whereas the high threshold Vth is managed by varying the thickness of the oxide Tox. Hence we are using different threshold voltages with minimum voltages and hence considered this project as ultra-low power designing.

Assessment of Axial Power Peaking Factors in GHARR-1 LEU Core: A Decadal Simulation Analysis

This study aims to thoroughly investigate the axial power peaking factors (PPF) within the low-enriched uranium (LEU) core of the Ghana Research Reactor-1 (GHARR-1). This study uses advanced simulation tools, like the MCNPX code for analysing neutron behavior and the PARET/ANL code for understanding power variations, to get a clearer picture of the reactor’s performance. The analysis covers the initial six years of GHARR-1’s operation and includes projections for its whole 60-year lifespan. We closely observed the patterns of both the highest and average PPFs at 21 axial nodes, with measurements taken every ten years. The findings of this study reveal important patterns in power distribution within the core, which are essential for improving the safety regulations and fuel management techniques of the reactor. We provide a meticulous approach, extensive data, and an analysis of the findings, highlighting the significance of continuous monitoring and analysis for proactive management of nuclear reactors. The findings of this study not only enhance our comprehension of nuclear reactor safety but also carry significant ramifications for sustainable energy progress in Ghana and the wider global context. Nuclear engineering is essential in tackling global concerns, such as the demand for clean and dependable energy sources. Research on optimising nuclear reactors, particularly in terms of safety and efficiency, is crucial for the ongoing advancement and acceptance of nuclear energy.

A Rapid Low Power Ultra-Violet Light-Assisted Bacterial Sensor for Coliform Determination

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) particle-incorporated Prussian blue (PB) sensor for the detection and inactivation of Escherichia coli (E. coli) is developed in this study. The system requires low power ultra-violet (UV) light to photoactivate TiO2 particles and change of signal response is measured immediately upon irradiation using cyclic voltammetry. The generation of free radical species (OH.) and H2O2 from the oxidation of water by the hole (h+) are the main components which cause destruction of cell membrane and eventually result in the inactivation of cell. Our study also shows direct oxidation of cells by h+ as one of the mechanisms for cell inactivation due to the close contact between TiO2 particles and E. coli cells. Highly attractive features of this unique sensor include its ability to be regenerated and reused for at least three times without the use of harsh chemicals, good reproducibility and its specificity in bacteria sensing when tested against organic contaminants, which potentially reduce the operation cost when incorporated into water disinfection system. Its superior performance in detection of total coliform without additional steps of sample treatment is also demonstrated in river water. TiO2 particle-incorporated PB membrane sensor exhibits signal response with higher current output compared to PB-TiO2 coated screen printed carbon electrode (SPCE) due to its porous structure and higher surface area, suggesting its potential development into a powerful and low cost contamination monitoring tool.

Re-understanding and Thinking about Environmental Impact of Coal-fired Power Plants under Ultra-low Emission

From the perspective of development background,concepts and related policies of ultra-low emission,according to work practice,some issues and difficulties that need to be paid attention to in the environmental impact assessment of ultra-low-emission thermal power projects were discussed from the aspects of evaluation criteria,evaluation grade and scope,pollution control technical lines,environmental benefit accounting,and total emission control,and corresponding recommendations were put forward.

Ultra-Low Power, Low Phase Noise 10 GHz LC VCO in the Subthreshold Regime

A new design for an ultra-low power, low phase noise differential 10 GHz LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) which is biased in the subthreshold regime, is presented in the 0.18 μm CMOS process, for the first time. The designed circuit topology is an NMOS only cross-coupled LC-tank VCO which has an extra symmetric centre tapped inductor between the source ends of the cross-coupled transistors. Using this inductor leads to an improvement of the phase noise of VCO about 3.5 dB. At the supply voltage of 0.46 V, the output phase noise is -107.8 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency from the carrier frequency of 10.53 GHz, so that the dc power consumption is only 0.346 mW. Tuning range is between 10.53 GHz to 11.35 GHz which is 7.5% and the figure of merit is -193.8 dB, which this result shows that this is the first VCO design in the subthreshold regime at this frequency. This VCO can be used for multi-standard wireless LAN communication protocols 802.11a/b/g easily by a frequency division of 2 or 4 respectively.

Synthesis Scheme for Low Power Designs Under Timing Constraints

To minimize the power consumption with resources operating at multiple voltages a time-constrained algorithm is presented.The input to the scheme is an unscheduled data flow graph (DFG),and timing or resource constraints.Partitioning is considered with scheduling in the proposed algorithm as multiple voltage design can lead to an increase in interconnection complexity at layout level.That is,in the proposed algorithm power consumption is first reduced by the scheduling step,and then the partitioning step takes over to decrease the interconnection complexity.The time-constrained algorithm has time complexity of O(n 2),where n is the number of nodes in the DFG.Experiments with a number of DSP benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm achieves the power reduction under timing constraints by an average of 46 5%.

Low Power Polarity Conversion Based on the Whole Annealing Genetic Algorithm

For an n-variable logic function,the power dissipation and area of the REED-MULLER （RM） circuit corresponding to each polarity are different. Based on the propagation algorithm of signal probability,the decomposition algorithm of a multi-input XOR/AND gate,and the multiple segment algorithm of polarity conversion,this paper successfully applies the whole annealing genetic algorithm （WAGA） to find the best polarity of an RM circuit. Through testing eight large-scale circuits from the Microelectronics Center North Carolina （MCNC） Benchmark, the SYNOPSYS synthesis results show that the RM circuits corresponding to the best polarity found using the proposed algorithm attain average power,area,and max delay savings of 77.2% ,62.4% ,and 9.2% respectively,compared with those under polarity 0.

Designing Leakage-Tolerant and Noise-Immune Enhanced Low Power Wide OR Dominos in Sub-70nm CMOS Technologies

Two new circuit techniques to suppress leakage currents and enhance noise immunity while decreasing the active power are proposed. Eight-input OR gate circuits constructed with these techniques are simulated using 45nm BSIM4 SPICE models in HSPICE. The simulation results show that the proposed circuits effectively lower the active power, reduce the total leakage current, and enhance speed under similar noise immunity conditions. The active power of the two proposed circuits can be reduced by up to 8. 8% and 11.8% while enhancing the speed by 9.5% and 13.7% as compared to dual Vt domino OR gates with no gating stage. At the same time,the total leakage currents are also reduced by up to 80.8% and 82.4% ,respectively. Based on the simulation results,the state of the evaluation node is also discussed to reduce the total leakage currents of dual Vt dominos.

Low Power Design Orienting 384×288 Snapshot Infrared Readout Integrated Circuits

This paper presents a low power design for a 384 x 288 infrared （IR） readout integrated circuit （ROIC）. For the character of IR detector （ ro ≈ 100kΩ, Iint ≈ 100nA）, a novel pixel structure called quad-share buffered direct injection （QSBDI） is proposed and realized. In QSBDI,four neighbor pixels share one buffered amplifier,which creates high injection efficiency, a stable bias, good FPN performance, and low power usage. This ROIC also supports two integration modes （integration then readout and integration while readout）, two selectable gains, and four window readout modes. A test 128 × 128 ROIC is designed,fabricated,and tested. The test results show that the ROIC has good linearity. The peak to peak variance of the sub array is about 10mV. The power of pixel stage is only lmW,and the total power dissipation is 37mW at a working frequency of 4MHz.