Ion channels, like most other proteins, are designed to move. To preserve ionic gradients across cell membranes , they are usually closed and open their gates only when called upon to do electric work. Ionic fluxes through open channels are exploited by cells for a variety of tasks, including the generation of explosive action potentials in excitable cells. A singular feature of the ion channel...

The complexity of analog VLSI systems is often limited by the number of pins on a chip rather than by the die area. Currently, many analog parameters and biases are stored off-chip. Moving parameter storage on-chip could save pins and allow us to create complex programmable analog systems. In this paper, we present a design for an on-chip nonvolatile analog memory cell that can be configured in...

The bias stress effect in pentacene organic thinfilm transistors has been investigated. The transistors utilize a thin gate dielectric based on an organic self-assembled monolayer and thus can be operated at low voltages. The bias stress-induced threshold voltage shift has been analyzed for different drain-source voltages. By fitting the timedependent threshold voltage shift to a stretched expo...

To meet the gate leakage specifications in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), an intensive search is being conducted for alternative gate stack materials. Most of the studies have focused on basic material properties, but very little effort has been directed towards quantifying and understanding the effect of post metallization annealing (PMA) on the electrical prop...

Power consumption is a growing problem in modern digital design, and due to the quadratic relationship between power consumption and supply voltage, significant low-power research has focused on reducing the supply voltage. Adaptive gate-level voltage scaling (AGVS) is a novel design technique which dynamically adjusts the supply voltage at the gate-level to maximize energy efficiency. We propo...

Voltage-dependent K(+) (Kv) channels gate open in response to the membrane voltage. To further our understanding of how cell membrane voltage regulates the opening of a Kv channel, we have studied the protein interfaces that attach the voltage-sensor domains to the pore. In the crystal structure, three physical interfaces exist. Only two of these consist of amino acids that are co-evolved acros...

A modeling approach to study advanced floating body Z-RAM memory cells is developed. In particular, the scalability of the cells is investigated. First, a Z-RAM cell based on a 50 nm gate length double-gate structure corresponding to state of the art technology is studied. A bi-stable behavior essential for Z-RAM operation is observed even in fully depleted structures. It is demonstrated that b...