_____________________________ Charlie Han - 1st Place Undergrad Fairleigh Dickinson University "Automotive Engine Coolant Service Monitoring System (ECSMS)" Engine coolant is a vital fluid in any internal combustion engine, however it is one of the most neglected systems in the vehicle. Even the newest domestic automobiles lack service indicators for engine coolant. If equipped, they would inform the owner to service the fluid before any serious damage occurs from electrolysis and metal breakdown. The proposed ECSMS will essentially utilize sensors to monitor the pH of the coolant mixture, as well as the DC voltage of the coolant with respect to ground. By monitoring the pH and voltage, the sensors can notify the owner when unsafe coolant conditions are present. Ultimately, using the ECSMS in the vehicle will prevent excessive corrosion and accelerated electrolysis, enabling automobile owners to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars by not having to replace heater cores, expensive radiators, and water pumps. _____________________________ TIAS KUNDU - 1st Place Grad New Jersey Institute of Technology "Reliability of Thin Oxides Grown on Deuterium Implanted Silicon Substrate" Investigated the reliability of gate oxide with deuterium incorporated at the Si/SiO2 interface through low energy ion implantation in the silicon substrate before thin oxide growth. Investigation was carried out on gate oxide layers with thickness in the range of 4nm in polycrystalline Si-SiO2-Si metal/oxide/ semiconductor capacitors. Implantation of deuterium can be carried out at different energies and at different doses. Deuterium implantation at a dose of 1 x 1014/cm2 at 25 Kev showed improved breakdown characteristics. Investigations are carried out to study the effect of the implantation on NMOS transistors. _____________________________ John Carcich - 2nd Place Undergrad Fairleigh Dickinson University "In-circuit Continuity Tester" The aim of this project is the design of a smart alternative to using an ohmmeter for routine wiring checks. The in-circuit continuity tester is specially designed to check the wiring of experimental breadboards and populated printed circuit cards. What makes this tester unique is its ability to ignore a low-resistance alternate path through a component if an open connection is found. The tester can be adjusted to ignore a resistance as low as one ohm or less. This feature is useful if the breadboard contains many low-resistance components such as inductors or relay coils. Only a true connection from one component to another will produce a tone. The tester also features a voltage alarm circuit that is triggered when a voltage source, such as a charged capacitor is encountered. A tester of this kind is useful, since existing digital multimeters feature audible continuity checkers which may indicate continuity through resistances as high as seventy ohms. _____________________________ Jingxuan Liu - 2nd Place Grad New Jersey Institute of Technology "Forward Resource Reservation for the OBS-enabled WDM Network" This paper addresses the latency reduction problem for the Optical Burst Switching (OBS) enabled Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. Specifically, we propose a Forward Resource Reservation (FRR) scheme to reduce the data burst delay at the edge nodes of OBS systems. We also present an aggressive reservation strategy to deliver a significant performance improvement with controllable system cost. Theoretical analysis is conducted to evaluate the system performance in terms of the latency reduction improvement and the bandwidth overhead, showing that by reserving resources in an aggressive manner, our FRR system yields a significant delay reduction for time-critical traffic, while maintaining the bandwidth overhead within limits. Simulation results have validated our discussions. _____________________________ William Gannon - 3rd Place Undergrad Fairleigh Dickinson University "Smart Cars" Every year there are millions of auto accidents, costing a lot of money due to damage and thousands of lives are lost. These accidents are caused due to human error and carelessness. If we could somehow minimize human errors during everyday driving we could drastically reduce the number of accidents and fatalities. This can be done through the use of robotic technology to control the vehicle and make the roads safer. Different techniques can be used to simulate the human sense of sight and a vehicle can be completely controlled by the computer eliminating the need for humans to operate the vehicle. Besides saving lives, benefits of such a system would be the reduction in traffic congestion, increasing the capacity of freeways, reducing the need for expanding highways, and also reducing fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. _____________________________ Amin Katouzian - 3rd Place Grad Fairleigh Dickinson University "Speech Recognition Using Neural Networks" In this project, I have used neural networks in order to recognize single words. At the beginning, the project had been defined just for ten single words and depended on recognizing the speaker's voice but by using filter banks and implementing a new and simple method for separating speech signal from silence, the system could recognize more than 200 single words and it became independent of the speaker's voice. In the features extraction part, both Fourier algorithms and filter banks have been used and frequency domain criteria were changed slightly. To take advantage of the human hearing system, instead of the Hertz criteria the Bark transformation was performed. _____________________________ Purushothaman Srinivasan - Honorable Mention Grad New Jersey Institute of Technology "Effect of Reverse Bias Voltage on Hot Electron Stressed MOSFETs" Hot carrier degradation is one of the major reliability issues in the silicon industry and this research aims to understand and reduce this effect and increase the lifetime of the transistors. The aim of the paper is to understand the effect of the reverse bias voltage on the hot carrier induced high field electron injection on MOSFETs. This effect is being carried out as a measure of device threshold voltage and transconductance. Due to this effect, the threshold voltage and transconductance value increases along with interface trap density. When a reverse bias voltage is being applied to source and the drain, the induced depletion layer between the p and n junctions of the transistor, protects the device from excessive stressing of the device thereby increasing the reliability of the transistor.