Power

Power Electronics Applications in Offshore Wind Farms

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KAUST

Advances in power electronics have enabled many renewable energy applications. Wind energy harnessing is very promising and offshore farm installations have grown considerably in the past years. In this seminar we will go through some of the fundamentals of these enabling technologies and their applications. We will also present a simple, reliable, efficient and cost-effective concept applied to parallel connection of offshore wind turbines.

Advances in Microelectromechanical Digital Circuit Design: Low Power Computation, Sensing and Beyond

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KAUST

Electromechanical switches were the core elements of the very first digital computers in early 20th century. While these switches were later replaced by the smaller, faster and more reliable "transistor" technology, they found a new life following the development of nanofabrication tools and Micro-electromechannical Systems (MEMS). In this seminar we will explore the most recent advances in the field of MEMS-based digital circuit and sensor design. We also examine the application of MEMS switches and resonators in building the most important blocks of a digital system, namely adders, multipliers, data converters, sequential and combinational complex logic, and discuss the future of this technology in the beyond-CMOS era.