Daniele Caviglia

University of Genoa | UNIGE · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Navale, Elettrica, Elettronica e delle Telecomunicazioni (DITEN)

Neural recording systems play a crucial role in comprehending the intricacies of the brain and advancing treatments for neurological disorders. Within these systems, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) serves as a fundamental component, converting the electrical signals from the brain into digital data that can be further processed and analyzed b...

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A low-power, low-voltage universal multi-mode Gm-C filter using a 180 nm TSMC technology node is presented in this paper. The proposed filter employs only three transconductance operational amplifiers (OTAs) operating in the sub-threshold region with a supply voltage of 0.5 V, resulting in a power consumption of 32 nW. Moreover, without additional...

This paper presents an ultra-low-power, low-voltage universal multi-mode Gm-C filter, designed in CMOS technology. The proposed filter uses only three transconductance operational amplifiers (OTAs) operating in a sub-threshold region: this leads to a significant reduction in energy consumption compared to previous solutions reported in the literatu...

An improved spectral coefficient method based on Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind is employed to solve the vector radiative transfer equation under the assumption of parallel-plane atmosphere and Rayleigh scattering. The solver is extended to consider a Lambertian surface at the bottom of the atmosphere. The computational properties of the...

This article aims to sketch the figure of Alessandro De Gloria, a professor who dedicated his entire life, with generosity and enthusiasm, to engineering and scientific research. He designed one of the first chips in an Italian university and then a set of digital system architectures that contributed to shaping the then-fledgling field of micropro...

This paper presents a method for sea monitoring based on a low-cost 24 GHz off-the-shelf FMCW radar and an embedded Raspberry Pi PC. The technique relies upon the use of range-Doppler maps, which are obtained through a 2D FFT processing of the acquired scattered data. The resulting insights may offer new possibilities for monitoring and understandi...

Monitoring rainfall is becoming increasingly important due to the impacts of climate change. In this context, opportunistic sensing based on satellite microwave links (SMLs) is gaining significant interest for its potential to provide real-time, low-cost, and valuable information. In this work, we deployed a network of 26 SML sensors over a survey...

"Smart Embedded Systems: Advances and Applications" is a comprehensive guide that demystifies the complex world of embedded technology. The book journeys through a wide range of topics from healthcare to energy management, autonomous robotics, and wireless communication, showcasing the transformative potential of intelligent embedded systems in the...

The realm of low power wide area network (LPWAN) has revolutionized access to different varieties of applications over the Internet. Some of these technologies include Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT), and Sigfox, which enable long-range transmission over extremely low power consumption. However, such technologies fa...

The energy consumption of a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system represents a large amount of the total for a commercial or civic building. In order to optimize the system performance and to increase the comfort of people living or working in a building, it is necessary to monitor the relevant parameters of the circulating air f...

The realm of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) has a paramount influence on the way we work and live. For instance, real-time applications and rapid packet transiting for long-range have now come into practice that was previously considered mysterious. However, euphoria becomes a problem when it comes to security considerations, as low-power devi...

In the climate change scenario the world is facing, extreme weather events can lead to increasingly serious disasters. To improve managing the consequent risks, there is a pressing need to have real-time systems that provide accurate monitoring and possibly forecasting which could help to warn people in the affected areas ahead of time and save the...

Owing to the geographically scattered end devices ( EDs ) in long-range wide area networks (LoRaWAN), devices that combat challenging cyber threats and attacks are of critical significance. In this perspective, LoRa Alliance® is continuously evolving the security of LoRaWAN and recently introduced a new version i.e., LoRaWAN 1.1x that is featured...

In recent years, opportunistic rainfall sensing exploiting Commercial Microwave Links (CML) has become popular for real-time monitoring of rainfall events. Among such systems, Satellite-to-earth Microwave Links (SML) are gaining great interest. An important information to extract from the collected data is whether or not an SML observation correspo...

In this paper, an approach for ground-moving target classification with an FMCW radar is proposed. In particular, data are collected using a low-cost 24 GHz off-the-shelf FMCW radar, combined with an embedded Raspberry Pi device for data acquisition and processing. An FFT-based processing scheme is then applied to obtain a sequence of range-Doppler...

The realm of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) has a paramount influence on the way we work and live. For instance, real-time applications and rapid packet transiting for long-range have now come into practice that was previously considered mysterious. However, euphoria becomes a problem when it comes to security considerations, as low-power devi...

Machine learning techniques aim to mimic the human ability to automatically learn how to perform tasks through training examples. They have proven capable of tasks such as prediction, learning and adaptation based on experience and can be used in virtually any scientific application, ranging from biomedical, robotic, to business decision applicatio...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has disrupted the IT landscape drastically, and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one specification that enables these IoT devices to have access to the Internet. Former security analyses have suggested that the gateways in LoRaWAN in their current state are susceptible to a wide variety of malicious attacks, wh...

In the present paper, a new microwave-radar-based technique for short-range detection and classification of multiple human and vehicle targets crossing a monitored area is proposed. This approach, which can find applications in both security and infrastructure surveillance, relies upon the processing of the scattered-field data acquired by low-cost...

Edge Computing enables to perform measurement and cognitive decisions outside a central server by performing data storage, manipulation, and processing on the Internet of Things (IoT) node. Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning applications have become a rudimentary procedure in virtually every industrial or preliminary system. Co...

A prototype of a radar system for classification of multiple targets passing through a road gate is presented in this paper. It allows to identify different types of targets, i.e., pedestrians, motorcycles, cars, and trucks. The developed system is based on a low-cost 24 GHz off-the-shelf FMCW radar, combined with an embedded Raspberry Pi PC for da...

Sensor nodes have been assigned a lot of tasks in a connected environment that is growing rapidly. The power supply remains a challenge that is not answered convincingly. Energy harvesting is an emerging solution that is being studied to integrate in low power applications such as internet of things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this...

With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing, which are technologies that rely on smart and low power computing nodes with adequate processing power and storage capabilities, it is expected that Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will play a role in the continuous spreading of their application fields. One of the most adop...

Correct regulation of meteoric surface and subsurface flow waters is a fundamental goal for the sustainable development of the territories. A new system, aimed at real-time monitoring of the rainfall and of the cumulated rainfall, is introduced and discussed in the present paper. The system implements a Sensor Network based on the IoT paradigm and...

Radar Target classification has gained huge interest in many fields over the years in applications like road surveillance, smart gates, and autonomous driving. This is accompanied by the new advancements in radar technologies that made radars a cheap optional replacement of cameras for such applications. Target recognition requires the extraction o...

Nowadays, cities can be perceived as increasingly dangerous places. Usually, CCTV is one of the main technologies used in a modern security system. However, poor light situations or bad weather conditions (rain, fog, etc.) limit the detection capabilities of image-based systems. Microwave radar detection systems can be an answer to this limitation...

Detection and classification of moving targets is an essential feature in many applications like road surveillance systems, autonomous cars, and smart gate systems. Multi-chirp sequence Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars with a 2D FFT processing can be used to produce a Range-Doppler images (R-D maps) containing the signature of the...

Towards implementing a portable and low power hand‐held gas sensing system, this chapter targets the design of integrated electronic signal conditioning circuits also known as integrated electronic readout circuits. It first reports a study of the available gas sensing technologies focusing on the advantages and limitations of each, then metal oxid...

This article compares different rainfall observing techniques available in the City of Genoa (Italy): the Ligurian regional tipping-bucket rain gauge (TBRG) network and the Monte Settepani long-range weather radar (WR) operated by the Ligurian Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPAL) and Smart Rainfall System (SRS), a network of microwave s...

Kalman filter is designed to predict the correct values for noisy measurements, using a probabilistic model. However, the chosen system model has a huge impact on the outcome of this algorithm, which makes it very important for the model to be as representative of the system as possible. A new approach to handle the noisy measurements in low power...

In this paper, we analyze the radar echo signals of a 24 GHz FMCW radar obtained from two different groups of moving targets (humans and vehicles). Range and Doppler information are obtained with a 2D FFT analysis. The aim of this paper is to describe the experimental setup, the adopted approach for the extraction of the Doppler-based features for...

In this paper the design of printed log-periodic antennas is presented. Focus is on the design of an antenna for long range communication within a wireless sensor network system for sea water quality monitoring, but the contents of the paper can also be useful at other frequencies and other applications. The difficulties in using the design procedu...

In this work, a power management system for the fluttering wind energy harvester FLEHAP is presented and tested. The proposed system uses a low power microcontroller running a simple power management algorithm, and an optimized self-powered circuit consisting of a buck-boost converter and an auxiliary circuit, which is capable of providing enough p...

Globally, the risks from extreme weather are significant and increasing, mainly because larger numbers of people and their assets are being exposed to floods. To cope with such events a now-casting service would be worth to validate weather alerts and to give civil protection offices timely information on the precipitation. In this work, rain-monit...

The need for low cost power sources was always the scope of researchers, especially for applications such as Wireless sensor networks (WSN), where the maintenance and replacement of energy storage units is costly. In this sense, energy harvesting (EH) is more reliable and cheaper due to its unlimited availability. Though, the environment conditions...

This paper describes the results obtained by the application of an innovative environmental monitoring technique able to estimate rainfall intensity in real time by processing the attenuation of microwave satellite link signal measured by low cost sensors. The satellite that has been used during our work, Turksat 42° E, belongs to the plethora of s...

This work presents the performance of an innovative environmental monitoring system-Smart Rainfall System (SRS)-that estimates rainfall in real-time by means of the analysis of the attenuation of satellite signals (DVB-S in the microwave Ku band). SRS consists in a set of peripheral microwave sensors placed on the field of interest, and connected t...

Globally, the risks from extreme weather are significant and increasing, mainly because larger numbers of people and their assets are being exposed to floods. To cope with such events a now-casting service would be worth to validate weather alerts and to give civil protection offices timely information on the precipitation. In this work, rain-monit...

This paper presents a high linearity, wide dynamic range, calibration-less readout circuit for metal oxide resistive gas sensors. The proposed interface is based on resistance-to-time conversion. Such conversion represents a suitable signal conditioning to interface resistive sensors varying over a wide range. The output waveform of time-based circ...

The growth of the IoT infrastructure requires the development of new devices able to harvest energy from the environment to power Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. Among the avail- able sources (light, mechanical vibrations, temperature differences…), air flow can represent a good choice in many cases: we consider not only a natural wind, but al...

Weather conditions have in general huge impact on the global economy, in particular on agriculture, industry, transport, and so forth. In recent years, also the occurrences of rapid and localized heavy rainfall in complex topographic areas became more frequent, possibly due to global warming. These facts cause injuries and deaths, and an accurate a...

An innovative environmental monitoring system - Smart Rainfall System (SRS) - that estimates rainfall in real-time by means of the analysis of the attenuation of satellite signals (DVB-S in the microwave Ku band) is presented. Such a system consists in a set of peripheral microwave sensors placed on the field of interest, and connected to a central...

Abstract: Gas sensing in biomedical applications shows a conversion of the concentration of the exhaled gas to a variation in resistance, so an electronic integrated interface circuit is required to analyse the exhaled gases, which are indications for many diseases. In this paper, a resistance to current conversion circuit based on differential bia...

The development of the Internet of Things infrastructure requires the deployment of millions of heterogeneous sensors embedded in the environment. The powering of these sensors cannot be done with wired connections, and the use of batteries is often impracticable. Energy harvesting is the common proposed solution, and many devices have been develop...

In this paper, we present measurement results from a prototype chip (fabricated in 130 nm CMOS technology), designed to extract maximum power from a Thermoelectric Generator (TEG). From analytical expression, we prove that the maximum extracted power is around 75% of the available power in a TEG, without using a closed loop maximum peak power track...

This paper presents a study of Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTAs) for voltage to current conversion circuits. The paper includes a comparative analysis of three OTA architectures implemented in 0.35µm CMOS AMS Technology under ± 1.65V power supply voltage. The impact of the OTA topology has been investigated by simulation. The designed...

The Ligurian Sea features a complex ecosystem due to its environmental characteristics and highly anthropized coast: its status has to be protected from several types of pollution. This paper deals with a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) whose purpose is to monitor the seawater quality in the Portofino Marine Natural Reserve. Specifically, aim of the...

In recent years, the occurrence of flash flood events seems increasing all over the world. Flash flooding is a result of heavy localized rainfall such as that from slow moving intense thunderstorms. Such floods often become raging torrents, which rip through riverbeds, valleys, and city streets, and possibly generate extensive damage. To cope with...

In biomedical engineering specifically in the branch of breathe analysis, the concentration of the gas in the breath is converted to a variation in resistance, such that each gas molecule is represented by a value of resistance. The array of resistive gas sensors analyze the gases released in breathe which are indications for many diseases. The res...

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) thin films were prepared by means of electrochemical anodisation or anodic spark deposition (ASD) from thin and flat metallic titanium (Ti) films pre-deposited on high quality quartz substrates by electron beam evaporation. AFM analysis indicates the formation of uniform mesoporous layers and a definite increase about 50% of...

Recent studies aimed to reduce the air pollution and avoid human exposure to dangerous gasses. The need of novel resistive gas sensors and their related electronic interfaces, showing reduced dimensions and low voltage low power characteristics, is in a continuous growth. Gas sensors require an electronic interface circuit sufficiently fast to be a...

Second-generation current conveyors (CCII) provide flexible building blocks for current-mode circuits. This paper discusses a novel design for the CMOS realization of a rail-to-rail fully differential CCII (FDCCII). The FDCCII is eventually obtained by suitably combining two instances of a four-terminal block, which in practice implements a differe...

When, in the middle sixties, Prof. Giuseppe Biorci (1930-2002) was called at the University of Genoa to take the chair of ?Circuit Theory?, and became director of the ?Istituto di Elettrotecnica? he was able to bear copious fruits from his research experience at MIT. He was an innovator in many respects: research, teaching, organisation and adminis...

The present invention relates to an environmental monitoring system comprising a central system and a plurality of remote measuring units operatively connected to the central system. Each remote measuring unit comprises a receiver intended to receive a radio signal transmitted from a satellite and to measure the power of an electric signal generate...

In this paper, we propose a design solution for implementing high-value resistance circuit, intended to bias the floating gate of PolyVinyliDene Fluorine (PVDF) based tactile sensors. The solution was proposed to design circuits based on Twin-tub and N-well processes. The formulations of mathematical equations were derived from EKV model. Our simul...

Piezoelectric oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (i.e. POSFET) sensor is a class of piezoelectric semiconductor devices which has been proposed for tactile sensing. As these sensors have piezoelectric material on top of the NMOS transistor gate, their bias point behaviour became a matter of speculation for a designer. Therefore, while bias...

In this paper we present series of experimental results showing the vulnerability of tactile sensors called by name Piezoelectric Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (POSFETs) toward light and bare touch. In fact these sensors have customized transistors on exposed silicon substrate/well. The result shows that by using a naked sensor chip...

The ultra-short pulse propagation in Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) structures can be modeled through the Piecewise Linear Recursive Convolution (PLRC) technique in the context of the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) solution of Maxwell's equations. Our model is based on a Lorentzian formulation of dispersive media, taking into account the Ram...