Among the various sensor technologies, thick-film technology (TFT) on ceramic substrates offers several appreciable capabilities, e.g., flexibility in choice of material and design, high shock resistance, ease of integration into electronic circuits and packaging. In this application a thick-film tilt sensor has been developed based on heat transfer by natural convection. The device measures internal changes in heat transfer caused by the inclination using the force of gravity as an input. The device is functionally equivalent to traditional proof-mass accelerometer. The proof mass in the new thick-film sensor is a gas. The gaseous proof-mass provides great advantages over the use of the traditional solid proof mass. Preliminary tests on the first prototypes show an accuracy of about 2% full scale output, repeatability of about 0.2° and thermal stability less than 0.2%/°C over a ± 50° range.

An important characteristic of e-learning environments is that the instructor should know whether a registered user is sufficiently attending the lessons. ELMVT is a tool that measures and calculates official or preset indicators of learners’ diligence and then graphically depicts them in the form of a polychromatic (multi-colored) tree. In this way, the instructor can quickly and accurately form a first impression of the trainee’s diligence, an element important in order to enhance the trainee’s guidance and to ameliorate the further co-operation between the trainee and the instructor.

Measurements of the magnetic field emissions over [10 kHz, 30 MHz] frequency range of large power synchronous generators are reported; recorded spectra are correlated with the operating conditions of the machine under test. Comparison is made with other results obtained in a similar configuration.

The paper mainly concerns interference measurement in spread spectrum, wireless communication systems. A new digital signal-processing method is proposed, which proves non intrusive and independent of the specific system considered. Thanks to the nice properties of the wavelet packet transform, the method is capable of extracting the occurred interference from the spread spectrum signal, thus ensuring accurate interference magnitude and frequency estimates also in critical conditions: interference level much smaller than that characterizing the spread spectrum signal, and interference spectral content very close to the carrier centre frequency of the considered system.

In this paper, an incremental Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) designed as part of the signal-conditioning circuitry for tissue impedance measurement system is presented. Continuous-time design techniques has been used and a modified implementation of the conversion algorithm, with respect to its discrete-time counterpart, has been developed. To reduce the influence of the no-idealities, analog and digital corrections have been also implemented. A prototype in 0.8 µm CMOS technology has been fabricated and tested. Experimental results are reported.