We present a smart steering wheel that detects the gripping position and area, as well as the distance to the approaching driver's hands by measuring the resonant frequency and its resistance value in an LCR circuit composed of the floating capacitance between the gripping hand and the electrode of the steering, and the body resistance. The resonant frequency measurement provides a high sensitivity that enables the estimation of the distance to the approaching hand, the gripping area of a gloved hand, and for covering the steering surface with any type of insulating material. This system can be applied for drowsiness detection, driving technique improvements, and for customization of the driving settings.

To design high quality three-dimensional integrated circuits (3-D ICs), the effect of process and design parameters on delay must be adequately understood. This paper presents an electrical circuit model of an entire structure in through silicon via (TSV) based 3-D ICs with a new equation for on-chip interconnect capacitance and then proposes an effective model for evaluating signal propagation delay in vertically stacked chips. All electrical parameter values can be calculated by the closed-form equations without a field solver. The delay model is constructed with the first- or second-order function of each parameter to the delay obtained from a typical structure. The results obtained by on-chip interconnect capacitance equations and delay model are in excellent agreement with those by a field solver and circuit simulator, respectively. We also show that the model is very useful for evaluating effects of the process and design parameters on vertical signal propagation delay such as the sensitivity and variability analysis.