This paper presents an efficient approach for logarithmic and anti-logarithmic converters which can be used in the arithmetic unit of hybrid number system processors and logarithm/exponent function generators in DSP applications. By employing the novel quasi-symmetrical difference method with only the simple shift-add logic and the look-up table, the proposed approach can reduce the hardware area and improve the conversion speed significantly while achieve similar accuracy compared with the previous methods. The implementation results in both FPGA and 0.18-µm CMOS technology are also presented and discussed.

High performance, low area multipliers are highly desired for modern and future DSP systems due to the increasing demand of high speed DSP applications. In this paper, we present an efficient architecture for an LUT-based truncated multiplier and its application in RGB to YCbCr color space conversion which can be used for digital TV, image and video processing systems. By employing an improved split LUT-based architecture and LUT optimization method, the proposed multiplier can reduce the value of area-delay product by up to 52% compared with other constant multiplier methods. The FPGA implementation of a color space conversion application employing the proposed multiplier also results in significant reduction of area-delay product of up to 48%.

In this paper, the authors present a CAM-based Information Detection Hardware System for fast, exact and approximate image matching on 2-D data, using FPGA. The proposed system can be potentially applied to fast image matching with various required search patterns, without using search principles. In designing the system, we take advantage of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) which has parallel multi-match mode capability and has been designed, using dual-port RAM blocks. The system has a simple structure, and does not employ any Central Processor Unit (CPU) or complicated computations.

This paper described discrete time Cellular Neural Networks (DT-CNN) with two types of neuron circuits for image coding from an analog format to a digital format and their VLSI implementations. The image coding methods proposed in this paper have been investigated for a purpose of transmission of a coded image and restoration again without a large loss of an original image information. Each neuron circuti of a network receives one pixel of an input image, and processes it with binary outputs data fed from neighboring neuron circuits. Parallel dynamics quantization methods have been adopted for image coding methods. They are performed in networks to decide an output binary value of each neuron circuit according to output values of neighboring neuron circuits. Delayed binary outputs of neuron circuits in a neighborhood are directly connected to inputs of a current active neuron circuit. Next state of a network is computed form a current state at some neuron circuits in any time interval. Models of two types of neuron circuits and networks are presented and simulated to confirm an ability of proposed methods. Also, physical layout designs of coding chips have been done to show their possibility of VLSI realizations.

A CAM-based matching system for fast exact pattern matching is implemented on a hardware system with FPGA and ASIC. The system has a simple structure, and does not employ any Central Processor Unit (CPU) as well as complicated computations. We take advantage of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) which has an ability of parallel multi-match mode for designing the system. The system is applied to fast pattern matching with various required search patterns without using search principles. In this paper, the authors present a CAM-based system for fast exact pattern matching on 2-D data.

A hardware accelerator for a raster-based design-rule checking called BITDRC for a bit-mapping CAD system is described. BITDRC is a special-purpose hardware accelerator which performs design-rule checking for the Manhattan layout style VLSI circuis, much faster than the software checking which belonged to the bit-mapping CAD system before. The bit-mapping CAD system had effectively been developed for both of educational and VLSI design purposes, and just needs only a personal computer as a compact working environment. The proposed hardware architecture is rather simply and characterized by the bit-mapping CAD system where it works on. The hardware architecture and checking algorithm have been confirmed by implementing a bread-board prototype using discrete components. As a result, the processing time of BITDRC is speeded up as much as 500 times faster than the original software and takes only 4 seconds for checking every rule on a(15001500) grids layout pattern. BITDRC performs the error checking together with the data scanning that makes it can be as an on-line design-rule checker for the bit-mapping CAD system. Finally, the physical layout of BITDRC has been designed using a conventional CMOS technology.

The increasing demand of low power Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS) leads to the requirement of efficient compression methods to reduce ROM size for storing sine function values. This paper presents a technique to achieve very high compression ratio by using the optimized four-segment linear difference method. The proposed technique results in the ROM compression ratio of about 117.3:1 and the word size reduction of 6 bits for the design of a DDFS with 11-bit sine amplitude output. This high compression ratio result is very promising to meet the requirement of low power consumption and low hardware complexity in digital VLSI technology.

In this paper, a low power current protection circuit implemented in a low dropout regulator (LDO) is presented. The proposed circuit, designed in a 0.35 µm CMOS process, provides a precise limiting current as well as holding current with low dependency on both supply voltage and regulator output voltage. The experimental results showed that the proposed circuit is operable in the regulator output voltage range from VOUT=1.2 V to VOUT=3.6 V and supply voltage range from VDD=VOUT+0.5 V to VDD=5.6 V. Since the proposed circuit is composed of few simple basic circuits such as a comparator and a Schmitt Trigger, it has a low current consumption of less than ISS=0.82 µA at a load current of ILOAD=200 mA. This makes the circuit suitable for low power and low voltage LDO design.

A 32bit CPU, which can operate more than 15 years with 220mAH Li battery, or eternally operate with an energy harvester of in-door light is presented. The CPU was fabricated by using 65nm SOTB CMOS technology (Silicon on Thin Buried oxide) where gate length is 60nm and BOX layer thickness is 10nm. The threshold voltage was designed to be as low as 0.19V so that the CPU operates at over threshold region, even at lower supply voltages down to 0.22V. Large reverse body bias up to -2.5V can be applied to bodies of SOTB devices without increasing gate induced drain leak current to reduce the sleep current of the CPU. It operated at 14MHz and 0.35V with the lowest energy of 13.4 pJ/cycle. The sleep current of 0.14µA at 0.35V with the body bias voltage of -2.5V was obtained. These characteristics are suitable for such new applications as energy harvesting sensor network systems, and long lasting wearable computers.

In this paper, the CMOS Cell Compiler (CCC) which was developed on our bit-mapping CAD is introduced. The CCC generates the physical layout for a logic cell from a functional description expressed by a set of Boolean equations. A CMOS digital LSI having up to 104 transistors can be designed on this bit-mapping CAD by placing a physical layout of cells generated on the bit-map editor and by giving interconnections manually among the cells. The physical layout obeys λ-base design rule on a bit-map grid plane and can support single-and double-metal CMOS process. An aspect ratio and a position of input and output terminals in a rectangle cell are depending on functional description of Boolean equations.

In this paper, the hardware architecture of a CORDIC-based Arithmetic Processor utilizing both angle recoding (ARD) CORDIC algorithm and scaling-free (SCFE) CORDIC algorithm is proposed and implemented in 180 nm CMOS technology. The arithmetic processor is capable of calculating the sine, cosine, sine hyperbolic, cosine hyperbolic, and multiplication function. The experimental results prove that the design is able to work at 100 MHz frequency and requires 12.96 mW power consumption. In comparison with some previous work, the design can be seen as a good choice for high-throughput low-energy applications.

In this paper, bifurcation and chaotic behavior which occur in simple looped MOS inverters with high speed operation are described. The most important point in this work is to change a nonlinear transfer characteristic of a MOS inverter to the nonlinearity generating a chaos. Three types of circuits which include four, three and one MOS inverters, respectively, are proposed. A switched capacitor (SC) circuit to operate sampling holding is added in the loop in each of the circuits. The bifurcation and chaotic behavior have been found along with a variation of an external input, and/or a sampling clock frequency. The bifurcation and chaotic behavior of the proposed simple looped MOS inverters are verified by employing SPICE circuit simulator as well as the experiments. For the first type of four looped CMOS inverters, Lyapunov exponent λ which has the positive regions for the chaotic behavior can be calculated by use of the fitting nonlinear function synthesized from two sigmoid functions. For the second type of three looped CMOS inverters and the third type of one looped MOS inverter, the nonlinear charge/discharge characteristics of the hold capacitor in the SC circuit is utilized efficiently for forming the nonlinearity generating the bifurcation and chaotic behavior. Their bifurcation can be generated by the sampling clock frequency parameter which is controlled easily.

A new information detection method has been proposed for a very fast and efficient search engine. This method is implemented on hardware system using FPGA. We take advantages of Content Addressable Memory (CAM) which has an ability of matching mode for designing the system. The CAM blocks have been designed using available memory blocks of the FPGA device to save access times of the whole system. The entire memory can return multi-match results concurrently. The system operates based on the CAMs for pattern matching, in a parallel manner, to output multiple addresses of multi-match results. Based on the parallel multi-match operations, the system can be applied for pattern matching with various required constraint conditions without using any search principles. The very fast multi-match results are achieved at 60 ns with the operation frequency 50 MHz. This increases the search performance of the information detection system which uses this method as the core system.

COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) is an efficient algorithm to compute elementary arithmetic such as trigonometric, exponent, and logarithm. However, the main drawback of the conventional CORDIC is that the number of iterations is equal to the number of angle constants. Among a great deal of research to overcome this disadvantage, angle recording method is an effective method because it is capable of reducing 50% of the number of iterations. Nevertheless, the hardware architecture of this algorithm is difficult to implement in pipeline. Therefore, a low-latency parallel pipeline hybrid adaptive CORDIC (PP-CORDIC) architecture is proposed in this paper. In the design hybrid architecture was exploited together with pipeline and parallel technique to achieve low latency. This design is able to operate at 122.6 MHz frequency and costs 8, 12, and 15 clock cycles latency in the best, average, and worst case, respectively. More significantly, the latency of PP-CORDIC in the worst case is 1.1X lower than that of the Altera's commercial floating-point sine and cosine IP cores.

In this paper, an improved hybrid LUT-based architecture for low-error and efficient fixed-width squarer circuits is presented in which LUT-based and conventional logic circuits are employed together to achieve the good trade-off between hardware complexity and performance. By exploiting the mathematical identities and hybrid architecture, the mean error and mean squarer error of the proposed squarer are reduced by up to 40%, compared with the best previous method presented in literature. Moreover, the proposed method can improve the speed and reduce the area of the squarer circuit. The implementation and chip measurement results in 0.18-µm CMOS technology are also presented and discussed.