Light weight RLSAs with a honeycomb-type parallel plate are promising candidates for satellite antennas. However, the design of slot lengths and positions in honeycomb RLSAs consisting of a core, skin and adhesive layers involves time-consuming EM analysis. In this paper, an equivalent double layer model is devised for fast slot coupling analysis by the Method of moments (MoM) together with a simplified array design procedure. A fabricated antenna with a diameter of 900mm demonstrates the high directivity of 48.3dBi and a gain of 44.6dBi at 32GHz, with the reflection below -15dB. This antenna weighs only 1.16kg.

Honeycomb structures are widely used in aerospace industry because of the lightweight and durable properties they provide. Here we propose to use a honeycomb core as the wave guiding structure in Radial Line Slot Antennas (RLSAs). This paper quantifies the propagation characteristics, especially the loss due to the honeycomb. At 32GHz, by choosing the proper cell size, both good isotropy and reasonably low effective dielectric constants are realized with the honeycomb as a spacer in a radial line waveguide. To estimate the material loss factor, several methods are compared and a factor of about 0.014∼0.018dB/mm is predicted and measured. A fabricated 90cm diameter honeycomb RLSA suffers about a 3.5∼5dB loss, which coincides with the estimates using the predicted loss factor.

This paper discusses how to design a Radial Line Slot Antenna (RLSA) whose waveguide is filled with high loss dielectric materials. We introduce a new design for the aperture slot coupling synthesis to restrain the dielectric losses and improve the antenna gain. Based on a newly defined slot coupling, a number of RLSAs with different sizes and loss factors are analyzed and their performances are predicted. Theoretical calculations suggest that the gain is sensitive to the material losses in the radial lines. The gain enhancement by using the new coupling formula is notable for larger antenna size and higher loss factor of the dielectric material. Three prototype RLSAs are designed and fabricated at 60GHz following different slot coupling syntheses, and their measured performances consolidate our theory.

The increasing demand on scalability and reusability of system-on-chip design as well as the decoupling between computation and communication has motivated the growth of the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm in the last decade. In NoC-based systems, the computational resources (i.e. IPs) communicate with each other using a network infrastructure. Many works have focused on the development of NoC architectures and routing mechanisms, while the interfacing between network and associated IPs also needs to be considered. In this paper, we present a novel efficient AXI (AMBA eXtensible Interface) compliant network adapter for NoC architectures, which is named an AXI-NoC adapter. The proposed network adapter achieves high communication throughput of 20.8Gbits/s and consumes 4.14mW at the operating frequency of 650MHz. It has a low area footprint (952 gates, approximate to 2,793µm2 with CMOS 45nm technology) thanks to its effective hybrid micro-architectures and with zero latency thanks to the proposed mux-selection method.

Cognitive radio has been developed recently as a promising solution to tackle the spectrum related issues such as spectrum scarcity and spectrum underutilization. Cognitive spectrum assignment is necessary for allocating spectrum bands to secondary users in order to avoid conflicts among secondary users and maximize the total network performance under a given set of conditions. In most spectrum assignment schemes, throughput is considered as the main criterion for spectrum selection or spectrum assignment. In this paper, we propose a distortion-aware channel allocation scheme for multiple secondary users who compete for primary channels to transmit multimedia data. In the proposed scheme, idle spectrum bands are assigned to the multimedia secondary users that attain the highest video distortion reduction. The scheme is expected to mitigate the selfish behaviors of users in competing channels. The performance effectiveness of our proposed channel allocation scheme is demonstrated through simulation by comparing with a benchmark of two reference spectrum assignment schemes.