Single-carrier (SC) transmission with space-time block coded (STBC) transmit diversity can achieve good bit error rate (BER) performance. However, in a high mobility environment, the STBC codeword orthogonality is distorted and as consequence, the BER performance is degraded by the interference caused by the orthogonality distortion of STBC codeword. In this paper, we proposed a novel frequency-domain equalization (FDE) for SC-STBC transmit diversity in doubly selective fading channel. Multiple FDE weight matrices, each associated with a different code block, are jointly optimized based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion taking into account not only channel frequency variation but also channel time variation over the STBC codeword. Computer simulations confirm that the proposed robust FDE achieves BER performance superior to conventional FDE, which was designed based on the assumption of a quasi-static fading.

In this study, we investigated Si(100), Si(110) and Si(111) surface flattening process utilizing sacrificial oxidation method, and its effect on Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor (MIS) diode characteristics. By the etching of the 100 nm-thick sacrificial oxide formed by thermal oxidation at 1100°C, the surface roughness of Si(100), Si(110) and Si(111) substrates were reduced. The obtained Root-Mean-Square (RMS) roughness of Si(100) was reduced from 0.22 nm (as-cleaned) to 0.07 nm (after etching), while it was reduced from 0.23 nm to 0.12 nm in the case of Si(110), and from 0.23 nm to 0.11 nm in the case of Si(111), respectively. Furthermore, it was found that time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) characteristics of MIS diodes for p-Si(100), p-Si(110) and p-Si(111) were improved with the reduction of Si surface RMS roughness.

An application of laser annealing process, which is used to form the P-type Base junction for high-performance low-voltage power MOSFETs (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors), is proposed. An equivalent shallow-junction structure for P-Base junction with uniform impurity distribution is achieved by adopting green laser annealing of pulsed mode. Higher impurity activation for the shallow junction has been achieved by the laser annealing of melted phase than by conventional RTA (Rapid Thermal Annealing) of solid phase. The application of the laser annealing technology in the fabrication process of Low-Voltage U-MOSFET is also examined.

We propose a low-noise and low-power dynamic comparator with an offset calibration circuit for Low-Power ADCs. The proposed comparator equips the control circuit in order to switching the comparison accuracy and the current consumption. When high accuracy is not required, current consumption is reduced by allowing the noise increase. Compared with a traditional dynamic comparator, the proposed architecture reduced the current consumption to 78% at 100MHz operating and 1.8V supply voltage. Furthermore, the offset voltage is corrected with minimal current consumption by controlling the on/off operation of the offset calibration circuit.

In this research, we have investigated the deposition condition of pentacene film on nitrogen doped (N-doped) LaB6 donor layer for larger grain growth at the channel region for bottom-contact type pentacene-based organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) to improve the device characteristics. Source and drain bottom-contacts of Al were patterned and 2nm-thick N-doped LaB6 donor layer was deposited on the SiO2/Si(100) back-gate structure. The dendritic grain growth of pentacene larger than 10µm without lamellar grain growth was demonstrated when the deposition temperature and rate were 100°C and 0.5nm/min, respectively. Furthermore, it was found that the dendritic grain growth was realized at the boundary region of bottom-contact as well as channel region.

This study proposes the application and implementation of a new power factor correction (PFC) with a variable slope ramp for a small wind power system without any input voltage sensing circuits or external control components in the current shaping loop. The hardware description of the variable slope ramp simplifies the complexity of integrated circuit realization with low resolution analog-to-digital converters, and achieves a high power factor for multi and three-phase AC/DC converters such as wind power systems. Up to 1 kW small wind power system is tested to verify the performance of the proposed PFC control. The highest achieved power factor reaches 99.5%.

In recent years, the need to build solid state drive (SSD)-based cloud storage systems has been increasing in order to process the big data generated by lots of Internet of Things devices and Internet users. Because these kinds of cloud systems require high performance and reliable storage, the use of flash-based Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) will increase. But in flash-based RAID storage, parity data must be updated with every data write operation, which can more quickly overwhelm SSD's lifespan. To solve this problem, this letter proposes parity data deduplication for OpenStack cloud storage systems using an all flash array. Unlike the traditional data deduplication method, it only removes parity data, which will be stored in the parity disks of the all flash array. Experiments show that the proposed parity data deduplication method can efficiently reduce the number of parity data write operations, compared to the traditional data deduplication method.

The so-called numerical alphabet has been established as one of the various memorization systems. It enables numbers to be transformed into words. In that way memorizing numbers is highly alleviated, since words are to be memorized instead of numbers, which is substantially easier. In order to master the technique of transforming numbers into words (for memorizing them), as well as transforming words back to numbers, a person has to practice. Upon adopting the numerical alphabet, one then has to practice various examples and translate numbers into proper words and words into proper numbers. This paper describes the computer application we have developed that helps in this process. To our knowledge, this is the first complete application of this type ever created. We also show the results of the students' number-memorization tests, performed before and after using the application, which show significant improvements.

We developed a 300-GHz high gain amplifier MMIC in 75-nm InP high electron mobility transistor technology. We approached the issues with accurate characterization of devices to design the amplifier. The on-wafer through-reflect-line calibration technique was used to obtain accurate transistor characteristics. To increase measurement accuracy, a highly isolated structure was used for on-wafer calibration standards. The common source amplifier topology was used for achieving high gain amplification. The implemented amplifier MMIC exhibited a gain of over 25 dB in the 280-310-GHz frequency band.

The information maximization (Infomax) based on information entropy theory is a class of methods that can be used to blindly separate the sources. Torkkola applied the Infomax criterion to blindly separate the mixtures where the sources have been delayed with respect to each other. Compared to the frequency domain methods, this time domain method has simple adaptation rules and can be easily implemented. However, Torkkola's method works only in the real valued field. In this letter, the Infomax for blind separation of the delayed sources is extended to the complex case for processing of complex valued signals. Firstly, based on the gradient ascent the adaptation rules for the parameters of the unmixing network are derived and the steps of algorithm are given. Then, a measurement matrix is constructed to evaluate the separation performance. The results of computer experiment support the extended algorithm.

This paper proposes a new class of Hilbert pairs of almost symmetric orthogonal wavelet bases. For two wavelet bases to form a Hilbert pair, the corresponding scaling lowpass filters are required to satisfy the half-sample delay condition. In this paper, we design simultaneously two scaling lowpass filters with the arbitrarily specified flat group delay responses at ω=0, which satisfy the half-sample delay condition. In addition to specifying the number of vanishing moments, we apply the Remez exchange algorithm to minimize the difference of frequency responses between two scaling lowpass filters, in order to improve the analyticity of complex wavelets. The equiripple behavior of the error function can be obtained through a few iterations. Therefore, the resulting complex wavelets are orthogonal and almost symmetric, and have the improved analyticity. Finally, some examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.

Most Android applications are written in JAVA and run on a Dalvik virtual machine. For smartphone vendors and users who wish to know the performance of an application on a particular smartphone but cannot obtain the source code, we propose a new technique, Dalvik Profiler for Applications (DPA), to profile an Android application on a Dalvik virtual machine without the support of source code. Within a Dalvik virtual machine, we determine the entry and exit locations of a method, log its execution time, and analyze the log to determine the performance of the application. Our experimental results show an error ratio of less than 5% from the baseline tool Traceview which instruments source code. The results also show some interesting behaviors of applications and smartphones: the performance of some smartphones with higher hardware specifications is 1.5 times less than the phones with lower specifications. DPA is now publicly available as an open source tool.

Given a set of positive-weighted points and a query rectangle r (specified by a client) of given extents, the goal of a maximizing range sum (MaxRS) query is to find the optimal location of r such that the total weights of all points covered by r is maximized. In this paper, we address the problem of processing MaxRS queries over road network databases and propose two new external memory methods. Through a set of simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed methods.

The numerical error of a sample Mahalanobis distance (T2=y'S-1y) with sample covariance matrix S is investigated. It is found that in order to suppress the numerical error of T2, the following conditions need to be satisfied. First, the reciprocal square root of the condition number of S should be larger than the relative error of calculating floating-point real-number variables. The second proposed condition is based on the relative error of the observed sample vector y in T2. If the relative error of y is larger than the relative error of the real-number variables, the former governs the numerical error of T2. Numerical experiments are conducted to show that the numerical error of T2 can be suppressed if the two above-mentioned conditions are satisfied.

The cycling wheelchair “Profhand” was developed in Japan as locomotion and lower limb rehabilitation device for hemiplegic subjects and elderly persons. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) control of paralyzed lower limbs enables application of the Profhand to paraplegic subjects as a rehabilitation device. In this paper, simplified muscle stimulation control for FES cycling with Profhand was examined for practical application, because cycling speed was low and not stable in our preliminary study and there was a difficulty in setting stimulation electrodes for the gluteus maximus. First, a guideline of target cycling speed to be achieved by FES cycling was determined from voluntary cycling with healthy subjects in order to evaluate FES cycling control. The cycling speed of 0.6m/s was determined as acceptable value and 1.0m/s was as ideal one. Then, stimulation to the gluteus maximus and that to the dorsiflexor muscles in addition to the quadriceps femoris were examined for simple FES cycling control for Profhand with healthy subjects. Stimulation timing was adjusted automatically during cycling based on muscle response time to electrical stimulation and cycling speed, which was shown to be effective for FES cycling control. Simple FES cycling control with Profhand removing stimulation to the gluteus maximus was found to be feasible. Stimulation to the dorsiflexor muscles with the quadriceps femoris was suggested to be effective for practical, simple FES cycling with Profhand in case of removing the gluteus maximus stimulation.

We propose a kernel-based quadratic classification method based on kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). Subspace methods have been widely used for multiclass classification problems, and they have been extended by the kernel trick. However, there are large computational complexities for the subspace methods that use the kernel trick because the problems are defined in the space spanned by all of the training samples. To reduce the computational complexity of the subspace methods for multiclass classification problems, we extend Oja's averaged learning subspace method and apply a subset approximation of KPCA. We also propose an efficient method for selecting the basis vectors for this. Due to these extensions, for many problems, our classification method exhibits a higher classification accuracy with fewer basis vectors than does the support vector machine (SVM) or conventional subspace methods.

In this letter, we propose a novel texture descriptor that takes advantage of an anisotropic neighborhood. A brand new encoding scheme called Reflection and Rotation Invariant Uniform Patterns (rriu2) is proposed to explore local structures of textures. The proposed descriptor is called Oriented Local Binary Patterns (OLBP). OLBP may be incorporated into other varieties of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) to obtain more powerful texture descriptors. Experimental results on CUReT and Outex databases show that OLBP not only significantly outperforms LBP, but also demonstrates great robustness to rotation and illuminant changes.

Content oriented network is expected to be one of the most promising approaches for resolving design concept difference between content oriented network services and location oriented architecture of current network infrastructure. There have been proposed several content oriented network architectures, but research efforts for content oriented networks have just started and technical issues to be resolved are still remained. Because of content oriented feature, content data transmitted in a network can be reused by content requests from other users. Pervasive cache is one of the most important benefits brought by the content oriented network architecture, which forms interconnected caching networks. Caching network is the hottest research area and lots of research activities have been published. This paper surveys recent research activities for caching networks in content oriented networks, with focusing on important factors which affect caching network performance, i.e. content request routing, caching decision, and replacement policy of cache. And this paper also discusses future direction of caching network researches.

In quasi-synchronous frequency-hopping multiple access (QS-FHMA) systems, relative delays are allowed to vary in a domain around the origin. Under such condition, the low hit zone (LHZ) frequency-hopping sequence (FHS) set is more propitious than the conventional FHS set to be applied by the systems. In this paper, a construction based on the interleaving techniques of FHS set with LHZ is proposed. Besides the requirement for this constructed LHZ FHS set to get the optimality or the near optimality with respect to the Peng-Fan-Lee bound is also given. It turns out that the constructed LHZ FHS set has new parameters not covered in the literature, thus it does have great significance in practice.

Codebooks with good parameters are preferred in many practical applications, such as direct spread CDMA communications and compressed sensing. In this letter, an upper bound on the set size of a codebook is introduced by modifying the Levenstein bound on the maximum amplitudes of such a codebook. Based on an estimate of a class of character sums over a finite field by Katz, a family of codebooks nearly meeting the modified bound is proposed.