A probing front end circuit (PFE) senses and digitizes voltage noises at in-circuit locations on such as power supply wiring and substrate taps in a chip, with the simplest circuit construction only with a source follower or a unity gain buffer, followed by a latch comparator. The PFE with 2.5V I/O transistors in a 65nm CMOS technology node demonstrates 9.0 ENOB and 60.7dB SFDR in equivalent sampling at 1.0Gs/s, for a sinusoidal waveform of 10MHz with 200mV peak-to-peak amplitude. Behavioral modeling of an entire waveform acquisition system using PFEs includes the statistical variations of reference voltage and sampling timing. The simulation quantitatively explains the measured dynamic properties of on-chip noise monitoring, such as the AC response in SNDR and digitizing throughputs, with the clear dependency on the frequency and amplitude of input waveforms.

A hash function is an important primitive for cryptographic protocols. Since algorithms of well-known hash functions are almost serial, it seems difficult to take full advantage of recent multi-core processors. This paper proposes a multilane hashing (MLH) mode that achieves both of high parallelism and high security. The MLH mode is designed in such a way that the processing speed is almost linear in the number of processors. Since the MLH mode exploits an existing hash function as a black box, it is applicable to any hash function. The bound on the indifferentiability of the MLH mode from a random oracle is beyond the birthday bound on the output length of an underlying primitive.

Recently, non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes starts to show their superiority in achieving significant coding gains when moderate codeword lengths are adopted. However, the overwhelming decoding complexity keeps NB-LDPC codes from being widely employed in modern communication devices. This paper proposes a hybrid message-passing decoding algorithm which consumes very low computational complexity. It achieves competitive error performance compared with conventional Min-max algorithm. Simulation result on a (255,174) cyclic code shows that this algorithm obtains at least 0.5dB coding gain over other state-of-the-art low-complexity NB-LDPC decoding algorithms. A partial-parallel NB-LDPC decoder architecture for cyclic NB-LDPC codes is also developed based on this algorithm. Optimization schemes are employed to cut off hard decision symbols in RAMs and also to store only part of the reliability messages. In addition, the variable node units are redesigned especially for the proposed algorithm. Synthesis results demonstrate that about 24.3% gates and 12% memories can be saved over previous works.

Co/Pd multilayer films are prepared on fcc-Pd underlayers of (001), (011), and (111) orientations hetero-epitaxially grown on MgO single-crystal substrates at room temperature. The effects of underlayer orientation, Co and Pd layer thicknesses, and repetition number of Co/Pd bi-layer on the structure and the magnetic properties are investigated. fcc-Co/fcc-Pd multilayer films of (001), (011), and (111) orientations epitaxially grow on the Pd underlayers of (001), (011), and (111) orientations, respectively. Flatter and sharper Co/Pd interface is formed in the order of (011) < (111) < (001) orientation. Atomic mixing around the Co/Pd interface is enhanced by deposition of thinner Co and Pd layers, and Co-Pd alloy phase is formed. With increasing the repetition number (decreasing the thicknesses of Co and Pd layers), perpendicular magnetic anisotropy is promoted. Stronger perpendicular anisotropy is observed in the order of film orientation of (001) < (011) < (111). Perpendicular anisotropy of Co/Pd multilayer film is considered to be originated from the two sources; the interface anisotropy and the magnetocrystalline anisotropy associated with Co-Pd lattice shrinkage along the perpendicular direction. In order to enhance the perpendicular anisotropy of Co/Pd multilayer film, it is important to align the film orientation to be (111) and to enhance the lattice distortion along the perpendicular direction.

We seek a resource allocation algorithm through carrier allocation and modulation mode selection for improving the quality of service (QoS) that can adapt to various screen sizes and dynamic channel variations. In terms of visual quality, the expected visual entropy (EVE) is defined to quantify the visual information of being contained in each layer of the scalable video coding (SVC). Fairness optimization is conducted to maximize the EVE using an objective function for given constraints of radio resources. To conduct the fairness optimization, we propose a novel approximation algorithm for resource allocation for the maximal EVE. Simulations confirm that the QoS in terms of the EVE or peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is significantly improved by using the novel algorithm.

This paper presents a study of the applicability of clusters of GPUs to high-resolution 3D simulations of cardiac electrophysiology. By experimenting with representative cardiac cell models and ODE solvers, in association with solving the monodomain equation, we quantitatively analyze the obtainable computational capacity of GPU clusters. It is found that for a 501×501×101 3D mesh, which entails a 0.1mm spatial resolution, a 128-GPU cluster only needs a few minutes to carry out a 100,000-time-step cardiac excitation simulation that involves a four-variable cell model. Even higher spatial and temporal resolutions are achievable for such simplified mathematical models. On the other hand, our experiments also show that a dramatically larger cluster of GPUs is needed to handle a very detailed cardiac cell model.

Recognizing human action in complex scenes is a challenging problem in computer vision. Some action-unrelated concepts, such as camera position features, could significantly affect the appearance of local spatio-temporal features, and therefore the performance of low-level features based methods degrades. In this letter, we define the action-unrelated concept: the position of camera as high-level features. We observe that they can serve as a prior to local spatio-temporal features for human action recognition. We encode this prior by modeling interactions between spatio-temporal features and camera position features. We infer camera position features from local spatio-temporal features via these interactions. The parameters of this model are estimated by a new max-margin algorithm. We evaluate the proposed method on KTH, IXMAS and Youtube actions datasets. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

CoPt and Co3Pt alloy thin films are prepared on MgO(111), SrTiO3(111), and Al2O3(0001) single-crystal substrates by varying the substrate temperature in a range from room temperature to 600°C by using an ultra-high vacuum radio-frequency magnetron sputtering system. The formation of metastable ordered phase and the structural thermal stability are briefly investigated. CoPt and Co3Pt films with the close-packed plane parallel to the substrate surface grow epitaxially on these oxide single-crystal substrates. CoPt epitaxial films are also formed by employing Pt, Pd, Cu, Cr, Ti, and Ru underlayers hetero-epitaxially grown on MgO(111) substrates. The crystal structure is evaluated by considering the order degree and the atomic stacking sequence of close-packed plane. Metastable ordered phases of L11, Bh, and D019 are preferentially formed in the CoPt and the Co3Pt films deposited around 300°C. Metastable ordered phase formation is influenced by the substrate temperature, the film composition, and the underlayer material. With increasing the substrate temperature up to around 300°C, the order degree increases. As the substrate temperature further increases, the order degree decreases. Annealing a disordered film at 300°C does not effectively enhance ordering. The CoPt and the Co3Pt films which include metastable ordered phases have flat surfaces and show strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropies reflecting the magnetocrystalline anisotropies of ordered crystals.

This paper proposes a novel design method involving the stages from analog circuit design to layout synthesis in hope of suppressing the process-induced variations with a design style called transistor array. We manage to decompose the transistors into unified sub-transistors, and arrange the sub-transistors on a uniform placement grid so that a better post-CMP profile is expected to be achieved, and that the STI-stress is evened up to alleviate the process variations. However, since lack of direct theoretical support to the transistor decomposition, we analyze and evaluate the errors arising from the decomposition in both large and small signal analysis. A test chip with decomposed transistors on it confirmed our analysis and suggested that the errors are negligibly small and the design with transistor array is applicable. Based on this conclusion, a design flow with transistor array covering from circuit design to layout synthesis is proposed, and several design cases, including three common-source amplifiers, three two-stage OPAMPS and a nano-watt current reference, are implemented on a test chip with the proposed method, to demonstrate the feasibility of our idea. The measurement results from the chip confirmed that the designs with transistor array are successful, and the proposed method is applicable.

To mitigate the impact of the frequency selectivity of the wireless channel on the initial ranging (IR) process in 802.16 based WiMax systems, several well known pre-equalization techniques applied in the IR are first analyzed in detail, and the optimal pre-equalization scheme is further improved for the IR by overcoming its weaknesses. A numerical simulation shows that the proposed pre-equalization scheme significantly improves the performance of multiuser detection and parameter estimation in the IR process.

There is a well known Steiner tree algorithm called minimum-cost paths heuristic (MPH), which is used for many multicast network operations and is considered a benchmark for other Steiner tree algorithms. MPH's average case time complexity is O(m(l+nlog n)), where m is the number of end nodes, n is the number of nodes, and l is the number of links in the network, because MPH has to run Dijkstra's algorithm as many times as the number of end nodes. The author recently proposed a Steiner tree algorithm called branch-based multi-cast (BBMC), which produces exactly the same multicast tree as MPH in a constant processing time irrespective of the number of multicast end nodes. However, the theoretical result for the average case time complexity of BBMC was expressed as O(log m(l+nlog n)) and could not accurately reflect the above experimental result. This paper proves that the average case time complexity of BBMC can be shortened to O(l+nlog n), which is independent of the number of end nodes, when there is an upper limit of the node degree, which is the number of links connected to a node. In addition, a new parameter β is applied to BBMC, so that the multicast tree created by BBMC has less links on it. Even though the tree costs increase due to this parameter, the tree cost increase rates are much smaller than the link decrease rates.

In this paper, we present a pure hardware implementation of the advanced encryption standard (AES) with 8-bit data path with both encryption/decryption abilities for applications of wireless network. To achieve the requirements of low area resource and high throughput performance, the 8-bit AES design overlaps the MixColumns (MC) and ShiftRows (SR), Inverse MixColumns (IMC) and Inverse ShiftRows (ISR) operations in order to reduce the required clock cycles and critical path delay of transformations involved. The combinations of SB with ISB, MC with IMC, and SR with ISR can effectively reduce the area cost of the AES realization. We implement the AES processor in an ASIC chip. The design has the area cost of 4.3 k-gates with throughput of 72Mbps which can meet the throughput requirement of IEEE 802.11g wireless network standard. From the experimental results, we observe that our AES design has better performance compared with other previous designs.

This paper introduces a simple algorithm for pedestrian detection on low resolution images. The main objective is to create a successful means for real-time pedestrian detection. While the framework of the system consists of edge orientations combined with the local binary patterns (LBP) feature extractor, a novel way of selecting the threshold is introduced. Using the mean-variance of the background examples this threshold improves significantly the detection rate as well as the processing time. Furthermore, it makes the system robust to uniformly cluttered backgrounds, noise and light variations. The test data is the INRIA pedestrian dataset and for the classification, a support vector machine with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel is used. The system performs at state-of-the-art detection rates while being intuitive as well as very fast which leaves sufficient processing time for further operations such as tracking and danger estimation.

We propose a new face relighting method using an illuminance template generated from a single reference portrait. First, the reference is wrapped according to the shape of the target. Second, we employ a new spatially variant edge-preserving smoothing filter to remove the facial identity and texture details of the wrapped reference, and obtain the illumination template. Finally, we relight the target with the template in CIELAB color space. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method for both grayscale and color faces taken from different databases, and the comparisons with previous works demonstrate a better relighting effect produced by our method.

The “Blind Men and an Elephant” is an old Indian story about a group of blind men who encounter an elephant and do not know what it is. This story describes the difficulties of understanding a large concept or global view based on only local information. Modern technologies enable us to easily obtain and retain local information. However, simply collecting local information does not give us a global view, as evident in this old story. This paper gives a concrete model of this story on the plane to theoretically and mathematically discuss it. It analyzes what information we can obtain from collected local information. For a convex target object modeling the elephant and a convex sensing area, it is proven that the size and perimeter length of the target object are the only parameters that can be observed by randomly deployed sensors modeling the blind men. To increase the number of observable parameters, this paper argues that non-convex sensing areas are important and introduces composite sensor nodes as an approach to implement non-convex sensing areas. The paper also derives a model on the discrete space and analyzes it. The analysis results on the discrete space are applicable to some network related issues such as link quality estimation in a part of a network based on end-to-end probing.

This paper addresses a high-level synthesis (HLS) using dual-edge-triggered flip-flops (DETFFs) as memory elements. In DETFF-based HLS, the duty cycle becomes a manageable resource to improve the timing performance. To utilize the duty cycle radically, a programmable duty cycle (PDC) mechanism is built into this HLS, and captured by a new HLS task named PDC scheduling. As a first step toward DETFF-based HLS with PDC, the execution time minimization problem is formulated for given results of operation scheduling. A linear program is presented to solve this problem in polynomial time. As a next step, simultaneous operation scheduling and PDC scheduling problem for the same objective is tackled. A mixed integer linear programming-based (MILP) approach is presented to solve this problem. The experimental results show that the MILP can reduce the execution time for several benchmarks.

An improved genetic algorithm is employed to optimize the structure of (C60)N (N≤25) fullerene clusters with the lowest energy. First, crossover with variable precision, realized by introducing the hamming distance, is developed to provide a faster search mechanism. Second, the bit string mutation and feedback mutation are incorporated to maintain the diversity in the population. The interaction between C60 molecules is described by the Pacheco and Ramalho potential derived from first-principles calculations. We compare the performance of the Improved GA (IGA) with that of the Standard GA (SGA). The numerical and graphical results verify that the proposed approach is faster and more robust than the SGA. The second finite differential of the total energy shows that the (C60)N clusters with N=7, 13, 22 are particularly stable. Performance with the lowest energy is achieved in this work.

Increasing demand for multicast transmission necessitates service-specific and precise quality-of-service (QoS) control. Since existing works provided limited methodologies such as best path selection, their ability is restricted by the given topology and the congestion status of the network. This paper proposes a fanout set partition (FSP) scheme to realize QoS-guaranteed multicast transmission. The FSP scheme adjusts the delay of the multicast flow by dividing its fanout set into smaller subsets. Since it is carried out based on the service requirement, service-specific QoS control is implemented. Mathematical analysis investigates the trade-offs, and the performance evaluation results show significant improvements under various traffic conditions.

It is not always easy for an Android user to choose the most suitable application for a particular task from the great number of applications available. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic approach to extract feature names from Android applications. The case study verifies that we can associate common sequences of Android API calls with feature names.