There are continuous and strong demands for the DC-DC converter to reduce the size of passive components and increase the system power density. Advances in CMOS processes and GaN FETs enabled the switching frequency of DC-DC converters to be beyond 10MHz. The advancements of 3-D integrated magnetics will further reduce the footprint. In this paper, the overview of beyond-10MHz DC-DC converters will be provided first, and our recent achievements are introduced focusing on 3D-integration of Fe-based metal composite magnetic core inductor, and GaN FET control designs.

Time-of-flight (TOF) range imaging is a promising technology for various applications such as touchless control, augmented reality interface, and automotive. The TOF range imagers are classified into two methods: direct TOF with single photo avalanche diodes and indirect TOF with lock-in pixels. The indirect TOF range imagers have advantages in terms of a high spatial resolution and high depth precision because their pixels are simple and can handle many photons at one time. This paper reviews and discusses principal lock-in pixels reported both in the past and present, including circuit-based and charge-modulator-based lock-in pixels. In addition, key technologies that include enhancing sensitivity and background suppression techniques are also discussed.

This paper introduces a formation method for 3-dimensional 6 ch.×6 ch. shuffling structures with graded-index (GI) circular core in a multimode polymer optical waveguide for optical printed circuit boards (OPCBs) using a unique photomask-free fabrication technique named the Mosquito method. The interchannel pitch of the fabricated waveguides is 250µm, where all the channels consist of both horizontal and vertical bending structures and the last 6 channels in parallel cross over the first 6 channels. We also report 3-dimensional S-shaped polymer waveguides. In the S-shaped waveguides, the first and last 6 channels with both horizontal and vertical core bending composing the above 3-dimensional shuffling waveguide are separated, in order to evaluate the effect of over-crossing on the loss. It is experimentally confirmed that there is no excess insertion loss due to the shuffling structure in the 3-D shuffling waveguide. The evaluated crosstalk of the 3-D shuffling waveguide is lower than -30dB. The 3-D shuffling waveguide proposed in this paper will be a promising component to achieve high bandwidth density wiring for on-board optical interconnects.

SAR tomography is one of the methods that can perform 3-dimensional (3-D) imaging with multiple SAR datasets by using the Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation technique to estimate the height distribution of scatterers. Several reports on SAR tomography have been issued. However, experimental results of the SAR tomography by the Pi-SAR2-X, Japanese airborne SAR operated by the NICT, have not been reported yet. This paper is the first to report the results of experiments on the Japanese SAR platform. High-resolution 2-dimensional image can be obtained by the X-band SAR. However the image is generated by projecting 3-D objects in to a 2-D image plane, hence the target responses having the same slant-range distance locate at the same image pixel. This is well known as the layover problem. When we employ the X-band SAR tomography, we can obtain 3-D high-resolution images without the layover and also foreshortening problem. It will be useful for disaster damage monitoring, especially in urban areas. The main difficulty of the SAR tomography comes from the phase error caused by inaccurate flight-path data. In many cases, the dataset are preprocessed and compensated so as to parallelize their flight-path to carry out the phase calibration and the DOA estimation easily. However, it is often difficult for common users to obtain such preprocessed datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple calibration method by using a flat-surface area with known altitude. Experiments show that the proposed method is effective for the Pi-SAR2-X standard products without parallelized preprocessing or precise flight-path information.

A layered light-field display based on light-field factorization is considered. In the original work, the factorization is formulated under the assumption that the light field is captured with orthographic cameras. In this paper, we introduce a generalized framework for light-field factorization that can handle both the orthographic and perspective camera projection models. With our framework, a light field captured with perspective cameras can be displayed accurately.

In this paper, the effect of the tilt angle of return stroke channel and the stratified lossy ground on the lightning-induced voltages on the overhead lines are studied using the modified transmission-line model with linear current decay with height (MTLL). The results show that the lightning-induced voltages from oblique discharge channel are larger than those from the vertical discharge channel, and the peak values of the induced voltages will increase with increasing the tilt angle. When the ground is horizontally stratified, the peak of the induced voltages will increase with increasing the conductivity of the lower layer at different distances. When the upper ground conductivity increases, the voltage peak values will decrease if the overhead line is nearby the lightning strike point and increase if the overhead line is far from the lightning strike point. Moreover, the induced voltages are mainly affected by the conductivity of the lower layer soil when the conductivity of the upper layer ground is smaller than that of the lower layer ground at far distances. When the ground is vertically stratified, the induced voltages are mainly affected by the conductivity of the ground near the strike point when the overhead line and the strike point are located above the same medium; if the overhead line and the strike point are located above different mediums, both of the conductivities of the vertically stratified ground will influence the peak of the induced voltages and the conductivity of the ground which is far from the strike point has much more impact on induced voltages.

We evaluated a technique for protecting the copyright of digital data for 3-D printing. To embed copyright information, the inside of a 3-D printed object is constructed from fine domains that have different physical characteristics from those of the object's main body surrounding them, and to read out the embedded information, these fine domains inside the objects are detected using nondestructive inspections such as X-ray photography or thermography. In the evaluation, copyright information embedded inside the 3-D printed object was expressed using the depth of fine cavities inside the object, and X-ray photography were used for reading them out from the object. The test sample was a cuboid 46mm wide, 42mm long, and 20mm deep. The cavities were 2mm wide and 2mm long. The difference in the depths of the cavities appeared as a difference in the luminance in the X-ray photographs, and 21 levels of depth could be detected on the basis of the difference in luminance. These results indicate that under the conditions of the experiment, each cavity expressed 4 to 5bits of information with its depth. We demonstrated that the proposed technique had the possibility of embedding a sufficient volume of information for expressing copyright information by using the depths of cavities.

The 3-D channel routing is a fundamental problem on the physical design of 3-D integrated circuits. The 3-D channel is a 3-D grid G and the terminals are vertices of G located in the top and bottom layers. A net is a set of terminals to be connected. The objective of the 3-D channel routing problem is to connect the terminals in each net with a Steiner tree (wire) in G using as few layers as possible and as short wires as possible in such a way that wires for distinct nets are disjoint. This paper shows that the problem is intractable. We also show that a sparse set of ν 2-terminal nets can be routed in a 3-D channel with O(√ν) layers using wires of length O(√ν).

A novel directional coupler loaded with feedback capacitances on the coupled lines is presented. Its effect of enhancing the coupling is qualitatively shown by deriving an equation for the coupling. Besides, a method to compensate for the phase difference between the even and odd modes of the coupler is presented. To demonstrate, a novel tandem 3-dB coupler consisting of the proposed coupled lines is designed and described. In addition, a waveguide (rectangular coaxial line) 8×8 HYB matrix using planar double-layer structure that is composed of the proposed tandem 3-dB couplers and branch-line couplers, which is operated in S-band, is designed and fabricated showing excellent performance.

A tri-band Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system for LTE 700, LTE2500 and GSM 1800/1900 mobile handset application is presented. The whole system consists of four identical 3-D IFAs (inverted F antenna) folded on FR4 cuboids. Without any special designed decoupling structures, the measured isolation among antenna elements is higher than 20dB in the low and upper bands, even in the middle band, the isolation is higher than 13.7dB. Reflection coefficient, correlation coefficient, gain and radiation pattern are also presented. Acceptable agreement between the antenna models with and without plastic housing, battery and LCD screen demonstrate that the proposed antenna is a competitive candidate for mobile handsets.

ThruChip interface (TCI) is an emerging wireless interface in three-dimensional (3-D) integrated circuit (IC) technology. However, the TCI physical design guidelines remain unclear. In this paper, a ThruChip test chip is designed and fabricated for design guidelines exploration. Three inductive coupling interface physical design scenarios, baseline, power mesh, and dummy metal fill, are deployed in the test chip. In the baseline scenario, the test chip measurement results show that thinning chip or enlarging coil dimension can further reduce TCI power. The power mesh scenario shows that the eddy current on power mesh can dramatically reduce magnetic pulse signal and thus possibly cause TCI to fail. A power mesh splitting method is proposed to effectively suppress eddy current impact while minimizing power mesh structure impact. The simulation results show that the proposed method can recover 77% coupling coefficient loss while only introducing additional 0.5% IR-drop. In dummy metal fill case, dummy metal fill enclosed within TCI coils have no impact on TCI transmission and thus are ignorable.

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.

A compact dual-band MIMO (Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output) antenna system for LTE33 band, LTE 2300 and ISM 2.4GHz applications is presented. The whole system consists of four identical folded 3-D IFAs (inverted F antenna) mounted on nonmetallic cuboids. By using the radiation pattern diversity of the antenna elements, higher than 15dB isolation among the antenna elements and low correlation coefficient (CC<0.3) are achieved without any specially designed decoupling structures. Its gain and radiation pattern are elucidated.

In this paper the amplitude probability distribution (APD) measurement method is applied to evaluate noise coupling to an antenna on an evaluation board that uses mixed RF and digital signals of an IC. We analytically investigate noise coupling path to the antenna where the correlation coefficient matches the APD curve of the evaluation board. Moreover, in order to verify the analysis results, the noise coupling path in the board is evaluated by measurements involving In-phase/Quadrature (I/Q) signals as well as electromagnetic simulations. As a result, we demonstrate that APD method is effective in evaluating a degree of noise coupling from an IC to multiple antennas on the board, and confirm that the intensity of noise coupling to each antenna is affected greatly by the board layout patterns.

This paper presents an inductive coupling interface using a relay transmission scheme and a low-skew 3D clock distribution network synchronized with an external reference clock source for 3D chip stacking. A relayed transmission scheme using one coil is proposed to reduce the number of coils in a data link. Coupled resonation is utilized for clock and data recovery (CDR) for the first time in the world, resulting in the elimination of a source-synchronous clock link. As a result, the total number of coils required is reduced to one-fifth of the conventional number required, yielding a significant improvement in data rate, layout area, and energy consumption. A low-skew 3D clock distribution network utilizes vertically coupled LC oscillators and horizontally coupled ring oscillators. The proposed frequency-locking and phase-pulling scheme widens the lock range to $pm$ 10%. Two test chips were designed and fabricated in 0.18 $mu$m CMOS. The bandwidth of the proposed interface using relay transmission ThruChip Interface (TCI) is 2.7 Gb/s/mm$^2$; energy consumption per chip is 0.9 pJ/b/chip. Clock skew is less than 18- and 25- ps under a 1.8- and 0.9- V supply. The distributed RMS jitter is smaller than 1.72 ps.

This paper presents work on integrating wireless 3-D interconnection interface, namely ThruChip Interface (TCI), in three-dimensional field-programmable gate array (3-D FPGA) exploration tool (TPR). TCI is an emerging 3-D IC integration solution because of its advantages over cost, flexibility, reliability, comparable performance, and energy dissipation in comparison to through-silicon-via (TSV). Since the communication bandwidth of TCI is much higher than FPGA internal logic signals, in order to fully utilize its bandwidth, the time-division multiplexing (TDM) scheme is adopted. The experimental results show 25% on average and 58% at maximum path delay reduction over 2-D FPGA when five layers are used in TCI based 3-D FPGA architecture. Although the performance of TCI based 3-D FPGA architecture is 8% below that of TSV based 3-D FPGA on average, TCI based architecture can reduce active area consumed by vertical communication channels by 42% on average in comparison to TSV based architecture and hence leads to better delay and area product.

Ultra-wideband pulse radar exhibits high range resolution, and excellent capability in penetrating dielectric media. With that, it has great potential as an innovative non-destructive inspection technique for objects such as human body or concrete walls. For suitability in such applications, we have already proposed an accurate permittivity estimation method for a 2-dimensional dielectric object of arbitrarily shape and clear boundary. In this method, the propagation path estimation inside the dielectric object is calculated, based on the geometrical optics (GO) approximation, where the dielectric boundary points and its normal vectors are directly reproduced by the range point migration (RPM) method. In addition, to compensate for the estimation error incurred using the GO approximation, a waveform compensation scheme employing the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method was incorporated, where an initial guess of the relative permittivity and dielectric boundary are employed for data regeneration. This study introduces the 3-dimensional extension of the above permittivity estimation method, aimed at practical uses, where only the transmissive data are effectively extracted, based on quantitative criteria that considers the spatial relationship between antenna locations and the dielectric object position. Results from a numerical simulation verify that our proposed method accomplishes accurate permittivity estimations even for 3-dimensional dielectric medium of wavelength size.

With the rapid development of multi-view video coding (MVC) and light field rendering (LFR), Free-View Television (FTV) has emerged as new entrainment equipment, which can bring more immersive and realistic feelings for TV viewers. In FTV broadcasting system, the TV-viewer can freely watch a realistic arbitrary view of a scene generated from a number of original views. In such a scenario, the ownership of the multi-view video should be verified not only on the original views, but also on any virtual view. However, capacities of existing watermarking schemes as copyright protection methods for LFR-based FTV are only one bit, i.e., presence or absence of the watermark, which seriously impacts its usage in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-bit watermarking scheme for LFR-based free-view video. The direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) watermark is constructed according to the multi-bit message and embedded into DCT domain of each view frame. The message can be extracted bit-by-bit from a virtual frame generated at an arbitrary view-point with a correlation detector. Furthermore, we mathematically prove that the watermark can be detected from any virtual view. Experimental results also show that the watermark in FTV can be successfully detected from a virtual view. Moreover, the proposed watermark method is robust against common signal processing attacks, such as Gaussian filtering, salt & peppers noising, JPEG compression, and center cropping.

We propose low-power techniques for wireless three-dimensional Network-on-Chips (wireless 3-D NoCs), in which the connections among routers on the same chip are wired while the routers on different chips are connected wirelessly using inductive-coupling. The proposed low-power techniques stop the clock and power supplies to the transmitter of the wireless vertical links only when their utilizations are higher than the threshold. Meanwhile, the whole wireless vertical link will be shut down when the utilization is lower than the threshold in order to reduce the power consumption of wireless 3-D NoCs. This paper uses an on-demand method, in which the dormant data transmitter or the whole vertical link will be activated as long as a flit comes. Full-system many-core simulations using power parameters derived from a real chip implementation show that the proposed low-power techniques reduce the power consumption by 23.4%-29.3%, while the performance overhead is less than 2.4%.

We estimated the dependence of the perceived depth on luminance ratio by increasing the distance between the front and rear planes of a depth-fused 3-D (DFD) display. When the distance is great, the perceived depth has the tendency of nonlinear dependence on luminance ratio, which is very different from the almost linear dependence in a short-distance conventional DFD display. In a long-distance DFD display, the perceived depth is split to near the front plane at 0-40% of the rear luminance, near the rear plane at 70-100%, and the midpoint of the front and rear planes at 40-60%. Thus, the luminance-ratio dependence of perceived depth changes widely with the distance.