E-band low-noise amplifier (LNA) monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMICs) were developed using pseudomorphic In0.75Ga0.25As/In0.52Al0.48As high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with a gate length of 50 nm. The nanogate HEMTs demonstrated a maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) of 550 GHz and a current-gain cutoff frequency (fT) of 450 GHz at room temperature, which is first experimental demonstration that fmax as high as 550 GHz are achievable with the improved one-step-recessed gate procedure. Furthermore, using a three-stage LNA-MMIC with 50-nm-gate InGaAs/InAlAs HEMTs, we achieved a minimum noise figure of 2.3 dB with an associated gain of 20.6 dB at 79 GHz.

The use of the in-phase synthetic method is proposed for antenna calibration using the three-antenna method (TAM) in order to make the TAM applicable even in a semi-anechoic chamber (SAC) or on an open-area test site. Suitable antenna arrangements are theoretically investigated for this improved calibration method. Experimental analyses demonstrate that the in-phase synthetic method can remarkably reduce unwanted effects of the ground-reflected wave. Therefore, even on a metal ground plane, the proposed TAM with the in-phase synthetic method can yield an accurate actual gain of a double ridged guide antenna at frequencies from 4 GHz to 14 GHz with differences of +0.16/-0.37 dB from the results of the conventional TAM performed in an fully anechoic room (FAR).

A high-throughput on-chip monitoring circuit with a digital output is proposed for the variations of the NMOS and PMOS threshold voltages. A voltage-controlled delay line (VCDL) and a time-to-digital converter (TDC) are used to convert a small difference in analog voltage into a large difference in time delay. This circuit was applied to the transistors of W = 10 µm and L = 0.18 µm in a 1616 array matrix fabricated with a 0.18-µm process. The measurement of the threshold voltage shows that the maximum peak-to-peak intra-chip variation of NMOS and PMOS transistors are about 31.7 mV and 32.2 mV, respectively, for the temperature range from -25 to 75. The voltage resolutions of NMOS and PMOS transistors are measured to be 1.10 mV/bit and 3.53 mV/bit at 25, respectively. The 8-bit digital code is generated for the threshold voltage of a transistor in every 125 ns, which corresponds to the 8-MHz throughput.

In this letter, we develop a behavioral metric with which spamming botnets can be quickly identified with respect to their residing IP blocks. Our method aims at line-speed operation without deep inspection, so only TCP/IP header fields of the passing packets are examined. However, the proposed metric yields a high-quality receiver operating characteristics (ROC), with high detection rates and low false positive rates.

In this paper, we study an opportunistic scheduling scheme for the TDMA wireless network with relay stations. We model the time-varying channel condition of a wireless link as a stochastic process. Based on this model, we formulate an optimization problem for the opportunistic scheduling scheme that maximizes the expected system throughput while satisfying the QoS constraint of each user. In the opportunistic scheduling scheme for the system without relay stations, each user has only one communication path between the base station and itself, and thus only user selection is considered. However, in our opportunistic scheduling scheme for the system with relay stations, since there may exist multiple paths between the base station and a user, not only user selection but also path selection for the scheduled user is considered. In addition, we also propose an opportunistic time-sharing method for time-slot sharing between base station and relay stations. With the opportunistic time-sharing method, our opportunistic scheduling provides opportunistic resource sharing in three places in the system: user selection in a time-slot, path selection for the selected user, and time-slot sharing between base station and relay stations. Simulation results show that as the number of places that opportunistic resource sharing is applied to increases, the performance improvement also increases.

Digital signal processing requires digital filters with variable frequency characteristics. A variable digital filter (VDF) is a filter whose frequency characteristics can be easily and instantaneously changed. In this paper, we present a design method for variable linear-phase finite impulse response (FIR) filters with multiple variable factors and a reduction method for the number of polynomial coefficients. The obtained filter has a high piecewise attenuation in the stopband. The stopband edge and the position and magnitude of the high piecewise stopband attenuation can be varied by changing some parameters. Variable parameters are normalized in this paper. An optimization methodology known as semidefinite programming (SDP) is used to design the filter. In addition, we present that the proposed VDF can be implemented using the Farrow structure, which suitable for real time signal processing. The usefulness of the proposed filter is demonstrated through examples.

Method for eliminating magnetic saturation in low-voltage and high-current DC-DC converter with fast dynamic response is described. The magnetic saturation is observed in onboard isolated bridge-type DC-DC converter due to inherently asymmetrical PWM signal during transient condition. The saturation is not eliminated by using ac-coupling capacitor for transformer. Mechanism of the saturation is analyzed and confirmed by experiments. Based on the analysis a solution for the magnetic saturation is proposed. The effectiveness of proposed method is also confirmed by experiments.

Based on the least square (LS) approximation of sinusoidal signal in frequency domain by sample data, a frequency estimator is derived. Since sinusoidal signals are narrow-banded whereas white noise spreads equally in the whole spectrum, only narrow-band approximation around the actual tone is needed, and thus the influence of noise can be decreased significantly with high computational efficiency. Experimental results show that, without any iterations, the performance of the proposed estimator is close to the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB), and has a lower SNR threshold compared with other existing estimators.

A novel construction of complementary sequences with multi-width zero cross-correlation zone (ZCCZ) is presented based on the interleaving iteration of a basic kernel set. The presented multi-width ZCCZ complementary (MWZC) sequences can be divided into multiple sequence groups, the correlation functions of which possess one-width intragroup ZCCZ and multi-width intergroup ZCCZ. When an arbitrary orthogonal sequence set with set size equal to sequence length is used as a basic kernel set, the constructed MWZC sequence set and the combination sets of specific subsets with each subset including several groups can be optimal with respect to the theoretical bound on set size. In addition, the MWZC sequence set includes complementary sequence sets with one-width or two-width ZCCZ as special subsets, and allows a more flexible choice of sequence parameters.

A unipolar n-n heterostrucuture diode is developed in the InP material system. The electronic barrier is formed by a saw tooth type of conduction band bending which consists of a quaternary In0.52(AlyGa1-y)0.48As layer with 0 < y < ymax. This barrier is lattice matched for all y to InP and is embedded between two n+-InGaAs layers. By varying the maximum Al-content from ymax,1 = 0.7 to ymax,2 = 1 a variable barrier height is formed which enables a diode-type I-V characteristic by epitaxial design with an adjustable current density within 3 orders of magnitude. The high current density of the diode with the lower barrier height (ymax,1 = 0.7) makes it suitable for high frequency applications at low signal levels. RF measurements reveal a speed index of 52 ps/V at VD = 0.15 V. The device is investigated for RF-to-DC power conversion in UHF RFID transponders with low-amplitude RF signals.

We have developed a new computer-aided diagnostic system for differentiating oral borderline malignancies in hematoxylin-eosin stained microscopic images. Epithelial dysplasia and carcinoma in-situ (CIS) of oral mucosa are two different borderline grades similar to each other, and it is difficult to distinguish between them. A new image processing and analysis method has been applied to a variety of histopathological features and shows the possibility for differentiating the oral cancer borderline grades automatically. The method is based on comparing the drop-shape similarity level in a particular manually selected pair of neighboring rete ridges. It was found that the considered similarity level in dysplasia was higher than those in epithelial CIS, of which pathological diagnoses were conventionally made by pathologists. The developed image processing method showed a good promise for the computer-aided pathological assessment of oral borderline malignancy differentiation in clinical practice.

This letter deals with mobile location estimation based on a minimax mean-squared error (MSE) algorithm using time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements for mitigating the nonline-of-sight (NLOS) effects in cellular systems. Simulation results are provided for illustrating the minimax MSE estimator yields good performance than the other least squares and weighted least squares estimators under relatively low signal-to-noise ratio and moderately NLOS conditions.

In this letter, we propose a low-complexity sparse channel estimation method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed method uses a discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based technique for channel estimation and a novel sorted noise space discrimination technique to estimate the channel length and tap positions. Simulation results demonstrate that the reduction in signal space improves the channel estimation performance.

This paper presents a Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) pre-emphasis technique which utilizes time-domain information processing to increase the data rate for a given bandwidth of interconnection. The PWM pre-emphasis method does not change the pulse amplitude as for conventional FIR pre-emphasis, but instead exploits timing resolution. This fits well with recent CMOS technology trends toward higher switching speeds and lower supply voltage. We discuss multiple-valued data transmission based on time-domain pre-emphasis techniques in consideration of higher-order channel effects. Also, a new data-dependent adaptive time-domain pre-emphasis technique is proposed to compensate for the data-dependent jitter.

In order to quickly discharge the electrostatic discharge (ESD) energy, an unassisted low-voltage-trigger ESD protection structure is proposed in this work. Under transmission line pulsing (TLP) stress, the trigger voltage, turn-on speed and second breakdown current can be obviously improved, as compared with the traditional protection structure. Moreover there is no need to add any extra mask or do any process modification for the new structure. The proposed structure has been verified in foundry's 0.18-µm CMOS process.

A monolithic modulator driver IC based on InP HBTs with a new circuit topology -- called a functional distributed circuit (FDC) -- for over 80-Gb/s optical transmission systems has been developed. The FDC topology includes a wide-band amplifier designed using a distributed circuit, a digital function designed using a lumped circuit, and broadband impedance matching between the lumped circuit and distributed circuit to enable both wider bandwidth and digital functions. The driver IC integrated with a 2:1 multiplexing function produces 2.6-Vp-p (differential output: 5.2 Vp-p) and 2.4- Vp-p (differential output: 4.8 Vp-p) output-voltage swings with less than 450-fs and 530-fs rms jitter at 80 Gb/s and 90 Gb/s, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is equivalent to the highest data rate operation yet reported for monolithic modulator drivers. When it was mounted in a module, the driver IC successfully achieved electro-optical modulation using a dual-drive LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator up to 90 Gb/s. These results indicate that the FDC has the potential to realize high-speed and functional ICs for over-80-Gb/s transmission systems.

This paper presents a paraunitary filter bank (PUFB) based on a direct lifting structure of a building block and its inverse transform for lossless-to-lossy image coding. Although the conventional lifting-based filter banks (LBFBs), which are constructed by lifting structures with integer coefficients and rounding operations, suffer from degradation of coding performance due to much rounding error generated by cascading lifting structures, our proposals can be applied to any PUFB without losing many ones because building blocks can be applied to every lifting block as it is. It is constructed with very simple structures and many rounding operations are eliminated. Additionally, the number of rounding operations is reduced more by using two-dimensional block transform (2DBT) of separated transform to each building block. As result, even though the proposed PUFBs require a little side information block (SIB), they show better coding performance in lossless-to-lossy image coding than the conventional ones.

This paper proposes two novel frame resource allocation schemes: Mixed bidirectional allocation scheme and Offset allocation scheme. They improve system capacity and latency performance unlike the conventional time-division duplex relay scheme which divides the frame structure into time segments for the access zone and time segment for the relay zones as in IEEE802.16j (WiMAX) systems. Computer simulations confirm that the two proposed schemes outperform the conventional schemes in terms of throughput and latency. An evaluation of the offset allocation scheme confirms that it improves the total throughput by about 85%, and reduces latency by about 72%, compared to the conventional schemes.

Although the probabilistic model checking tool called PRISM has been applied in many communication systems, such as wireless local area network, Bluetooth, and ZigBee, the technique is not used in a controller area network (CAN). In this paper, we use PRISM to model the mechanism of priority messages for CAN because the mechanism has allowed CAN to become the leader in serial communication for automobile and industry control. Through modeling CAN, it is easy to analyze the characteristic of CAN for further improving the security and efficiency of automobiles. The Markov chain model helps us to model the behaviour of priority messages.

In this letter, two receive diversity combining techniques are proposed for cooperative relay systems based on single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) when relay station (RS) transmits the received signals from multiple mobile stations (MSs) together using one large size discrete Fourier transform (DFT). A simplified-MRC (S-MRC) technique performs diversity combining in the time-domain by using the estimated channel weights and initial estimates obtained by the SC-FDMA signal detector. An interference rejection-MRC (IR-MRC) technique performs diversity combining in the frequency-domain by adjusting the DFT spreading size at the receiver. It is shown by computer simulation that the proposed receive combining techniques achieve a significant diversity gain over the conventional techniques.