A three-dimensional semiconductor package structure with inter-chip connections was developed for broadband data transfer and low latency electrical communication between a high-capacity memory and a logic device interconnected by a feedthrough interposer (FTI) featuring a 10 µm scale fine-wiring pattern and ultra-fine-pitch through vias. This technology features co-existence of the wide-band memory accessibility of a system-on-chip (SoC) and the capability of memory capacity increasing of a system-in-package (SiP) that is made possible by the individual fabrication of memory and logic on independent chips. This technology can improve performance due to memory band widening and a reduction in the power consumed in inter-chip communications. This paper describes the concept, structure, process, and experimental results of prototypes of this package, called SMAFTI (SMAart chip connection with FeedThrough Interposer). This paper also reports the results of the fundamental reliability test of this novel inter-chip connection structure and board-level interconnectivity tests.

This paper presents a new multi-layered artificial immune system architecture using the ideas generated from the biological immune system for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed methodology is composed of five layers. After expressing the problem as a suitable representation in the first layer, the search space and the features of the problem are estimated and extracted in the second and third layers, respectively. Through taking advantage of the minimized search space from estimation and the heuristic information from extraction, the antibodies (or solutions) are evolved in the fourth layer and finally the fittest antibody is exported. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system, the graph planarization problem is tested. Simulation results based on several benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm performs better than traditional algorithms.

This paper presents a wide tuning range VCO with an automatic frequency, gain, and two-step amplitude calibration loop for Digital TV (DTV) tuner applications. To cover the wide tuning range, the fully digital automatic frequency calibration (AFC) loop is used. In addition to the AFC loop, a two-step negative-Gm tuning loop is proposed to provide the optimum negative-Gm to the LC tank in a wide frequency range with a fine resolution. In the coarse negative-Gm tuning loop, the number of active negative-Gm cells is selected digitally based on the target frequency. In the fine negative-Gm tuning loop, the negative-Gm is tuned finely with the bias voltage of the VCO. Also, the digital VCO gain calibration scheme is proposed to compensate for the gain variation in a wide tuning range. The VCO tuning range is 2.6 GHz, from 1.7 GHz to 4.3 GHz, and the power consumption is 2 mA to 4 mA from a 1.8 V supply. The measured VCO phase noise is -120 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset.

In this paper, we present a Double-Anchoring Based Tone Mapping (DABTM) algorithm for displaying high dynamic range (HDR) images. First, two anchoring values are obtained using the double-anchoring theory. Second, we use the two values to formulate the compressing operator, which can achieve the aim of tone mapping directly. A new method based on accelerated K-means for the decomposition of HDR images into groups (frameworks) is proposed. Most importantly, a group of piecewise-overlap linear functions is put forward to define the belongingness of pixels to their locating frameworks. Experiments show that our algorithm is capable of achieving dynamic range compression, while preserving fine details and avoiding common artifacts such as gradient reversals, halos, or loss of local contrast.

This paper presents a novel approach of analysing colour bleeding caused by image compression. This is achieved by isolating two components of colour bleeding, and evaluating these components separately. Although these specific components of colour bleeding have not been studied with great detail in the past, with the use of a synthetic test pattern -- similar to the colour bars used to test analogue television transmissions -- we have successfully isolated, and evaluated: "colour blur" and "colour ringing," as two separate components of colour bleeding artefact. We have also developed metrics for these artefacts, and tested these derived metrics in a series of trials aimed to test the colour reproduction performance of a JPEG codec, and a JPEG2000 codec -- both implemented by the developer IrfanView. The algorithms developed to measure these artefact metrics proved to be effective tools for evaluating and benchmarking the performance of similar codecs, or different implementations of the same codecs.

In this paper, we propose an area-efficient design of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) processor by applying a new common-expression-elimination (CSE) method to the sub-functions of various transformations required in AES. The proposed method reduces the area cost of realizing the sub-functions by extracting the common factors in the bit-level XOR/AND-based sum-of-product expressions of these sub-functions using a new CSE algorithm. Cell-based implementation results show that the AES processor with our proposed CSE method has significant area improvement compared with previous designs.

We report Ultraviolet (UV)-induced visible light luminescence in artificial-lattice thin films of ion-doped silica glass (silica superstructure thin films). The film was composed of periodic nanometer layers of germanium-doped silica (Ge:SiO2), titanium-doped silica (Ti:SiO2), and tin-doped silica (Sn:SiO2). The thickness of each layer was between 10 and 30 nm. Despite the small thickness of the film (few microns), a relatively bright luminescence of white light was observed, along with cathode-ray luminescence in the superstructure film. In addition, irradiation of the superstructure film with UV light led to light amplification by stimulated emission at 405 nm. The experimental results suggest the potential application of silica superstructure thin films as optical amplifiers.

In this paper, we study the performance of dual hop relaying in which the best relay selected by partial relay selection will help the source-destination link to overcome the channel impairment. Specifically, closed-form expressions for outage probability, symbol error probability and achievable diversity gain are derived using the statistical characteristic of the signal-to-noise ratio. Numerical investigation shows that the system achieves diversity of two regardless of relay number and also confirms the correctness of the analytical results. Furthermore, the performance loss due to partial relay selection is investigated.

Estimating a location of mobile phones or sound source is of considerable interest in wireless communications and signal processing. In this letter, we propose squared range weighted least squares (SRWLS) using the range estimate attained from the Taylor series-based maximum likelihood. The weight can be determined more accurately when using the proposed method, compared with the existing methods using the variance of noise. The simulation results show that the proposed method is superior to the existing methods in RMSE as the measurement noise amount of sensors increases.

This paper reviews applications of fuzzy logic to telecommunications and proposes a novel fuzzy combining scheme for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio systems. A summary of previous applications of fuzzy logic to telecommunications is given outlining also potential applications of fuzzy logic in future cognitive radio systems. In complex and dynamic operational environments, future cognitive radio systems will need sophisticated decision making and environment awareness techniques that are capable of handling multidimensional, conflicting and usually non-predictable decision making problems where optimal solutions can not be necessarily found. The results indicate that fuzzy logic can be used in cooperative spectrum sensing to provide additional flexibility to existing combining methods.

Channel estimation is a key baseband processing task in wireless systems. Filtering or smoothing algorithms can improve the accuracy of channel estimates and the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) can be used for this purpose. By using the DCT, performance will be improved compared to the straight-forward approach of per subcarrier estimation (PSE). However, the complexity of the DCT is not negligible. This paper proposes a low-complexity channel estimation scheme using the DCT. Simulation results show that the performance is improved by more than 1dB compared with PSE in MIMO-OFDM system.

The hidden terminal problem leads to frequent collisions and decreases the throughput of ad hoc networks dramatically. Low network spatial reuse also results in fewer parallel transmissions, which further leads to reduced network throughput. Eliminating the hidden terminals and improving the spatial reuse are two important approaches to improving network throughput. In this paper, spatial distribution of the hidden terminals is analyzed in consideration of accumulated interference and environmental noise. As the distribution of hidden terminals is affected by many factors such as transmitter-receiver distance, SINR requirement and nodes density, it is inefficient to use fixed busy tone transmission power. To eliminate the hidden terminals and improve network spatial reuse, an enhancement to DBTMA named EDBTMA is proposed. This is achieved by using an adaptive busy tone power control scheme. Receivers adjust the transmission power of busy tone according to received signal power and accumulated interference adaptively so that all hidden terminals (and only hidden terminals) are covered by the busy tone. Simulation results show that EDBTMA protocol can solve the hidden terminal problem and improve network spatial reuse better than DBTMA and achieves 65% additional network throughput compared to DBTMA.

Block truncation coding (BTC) is an efficient image compression algorithm that generates a constant output bit-rate. For color image compression, vector quantization (VQ) is exploited to improve the coding efficiency. In this letter, we propose an improved VQ based BTC (VQ-BTC) algorithm using template matching and Lloyd quantization (LQ). The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the PSNR by 0.9 dB in average compared to the conventional VQ-BTC algorithms.

This paper presents algorithms for searching text regions with specifying annotated information in tag-annotated text by using Region Algebra. The original algebra and its efficient algorithms are extended to handle both nested regions and crossed regions. The extensions are necessary for text search by using rich linguistic annotations. We first assign a depth number to every nested tag region to order these regions and write efficient algorithms using the depth number for the containment operations which can treat nested tag regions. Next, we introduce variables for attribute values of tags into the algebra to treat annotations in which attributes indicate another tag regions, and propose an efficient method of treating re-entrancy by incrementally determining values for variables. Our algorithms have been implemented in a text search engine for MEDLINE, which is a large textbase of abstracts in medical science. Experiments in tag-annotated MEDLINE abstracts demonstrate the effectiveness of specifying annotations and the efficiency of our algorithms. The system is made publicly accessible at http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/medie/.

Interleaved Frequency Division Multiple Access (IFDMA) is a modulation scheme that achieves a frequency diversity gain and establishes a frequency orthogonal channel. In multicarrier modulation schemes such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), a pilot signal is dispersed over the frequency and time domains and thus the estimated channel transfer function can track the fluctuations that occur in the time and frequency domains. This pilot signal is referred to as a scattered pilot signal. However, the scattered pilot signal has not yet been applied to IFDMA. In this paper, we propose a scattered pilot signal for IFDMA. The problem with the proposed scattered pilot signal is that it increases the peak to average power ratio of the transmitted signal. Therefore, we also propose three peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction schemes for the IFDMA symbols including the scattered pilot signal. A computer simulation shows that the proposed pilot signal achieves a highly accurate channel estimation under various channel conditions and that the proposed reduction shemes significantly reduce the PAPR.

3D graphics application is widely used in consumer electronics which is an inevitable tendency in the future. In general, the higher abstraction level is used to model a complex system like 3D graphics SoC. However, the concerned issue is that how to use efficient methods to traverse design space hierarchically, reduce simulation time, and refine the performance fast. This paper demonstrates a system-level design space exploration model for a tile-based 3D graphics SoC refinement. This model uses UML tools which can assist designers to traverse the whole system and reduces simulation time dramatically by adopting SystemC. As a result, the system performance is improved 198% at geometry function and 69% at rendering function, respectively.

Partial forwarding is a design method to place forwarding paths on a part of processor pipeline. Hardware cost of processor can be reduced without performance loss by partial forwarding. However, compiler with the instruction scheduler which considers partial forwarding structure of the target processor is required since conventional scheduling algorithm cannot make the most of partial forwarding structure. In this paper, we propose a heuristic instruction scheduling method for processors with partial forwarding structure. The proposed algorithm uses available distance to schedule instructions which are suitable for the target partial forwarding processor. Experimental results show that the proposed method generates near-optimal solutions in practical time and some of the optimized codes for partial forwarding processor run in the shortest time among the target processors. It also shows that the proposed method is superior to hazard detection unit.

This paper studies reflection and transmission of a TE plane wave from a two-dimensional random slab with statistically anisotropic fluctuation by means of the stochastic functional approach. By starting with a representation of the random wavefield presented in the previous paper [IEICE Trans. Electron., vol.E92-C, no.1, pp.77-84, Jan. 2009], a solution algorithm of the multiple renormalized mass operator is newly shown even for anisotropic fluctuation. The multiple renormalized mass operator, the first-order incoherent scattering cross section and the optical theorem are numerically calculated and illustrated in figures. The relation between statistical properties and anisotropic fluctuation is discussed.

Traditional algorithms for dynamic OFDMA resource allocation have relatively deterministic system capacity and user fairness. Thus, in this letter, an efficient scheme is proposed to flexibly adjust quality-of-service for users, which is achieved by appropriately setting minimum data-rate of each user.

Geographic routing for wireless sensor networks requires a source that can encapsulate the location of a sink in each data packet. How a source can obtain the location of a sink with low overhead is a difficult issue. This letter proposes a Quorum Based Sink Location Service (QSLS) which can be exploited by most geographic routing protocols in arbitrary irregular wireless sensor networks.