Stochastic approaches for effective power distribution network optimization are proposed. Considering node voltages obtained using dynamic voltage drop analysis as sample variables, multi-variate regression is conducted to optimize clock timing metrics, such as clock skew or jitter. Aggregate correlation coefficient (ACC) which quantifies connectivity between different chip regions is defined in order to find a possible insufficiency in wire connections of a power distribution network. Based on the ACC, we also propose a procedure using linear regression to find the most effective region for improving clock timing metrics. By using the proposed procedure, effective fixing point were obtained two orders faster than by using brute force circuit simulation.

Space-time block codes (STBCs) from coordinate interleaved orthogonal designs (CIODs) have attracted a great deal of attention due to their full-diversity and linear maximum likelihood (ML) decodability. In this letter, we propose a simple detection technique, particularly for full-rate STBCs from CIODs to overcome the performance degradation caused by time-selective fading channels. Furthermore, we evaluate the effects of time-selective fading channels and imperfect channel estimation on STBCs from CIODs by using a newly-introduced index, the results of which demonstrate that full-rate STBCs from CIODs are more robust against time-selective fading channels than conventional full-rate STBCs.

Motion-compensated frame interpolation (MCFI) is widely used to smoothly display low frame rate video sequences by synthesizing and inserting new frames between existing frames. The temporal shift interpolation technique (TSIT) is popular for frame interpolation of video sequences that are encoded by a block-based video coding standard such as MPEG-4 or H.264/AVC. TSIT assumes the existence of a motion vector (MV) and may not result in high-quality interpolation for intra-mode blocks that do not have MVs. This paper proposes a new frame interpolation algorithm mainly designed for intra-mode blocks. In order to improve the accuracy of pixel interpolation, the new algorithm proposes sub-pixel interpolation and the reuse of MVs for their refinement. In addition, the new algorithm employs two different interpolation modes for inter-mode blocks and intra-mode blocks, respectively. The use of the two modes reduces ghost artifacts but potentially increases blocking effects between the blocks interpolated by different modes. To reduce blocking effects, the proposed algorithm searches the boundary of an object and interpolates all blocks in the object in the same mode. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm improves PSNR by an average of 0.71 dB compared with the TSIT with MV refinement and also significantly improves the subjective quality of pictures by reducing ghost artifacts.

In order to estimate fast time-varying channels exactly, the Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) caused by time-varying fading channels in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems is analyzed based on the Basis Expansion Model (BEM). A channel estimation and ICI cancellation algorithm with low complexity is proposed. A special pilot sequence is designed to minimize the cost of computing the channel state information in the proposed algorithm. Based on the property of channel frequency impulse matrix, the ICI can be canceled iteratively in frequency domain. The complexity of the algorithm is analyzed theoretically. Through simulation, the algorithm is shown to be effective in estimating channel state information and in cancelling ICI.

Dynamically-programmable gate arrays (DPGAs) promise lower-cost implementations than conventional field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) since they efficiently reuse limited hardware resources in time. One of the typical DPGA architectures is a multi-context FPGA (MC-FPGA) that requires multiple memory bits per configuration bit to realize fast context switching. However, this additional memory bits cause significant overhead in area and power consumption. This paper presents novel architecture of a switch element to overcome the required capacity of configuration memory. Our main idea is to exploit redundancy between different contexts by using a fine-grained switch element. The proposed MC-FPGA is designed in a 0.18 µm CMOS technology. Its maximum clock frequency and the context switching frequency are measured to be 310 MHz and 272 MHz, respectively. Moreover, novel CAD process that exploits the redundancy in configuration data, is proposed to support the MC-FPGA architecture.

In this paper, we propose δ-similar elimination to improve the search performance of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms in combinatorial optimization problems. This method eliminates similar individuals in objective space to fairly distribute selection among the different regions of the instantaneous Pareto front. We investigate four eliminating methods analyzing their effects using NSGA-II. In addition, we compare the search performance of NSGA-II enhanced by our method and NSGA-II enhanced by controlled elitism.

Recently, a method called pipeline stage unification (PSU) has been proposed to reduce energy consumption for mobile processors via inactivating and bypassing some of the pipeline registers and thus adopt shallow pipelines. It is designed to be an energy efficient method especially for the processors under future process technologies. In this paper, we present a mechanism for the PSU controller which can dynamically predict a suitable configuration based on the program phase detection. Our results show that the designed predictor can achieve a PSU degree prediction accuracy of 84.0%, averaged from the SPEC CPU2000 integer benchmarks. With this dynamic control mechanism, we can obtain 11.4% Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) reduction in the processor that adopts a PSU pipeline, compared to the baseline processor, even after the application of complex clock gating.

Random variations in Id-Vg characteristics of MOS transistors in an LSI chip are shown to be concisely characterized by using only 3 transistor parameters (Vth, β0, vSAT) in the MOS level 3 SPICE model. Statistical analyses of the transistor parameters show that not only the threshold voltage variation, ΔVth, but also the current factor variation, Δβ0, independently induces Id-variation, and that Δβ0 is negatively correlated with the saturation velocity variation, ΔvSAT. Using these results, we have proposed a simple method that effectively takes the correlation between parameters into consideration when creating statistical model parameters for designing a circuit. Furthermore, we have proposed a sensitivity analysis methodology for estimating the process window of SRAM cell operation taking transistor variability into account. By applying the concise statistical model parameters to the sensitivity analysis, we are able to obtain valid process windows without the large volume of data-processing and long turnaround time associated with the Monte Carlo simulation. The process window was limited not only by ΔVth, but also by Δβ0 which enhanced the failure region in the process window by 20%.

In this paper, we propose and analyze the adaptive modulation system with optimal Turbo Coded V-BLAST (Vertical-Bell-lab Layered Space-Time) technique that adopts extrinsic information from a MAP (Maximum A Posteriori) decoder with iterative decoding as a priori probability in two decoding procedures of V-BLAST scheme; the ordering and the slicing. Also, we consider the AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) using the conventional Turbo Coded V-BLAST technique that simply combines the V-BLAST scheme with the turbo coding scheme. And we compare the proposed iterative decoding algorithm to a conventional V-BLAST decoding algorithm and a ML (Maximum Likelihood) decoding algorithm. In this analysis, the MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and the STD (Selection Transmit Diversity) schemes are assumed to be parts of the system for performance improvement. Results indicate that the proposed systems achieve better throughput performance than the conventional systems over the whole SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) range. In terms of transmission rate performance, the suggested system is close in proximity to the conventional system using the ML decoding algorithm. In addition, the simulation result shows that the maximum throughput improvement in each MIMO scheme is respectively about 350 kbps, 460 kbps, and 740 kbps. It is suggested that the effect of the proposed iterative decoding algorithm accordingly gets higher as the number of system antenna increases.

This paper presents a color demosaicing method applied to the Bayer pattern color filter array (CFA). Reliable estimation of an edge direction, edge-directed asymmetric interpolation, and the use of color samples at immediate neighbors are considered as the key guidelines for smooth and sharp image restoration. Also, special interest is directed to local areas that are rich in high spatial frequency variations. For suppression of false colors likely to occur in those areas, a hue vector representation is introduced so that the spatial correlation between different color components may be exploited in consistent with the local constant-hue principle. Smoothing is repeated in the hue vector field a few times. Experimental results have shown preferable performances in terms of PSNR, CIELAB color difference, hue angle difference, CIE chromaticity and visual appearance, in particular resulting in less false colors.

Conventional narrowband interference (NBI) rejection algorithms often assumed perfect pseudo-noise (PN) code synchronization. The functions of NBI rejection and code tracking are performed separately and independently by an adaptive filter and a code tracking loop, respectively. This paper presents two new receiver structures for direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) systems, one operates in coherent mode and the other operates in noncoherent mode. Both receivers are designed to suppress NBI and minimize tracking jitter. Numerical results show that the proposed coherent receiver performs as good as the conventional receiver that uses an LMS NBI rejection filter with zero tracking jitter. The noncoherent receiver, when compared with the coherent one, suffers less than 3 dB degradation for bit error probability smaller than 10-3.

This paper proposes a method to generate exceptional scenarios from a normal scenario written with a scenario language. This method includes (1) generation of exceptional plans and (2) generation of exceptional scenario by a user's selection of these plans. The proposed method enables users to decrease the omission of the possible exceptional scenarios in the early stages of development. The method will be illustrated with some examples.

In video compression, the information transmitted from the encoder to the decoder can be classified into two categories: side information, which carries action instructions to be performed, and data such as the residual error of the texture. As video compression technology has matured, better compression has been achieved by increasing the ratio of side information to data, while reducing the overall bit rate. However, there is a limit to this method because the side information becomes a significant fraction of the overall bit rate. In recent video compression technologies, the decoder tends to share the burden of the decision making in order to achieve a higher compression ratio. To further improve the coding efficiency, we tried to provide the decoder with a more active role in reducing the amount of data. According to this approach, by using reconstructed pixels that surround a target block to produce a better sample predictor of the target block, the amount of side information and the residual error of the texture are reduced. Furthermore, multiple candidates of the sample predictor are utilized to create a better sample predictor without increasing the amount of side information. In this paper, we employ a template matching method that makes the decoder more active. The template matching method is applied to the conventional video codec to improve the prediction performance of intra, inter, and bi-directional pictures in video. The results show that improvements in coding efficiency up to 5.8% are achieved.

In this paper, we propose an improved SO-PMI (Semantic Orientation Using Pointwise Mutual Information) algorithm, for use in Japanese Weblog Opinion Mining. SO-PMI is an unsupervised approach proposed by Turney that has been shown to work well for English. When this algorithm was translated into Japanese naively, most phrases, whether positive or negative in meaning, received a negative SO. For dealing with this slanting phenomenon, we propose three improvements: to expand the reference words to sets of words, to introduce a balancing factor and to detect neutral expressions. In our experiments, the proposed improvements obtained a well-balanced result: both positive and negative accuracy exceeded 62%, when evaluated on 1,200 opinion sentences sampled from three different domains (reviews of Electronic Products, Cars and Travels from Kakaku.com). In a comparative experiment on the same corpus, a supervised approach (SA-Demo) achieved a very similar accuracy to our method. This shows that our proposed approach effectively adapted SO-PMI for Japanese, and it also shows the generality of SO-PMI.

Bone Mineral Density (BMD) is an indicator of osteoporosis that is an increasingly serious disease, particularly for the elderly. To calculate BMD, we need to measure the volume of the femur in a noninvasive way. In this paper, we propose a noninvasive bone volume measurement method using x-ray attenuation on radiography and medical knowledge. The absolute thickness at one reference pixel and the relative thickness at all pixels of the bone in the x-ray image are used to calculate the volume and the BMD. First, the absolute bone thickness of one particular pixel is estimated by the known geometric shape of a specific bone part as medical knowledge. The relative bone thicknesses of all pixels are then calculated by x-ray attenuation of each pixel. Finally, given the absolute bone thickness of the reference pixel, the absolute bone thickness of all pixels is mapped. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments on 300 subjects were performed. We found that the method provides good estimations of real BMD values of femur bone. Estimates shows a high linear correlation of 0.96 between the volume Bone Mineral Density (vBMD) of CT-SCAN and computed vBMD (all P<0.001). The BMD results reveal 3.23% difference in volume from the BMD of CT-SCAN.

We have proposed a random curved surface model as a new mathematical concept which enables the expression of spatial correlation. The model gives us an appropriate methodology to deal with the systematic components of device variation in an LSI chip. The key idea of the model is the fitting of a polynomial to an array of Gaussian random numbers. The curved surface is expressed by a new extension from the Legendre polynomials to form two-dimensional formulas. The formulas were proven to be suitable to express the spatial correlation with reasonable computational complexity. In this paper, we show that this approach is useful in analyzing characteristics of device variation of actual chips by using experimental data.

This paper presents a palmprint recognition algorithm using Phase-Only Correlation (POC). The use of phase components in 2D (two-dimensional) discrete Fourier transforms of palmprint images makes it possible to achieve highly robust image registration and matching. In the proposed algorithm, POC is used to align scaling, rotation and translation between two palmprint images, and evaluate similarity between them. Experimental evaluation using a palmprint image database clearly demonstrates efficient matching performance of the proposed algorithm.

The paper presents a novel approach to estimate the performance of MPI collective communications. Our objective is to help researchers to make appropriate decisions on their message-passing applications. For each collective communication, we attempt to apply LogGP and P-LogP standard point-to-point models. The resulted models are compared with the empirical data in order to identify the most suitable for performance characterization of collective operations. For the communications on large clusters with large size messages, the network contention problem can significantly affect the performance. Hence, to reduce the relative gap between the prediction and the measured runtime, the contention issue is also modeled, by a queuing theory analysis method, and taken in account with the total performance estimation. The experiments performed on a cluster which consists of 64 processors interconnected by Gigabit Ethernet network show encouraging results. For any collective operation, given a number of processors and a range of message sizes, there is at least one model that predicts the performance precisely. We could achieve a gap between the predicted and the measured run-time around 15%. Thus, by handling the contention problem, we could reduce around 80% of the relative gap.

We describe an extension of the wideband direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method using a frequency-domain frequency-invariant beamformer (FDFIB). The technique uses the Matrix Pencil Method (MPM) instead of conventional methods based on the eigen-structure of the input covariance matrix. MPM offers excellent resolution compared to conventional methods.

MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) technologies have attracted much interest for high-rate and high-capacity wireless communications. MIMO technologies under frequency-selective fading environments (wideband MIMO technologies) have also been studied. A wideband MIMO system is affected by ISI (Inter Symbol Interference) and CCI (Co-Channel Interference). Hence, we need a MIMO signal detection technique that simultaneously suppresses ISI and CCI. The OFDM system and SC-FDE (Single Carrier-Frequency Domain Equalization) techniques are often used for suppressing ISI. By employing these techniques with the ZF (Zero Forcing) or the MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) spatial filtering technique, we can cancel both ISI and CCI. To use ZF or MMSE, we need channel state information for calculating the receive weights. Although an LS (Least Square) channel estimation technique has been proposed for MIMO-OFDM systems, it needs a large estimation matrix at the receiver side to obtain sufficient estimation performance in heavy multipath environments. However, the use of a large matrix increases computational complexity and the circuit size. We use frequency domain channel estimation to solve these problems and propose an iterative method for achieving better estimation performance. In this paper, we assume the use of a MIMO-UWB system that employs a UWB-IR (Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio) scheme with the FDE technique as the wideband wireless transmission scheme for heavy multipath environments, and we evaluate the iterative frequency domain channel estimation through computer simulations and computational complexity calculations.