This paper presents some results of an experimental trial for the 5th generation (5G) wireless communication systems using 28GHz band. In order to tackle rapidly increasing traffic for 2020 and beyond, new radio access networks for the 5G mobile communication systems will introduce the use of higher frequency bands such as spectra higher than 10GHz to achieve higher capacity and super high bit rate transmission of several tens of Gbps. The target of this experimental trial is to evaluate the feasibility of using the 28GHz band with super-wide bandwidth of 800MHz for 5G wireless communication systems. To compensate large path-loss in higher frequency, the beamforming (BF) based on Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of promising techniques and can be combined with spatial multiplexing of multiple data streams to achieve much higher capacity. In addition, to support the mobility of mobile station (MS), beam tracking technique is important. In this trial, we first conduct a basic experiment of single-stream transmission by using prototype system with base station (BS) having 96-element antenna and MS having 8-element antenna to evaluate the effectiveness of joint transmitter/receiver BF in 28GHz band in terms of coverage, impact of path loss, shadowing loss and penetration loss under indoor, outdoor and outdoor-to-indoor (O-to-I) environments. We show that by using 28 GHz band with BF based on Massive MIMO, higher throughput near 1.2Gbps can be achieved at many points in the indoor environment. It is also shown that the throughput of over 1Gbps can be achieved at points around 200m distant from BS in outdoor line-of-site (LOS) environment. Secondly, to evaluate the effectiveness of spatial multiplexing and beam tracking under more realistic environment, we also conduct the outdoor experiment of BF combined with 2-stream spatial multiplexing in high mobility environment with MS speed of up to 60km/h by using smartphone-shape MS antenna. We also show that maximum throughput of 3.77Gbps can be achieved with MS speed of 60km/h by using BF with 2-stream multiplexing and beam tracking.

To use millimeter wave bands in future cellular and outdoor wireless networks, understanding the multipath cluster characteristics such as delay and angular spread for different polarization is very important besides knowing the path loss and other large scale propagation parameters. This paper presents result from analysis of wide-band full polarimetric double directional channel measurement at the millimeter wave band in a typical urban pico-cell environment. Only limited number of multipath clusters with gains ranging from -8dB to -26.8dB below the free space path loss and mainly due to single reflection, double reflection and diffraction, under both line of sight (LOS) and obstructed LOS conditions are seen. The cluster gain and scattering intensity showed strong dependence on polarization. The scattering intensities for ϑ-ϑ polarization were seen to be stronger compared to ϕ-ϕ polarization and on average 6.1dB, 5.6dB and 4.5dB higher for clusters due to single reflection, double reflection and scattering respectively. In each cluster, the paths are highly concentrated in the delay domain with delay spread comparable to the delay resolution of 2.5ns irrespective of polarization. Unlike the scattering intensity, the angular spread of paths in each cluster did not show dependence on polarization. On the base station side, average angular spread in azimuth and in elevation were almost similar with ≤3.3° spread in azimuth and ≤3.2° spread in elevation for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly smaller than those observed for ϕ-ϕ polarization. On the mobile station side the angular spread in azimuth was much higher compared to the base station side. On average, azimuth angular spread of ≤11.4° and elevation angular spread of ≤5° are observed for ϑ-ϑ polarization. These spreads were slightly larger than in ϕ-ϕ polarization. Knowing these characteristics will be vital for more accurate modeling of the channel, and in system and antenna design.

We propose an architecture for a 1-bit band-pass delta-sigma modulator (BP-DSM) that outputs concurrent multiband RF signals. The proposed BP-DSM consists of parallel bandpass filters (BPFs) in the feedback loop to suppress the quantization noise at each target frequency band while maintaining the stability. Each BPF is based on second-order parallel infinite impulse response (IIR) filters. This architecture can unify and reconfigure the split BPFs according to the number of bands. The architecture complexity is proportional to the bandwidth of each RF signal and is independent of the carrier spacing between the bands. The conventional architecture of a concurrent multiband digital modulator, reported previously, has multiple input ports to the dedicated BPF at each band and so it cannot be efficiently integrated. Measurements show that the proposed architecture is feasible for transmitting a concurrent dual-band and a triple-band by changing the 1-bit digital data stream while keeping a data transmission rate of 10Gb/s. We demonstrate that the proposed architecture outputs the signal with LTE intra-band and inter-band carrier aggregation on 0.8GHz, 2.1GHz and 3.5GHz, each with 40MHz bandwidth in 120MHz aggregated bandwidth, whose bandwidth surpasses the bandwidth with carrier aggregation of LTE-A up to 100MHz. Adjacent channel leakage ratios of -49dBc and -46dBc are achieved at 3.5GHz in the concurrent dual-band and triple-band, respectively.

The 1-bit band-pass delta-sigma modulator (BP-DSM) achieves high resolution by using the oversampling technique. This method allows direct RF signal transmission from a digitally modulated signal, using a 1-bit digital pulse train. However, it has been previously reported that the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) in a target frequency band degrades due to the pulse transition mismatch between rising and falling waveforms in the time domain. This paper clarifies that the spurious distortion in BP-DSM is caused by the asymmetricity of the waveform about the center of an eye pattern in the time axis, and proposes a 1-bit BP-DSM with the compensator consisting of a fractional delay filter and a binary data differentiator to cancel out the asymmetry in the target frequency band. This can accurately provide a wideband cancellation signal with more than 100MHz bandwidth, including the adjacent channel, within 50dB power dynamic range. Using long term evolution (LTE) signals with 5MHz bandwidth at 0.8GHz, we simulated the spurious distortion, performing various combinations of rising and falling times in the eye pattern, and the proposed 1-bit BP-DSM always achieved high ACLR, up to 60dB, in 140MHz bandwidth, under all conditions.

60GHz wireless communication requires analog baseband circuits having a bandwidth of about 1GHz. This paper presents a wide bandwidth current-mode low pass filter technique which involves current amplifiers, resistors and capacitors. The proposed current-mode filter is obtained by replacing an integrator employing an op-amp with another integrator employing a current amplifier. With the low input impedance current amplifier having little variation of the input impedance, the proposed filter is expected to improve linearity and power efficiency. The proposed current amplifier which employs super source follower topology with complementary input is suitable for the filter because of its class AB operation. Although simulation results shows the conventional current amplifier which employs super source follower topology without the complementary input has 12Ω variation and 30Ω input impedance, the proposed current amplifier has 1Ω variation and 21Ω input impedance. A fourth order 1GHz bandwidth filter which involves the proposed current amplifiers is designed in a 65nm CMOS technology. The filter can achieve IIP3 of 1.3dBV and noise of 0.6mVrms with power consumption of 13mW under supply voltage of 1.2V according to simulation results with layout parasitic extraction models. Active area of the filter is 380μm×170μm.

In this paper, a miniaturized absorptive/transmissive radome with switchable passband and wide absorbing band is designed. Pin diodes are loaded on the radome in order to obtain switchable passband and miniaturized unit cells, while the resistor loaded double square loops are used to absorb the incident wave. The total thickness of the radome is only 4.5mm. Its transmission and absorbing properties are verified by both synthetic experiments and measurements in the anechoic chamber. Furthermore, the switchable passband of the radome is also evaluated using a waveguide simulator.

This paper first reviews the state-of-the-art noise reduction methods and points out their vulnerability in noise reduction performance and speech quality, especially under the low signal-noise ratios (SNR) environments. Then this paper presents an improved perceptual multiband spectral subtraction (MBSS) noise reduction algorithm (NRA) and a novel robust voice activity detection (VAD) based on the amended sub-band SNR. The proposed SNR-based VAD can considerably increase the accuracy of discrimination between noise and speech frame. The simulation results show that the proposed NRA has better segmental SNR (segSNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) performance than other noise reduction algorithms especially under low SNR environments. In addition, a fully operational digital hearing aid chip is designed and fabricated in the 0.13 µm CMOS process based on the proposed NRA. The final chip implementation shows that the whole chip dissipates 1.3 mA at the 1.2 V operation. The acoustic test result shows that the maximum output sound pressure level (OSPL) is 114.6 dB SPL, the equivalent input noise is 5.9 dB SPL, and the total harmonic distortion is 2.5%. So the proposed digital hearing aid chip is a promising candidate for high performance hearing-aid systems.

The region that includes the register file is a hot spot in high-performance cores that limits the clock frequency. Although multibanking drastically reduces the area and energy consumption of the register files of superscalar processor cores, it suffers from low IPC due to bank conflicts. Our skewed multistaging drastically reduces not the bank conflict probability but the pipeline disturbance probability by the second stage. The evaluation results show that, compared with NORCS, which is the latest research on a register file for area and energy efficiency, a proposed register file with 18 banks achieves a 39.9% and 66.4% reduction in circuit area and in energy consumption, while maintaining a relative IPC of 97.5%.

This paper presents the design and characterization of an E-band 16×16-slot monopulse array antenna with full-corporate-feed fabricated by the commercially available batch process of diffusion bonding of laminated copper plates. The antenna is multi-layered, and consists of vertically-interconnected radiating elements, a corporate-feed circuit and a comparator. It has four input ports for different excitations. Sum and difference beams in different cut-planes for monopulse operation can be generated. The antenna has a quasi-planar profile, and a total size of 13.31 λ0×13.31λ0×1.52λ0 (λ0 is the wavelength at the design frequency of 78.5GHz). The antenna demonstrates a wide operation bandwidth of 17.2 (70-87.2) GHz for VSWR < 2. At 78.5GHz: 1) for the sum beam, there is a 32.6-dBi realized gain (83% antenna efficiency) and a 33.3-dBi directivity (95% aperture efficiency); 2) for the difference beams in the E-, H-, 45°-, and 135°-planes, the null depths are -53.0, -58.0, -57.8, and -65.6dB, respectively. Across the full operation band where the sum main-beam and difference null are able to consistently point at the boresight, the antenna also demonstrates excellent performance in terms of high gain, high efficiency, high isolation, low cross-polarization, and distinguished monopulse capability.

A chirp spread spectrum (CSS) system uses a chirp signal which changes the instantaneous frequency according to time for spreading a transmission bandwidth. In the CSS system, the transmission performance can be simply improved by increasing the time-bandwidth product which is known as the processing gain. However, increasing the transmission bandwidth is limited because of the spectrum regulation. In this letter, we propose a correlation-based chirp rate allocation method to improve the transmission performance by analyzing the cross-correlation coefficient in the same time-bandwidth product. In order to analyze the transmission performance of the proposed method, we analytically derive the cross-correlation coefficient according to the time-bandwidth separation product and simulate the transmission performance. The simulation results show that the proposed method can analytically allocate the optimal chirp rate and improve the transmission performance.

In this paper, robust stability of nonlinear feedback systems with unknown disturbance is considered by using the operator-based right coprime factorization method. For dealing with the unknown disturbance, a new design scheme and a nonlinear controller are given. That is, robust stability of the nonlinear systems with unknown disturbance is guaranteed by combining right coprime factorization with the proposed controller. Simultaneously, adverse effects resulting from the disturbance are removed by using the proposed nonlinear operator controller. Finally, a simulation example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed design scheme of this paper.

Compressed sensing (CS)-based wideband spectrum sensing has been a hot topic because it can cut high signal acquisition costs. However, using CS-based approaches, the spectral recovery requires large computational complexity. This letter proposes a wideband spectrum sensing algorithm based on multirate coprime sampling. It can detect the entire wideband directly from sub-Nyquist samples without spectral recovery, thus it brings a significant reduction of computational complexity. Compared with the excellent spectral recovery algorithm, i.e., orthogonal matching pursuit, our algorithm can maintain good sensing performance with computational complexity being several orders of magnitude lower.

A comprehensive model is presented for estimating the bit error rate (BER) of write disturbance in a resistive memory composed of a cross-point array. While writing a datum into the selected address, the non-selected addresses are biased by word-line (WL) and bit-line (BL). The stored datum in the non-selected addresses will be disturbed if the bias is large enough. It is necessary for the current flowing through the non-selected address to be calculated in order to estimate the BER of the write disturbance. Since it takes a long time to calculate the current flowing in a large-scale cross-point array, several simplified circuits have been utilized to decrease the calculating time. However, these simplified circuits are available to the selected address, not to the non-selected one. In this paper, new simplified circuits are proposed for calculating the current flowing through the non-selected address. The proposed and the conventional simplified circuits are used, and on that basis the trade-off between the write disturbance and the write error is discussed. Furthermore, the error correcting code (ECC) is introduced to improve the trade-off and to provide the low-cost memory chip matching current production lines.

A wideband noise-cancelling receiver front-end is proposed in this brief. As a basic architecture, a low-noise transconductance amplifier, a passive mixer, and a transimpedance amplifier are employed to compose the wideband receiver. To achieve wideband input matching for the transconductor, a global feedback method is adopted. Since the wideband receiver has to minimize linearity degradation if a large blocker signal exists out-of-band, a linearization technique is applied for the transconductor circuit. The linearization cancels third-order intermodulation distortion components and increases linearity; however, the additional circuits used in linearization generate excessive noise. A noise-cancelling architecture that employs an auxiliary path cancels noise signals generated in the main path. The designed receiver front-end is fabricated using a 65-nm CMOS process. The receiver operates in the frequency range of 25 MHz-2 GHz with a gain of 49.7 dB. The in-band input-referred third-order intercept point is improved by 12.3 dB when the linearization is activated, demonstrating the effectiveness of the linearization technique.

In this paper, we study the problem of noise with regard to the perfect reconstruction of non-bandlimited signals, the class of signals having a finite number of degrees of freedom per unit time. The finite rate of innovation (FRI) method provides a means of recovering a non-bandlimited signal through using of appropriate kernels. In the presence of noise, however, the reconstruction function of this scheme may become ill-conditioned. Further, the reduced sampling rates afforded by this scheme can be accompanied by increased error sensitivity. In this paper, to obtain improved noise robustness, we propose the matrix pencil (MP) method for sample signal reconstruction, which is based on principal component analysis (PCA). Through the selection of an adaptive eigenvalue, a non-bandlimited signal can be perfectly reconstructed via a stable solution of the Yule-Walker equation. The proposed method can obtain a high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for the reconstruction results. Herein, the method is applied to certain non-bandlimited signals, such as a stream of Diracs and nonuniform splines. The simulation results demonstrate that the MP and PCA are more effective than the FRI method in suppressing noise. The FRI method can be used in many applications, including those related to bioimaging, radar, and ultrasound imaging.

In this paper, a printed elliptical monopole antenna for wideband circular polarization is proposed. The antenna's structure is asymmetric with regard to the microstrip line. The section of the ground plane that overlaps the elliptical patch is removed. With simulations, the relationship between the antenna's geometrical parameters and the antenna's axial ratio of circularly polarized wave is clarified. The operational principle for wideband circular polarization is explained by the simulated electric current distributions. The simulated and measured bandwidths of the 3dB-axial ratio with a 2-VSWR is approximately 88.4% (2.12GHz-5.47GHz) and 83.6% (2.20GHz-5.36GHz), respectively.

A miniaturized and bandwidth-enhanced implantable antenna is designed for wireless biotelemetry in the medical implantable communications service (MICS) frequency band of 402-405MHz. To reduce the antenna size and enhance the available bandwidth with regard to the reflection coefficients, a meandered planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) structure is adopted on a dielectric/ferrite substrate which is an artificial magneto-dielectric material. The potential of the proposed antenna for the intended applications is verified through prototype fabrication and measurement with a 2/3 human muscle phantom. Good agreement is observed between the simulation and measurement in terms of resonant characteristics and gain radiation patterns; the bandwidth is enhanced in comparison with that of the ferrite-removed antenna, and antenna gain of -27.7dB is obtained in the measurement. Allowances are made for probable fabrication inaccuracies and practical operating environments. An analysis of 1-g SAR distribution is conducted to confirm compliance with the specific absorption rate limitation (1.6W/kg) of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

This paper proposed that a path loss model for outdoor-to-indoor corridor is presented to construct next generation mobile communication systems. The proposed model covers the frequency range of millimeter wave bands up to 40GHz and provides three dimensional incident angle characteristics. Analysis of path loss characteristics is conducted by ray tracing. We clarify that the paths reflected multiple times between the external walls of buildings and then diffracted into one of the buildings are dominant. Moreover, we also clarify how the paths affect the path loss dependence on frequency and three dimensional incident angle. Therefore, by taking these dependencies into consideration, the proposed model decreases the root mean square errors of prediction results to within about 2 to 6dB in bands up to 40GHz.

We propose a new direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method of wideband signals. In several decades, many approaches to estimate DOA of wideband signal sources have been proposed. Test of orthogonality of projected subspaces (TOPS) and Squared TOPS are the estimation algorithms to realize high resolution performance of closely spaced signal sources. These methods, however, are not suitable for DOA estimation of multiple signal sources, because the spatial spectrum calculated by Squared TOPS has some false peaks. Therefore, the authors have proposed the weighted squared TOPS (WS-TOPS) to suppress these false peaks by modifying the orthogonality evaluation matrix, WS-TOPS also achieves better DOA estimation accuracy than that of Squared TOPS. On the other hand, WS-TOPS has a drawback, it requires high computational complexity. Our new method can realize good DOA estimation performance, which is better than that of Squared TOPS, with low computational complexity by reducing the size of orthogonality evaluation matrix and the number of subspaces to be used. Simulation results show that the new method can provide high resolution performance and high DOA estimation accuracy with low computational complexity.

Compressed sensing (CS)-based wideband spectrum sensing approaches have attracted much attention because they release the burden of high signal acquisition costs. However, in CS-based sensing approaches, highly non-linear reconstruction methods are used for spectrum recovery, which require high computational complexity. This letter proposes a two-step compressive wideband sensing algorithm. This algorithm introduces a coarse sensing step to further compress the sub-Nyquist measurements before spectrum recovery in the following compressive fine sensing step, as a result of the significant reduction in computational complexity. Its enabled sufficient condition and computational complexity are analyzed. Even when the sufficient condition is just satisfied, the average reduced ratio of computational complexity can reach 50% compared with directly performing compressive sensing with the excellent algorithm that is used in our fine sensing step.