Channel scanning is an important aspect of seamless handovers since it is required in order to find a target point of attachment (PoA). However, channel scanning in single radio devices may cause severe service disruptions with the current PoA so that the provided QoS will be further degraded during a handover. In this letter, we propose a dynamic channel scanning algorithm that supports QoS. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism reduces the service disruptions and provides the desired QoS to users during the scanning period.

An adaptive beamforming method for the rejection of coherent interference signals is presented which exploits forward and backward correlations. The proposed method, in which the effective degree of freedom of the beamformer is increased by virtue of its use of both types of correlation, can cancel more coherent interference signals and provide better performance than the existing one that uses the forward correlation only.

Vector Coding (VC) is a novel vector modulation scheme that partitions a SISO (Single-Input Single-Output) channel into orthogonal subchannels by singular value decomposition (SVD). Because the orthogonal transmissions enabled by VC cannot cope with inter block interference (IBI) that is inevitable in delay spread channels, this paper proposes an IBI cancelling demodulator which can remove IBI by an iterative technique. We also show that code elimination in which insignificant eigencodes with lowermost eigenvalues are intentionally removed from transmission vectors greatly reduces BER (Bit Error Rate). The VC which utilizes the IBI cancelling demodulator and code elimination to reduce BER is compared with the original VC in not only delay spread SISO channels but also delay spread MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) channels while emphasis is placed on the MIMO cases. Simulation results show that, under a predetermined BER, the enhanced MIMO-VC can improve effective transmission rate than the natural extension of VC to delay spread MIMO channels.

This Letter proposes an optimal gain filter for the perceptual acoustic echo suppressor. We designed an optimally-modified log-spectral amplitude estimation algorithm for the gain filter in order to achieve robust suppression of echo and noise. A new parameter including information about interferences (echo and noise) of single-talk duration is statistically analyzed, and then the speech absence probability and the a posteriori SNR are judiciously estimated to determine the optimal solution. The experiments show that the proposed gain filter attains a significantly improved reduction of echo and noise with less speech distortion.

In this paper, we introduce a unified framework based on a canonical decision diagram called Horner Expansion Diagram (HED) [1] for the purpose of equivalence checking of datapath oriented hardware designs in various design stages from an algorithmic description to the gate-level implementation. The HED is not only able to represent and manipulate algorithmic specifications in terms of polynomial expressions with modulo equivalence but also express bit level adder (BLA) description of gate-level implementations. Our HED can support modular arithmetic operations over integer rings of the form Z2n. The proposed techniques have successfully been applied to equivalence checking on industrial benchmarks. The experimental results on different applications have shown the significant advantages over existing bit-level and also word-level equivalence checking techniques.

In this paper, a new local matching algorithm, to estimate dense disparity map in stereo vision, consisting of two stages is presented. At the first stage, the reduction of search space is carried out with a high efficiency, i.e. remarkable decrease in the average number of candidates per pixel, with low computational cost and high assurance of retaining the correct answer. This outcome being due to the effective use of multiple radial windows, intensity information, and some usual and new constraints, in a reasonable manner, retains those candidates which satisfy more constraints and especially being more promising to satisfy the implied assumption in using support windows; i.e., the disparity consistency of the window pixels. Such an output from the first stage, while speeding up the final selection of disparity in the second stage due to search space reduction, is also promising a more accurate result due to having more reliable candidates. In the second stage, the weighted window, although not necessarily being the exclusive choice, is employed and examined. The experimental results on the standard stereo benchmarks for the developed algorithm are presented, confirming that the massive computations to obtain more precise matching costs in weighted window is reduced to about 1/11 and the final disparity map is also improved.

An interference cancellation (ICAN) scheme for mobile communication radio repeaters is presented. When a radio repeater has a gain that is larger than the isolation between its transmit and receive antennas, it oscillates due to feedback interference signals. To prevent feedback oscillation of a radio repeater, we first formulate a feedback oscillation model of the radio repeater and then derive an ICAN model from that model. From the derived ICAN model, we show that the stability and the signal quality of the repeater depend on the repeater's gain and delay, the propagation delay on feedback paths, feedback channel characteristics, and the capability of the feedback channel estimation algorithm. It is also shown that the stability condition of the repeater does not guarantee the quality of the repeater's output signal. To guarantee repeater's stability and signal quality, an ICAN scheme based on an iterative algorithm is subsequently proposed. The simulation results confirm the relationship between the stability and signal quality of the repeater and the impact of the aforementioned factors. Using the proposed ICAN scheme, a mean error vector magnitude (quality indicator) of about 6.3% for the repeater's output signal was achieved.

An on-chip power supply noise canceller with higher voltage supply and switching transistor is proposed and the effectiveness of the canceller is experimentally verified. The noise canceller is effective for nano-second order noise caused by circuit wakeup or step increase of frequency in frequency hopping. The principle of the noise canceller is to reduce the current flowing through the supply line of VDD by injecting additional current from the higher voltage supply, so that the voltage drop across the VDD supply line is reduced. As additional current flow from higher supply, switching transistor has to be turned off not to increase the power consumption. With turn-off time of 2L/R, this current can be turned off without inducting another droop due to the increase of current flowing through the power supply line. The measurement shows the canceller reduces 68% of the noise with load circuit equivalent to 530 k logic gates in 90-nm CMOS with 9% wire overhead, 1.5% area overhead, and 3% power overhead at 50 k wake-ups/s. Compared to passive noise reduction, proposed noise canceller reduces power supply noise by 64% without wire overhead and to achieve same noise reduction with passive method, 77 times more C or 45 times less L is required. Too large switching transistor results in saturated noise reduction effect and higher power consumption. A rule-of-thumb is to set the on-resistance to supply 100% of load current when turned-on.

This paper proposes an adaptive algorithm for identifying unknown systems containing nonlinear amplitude characteristics. Usually, the nonlinearity is so small as to be negligible. However, in low cost systems, such as acoustic echo canceller using a small loudspeaker, the nonlinearity deteriorates the performance of the identification. Several methods preventing the deterioration, polynomial or Volterra series approximations, have been hence proposed and studied. However, the conventional methods require high processing cost. In this paper, we propose a method approximating the nonlinear characteristics with a piecewise linear curve and show using computer simulations that the performance can be extremely improved. The proposed method can also reduce the processing cost to only about twice that of the linear adaptive filter system.

In this paper, we propose a distance-based howling canceller with high speech quality. We have developed a distance-based howling canceller that uses only distance information by noticing the property that howling occurs according to the distance between a loudspeaker and a microphone. This method estimates the distance by transmitting a pilot signal from the loudspeaker to the microphone. Multiple frequency candidates for each howling are computed from the estimated distance and eliminated by cascading notch filters that have nulls at them. However degradation of speech quality occurs at the howling canceller output. The first cause is a shot noise occurrence at the beginning and end of the pilot signal transmission due to the discontinuous change of the amplitude. We thus develop a new pilot signal that is robust against ambient noises. We can then reduce the shot noise effect by taking the amplitude small. The second one is a speech degradation caused from overlapped stopbands of the notch filters. We thus derive a condition on the bandwidths so that stopbands do not overlap, and propose an adaptive bandwidth scheme which changes the bandwidth according to the distance.

Various scanning algorithms have been proposed to enhance the performance of intra prediction of H.264 codec. In this paper, an adaptive scanning scheme is proposed to achieve the entropy coding gain in intra coding, where scanning patterns are updated based on the probabilistic distribution of quantized coefficients of previous macroblocks so that the consecutive zeros are located at the rear part of the scanned data stream. Simulation results show that the average bit-rate reduction is about 2.15% in common test conditions.

The observed phenomena in actual sound and electromagnetic environment are inevitably contaminated by the background noise of arbitrary distribution type. Therefore, in order to evaluate sound and electromagnetic environment, it is necessary to establish some signal processing methods to remove the undesirable effects of the background noise. In this paper, we propose noise cancellation methods for estimating a specific signal with the existence of background noise of non-Gaussian distribution from two viewpoins of static and dynamic signal processing. By applying the well-known least mean squared method for the moment statistics with several orders, practical methods for estimating the specific signal are derived. The effectiveness of the proposed theoretical methods is experimentally confirmed by applying them to estimation problems in actual sound and magnetic field environment.

This paper proposes a scan design for delay fault testability of dual circuits. In normal operation mode, each proposed scan flip flop operates as a master-slave flip flop. In test mode, the proposed scan design performs scan operation using two scan paths, namely master scan path and slave scan path. The master scan path consists of master latches and the slave scan path consists of slave latches. In the proposed scan design, arbitrary two-patterns can be set to flip flops of dual circuits. Therefore, it achieves complete fault coverage for robust and non-robust testable delay fault testing. It requires no extra latch unlike enhanced scan design. Thus the area overhead is low. The evaluation shows the test application time of the proposed scan design is 58.0% of that of the enhanced scan design, and the area overhead of the proposed scan design is 13.0% lower than that of the enhanced scan design. In addition, in testing of single circuits, it achieves complete fault coverage of robust and non-robust testable delay fault testing. It requires smaller test data volume than the enhanced scan design in testing of single circuits.

The Transition Edge Sensor (TES)-Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS) is an X-ray detector with high-energy resolution (12.8 eV). The TES can be mounted to a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The TES-EDS is based on a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator. The high-energy resolution enables analysis of the distribution of various elements in samples under low acceleration voltage (typically under 5 keV) by using K-lines of light elements and M lines of heavy elements. For example, the energy of the arsenic L line differs from the magnesium K line by 28 eV. When used to analyze the spore of the Pteris vittata L plant, the TES-EDS clearly reveals a different distribution of As and Mg in the micro region of the plant. The TES-EDS with SEM yields detailed information about the distribution of multi-elements in a sample.

The performance of an analog winner-take-all (WTA) circuit is affected by the corner error and the offset error. Despite the fact that the corner error can be reduced with large transconductance of the transistor, the offset error caused by device mismatch has not been completely studied. This paper presents the complete offset error analysis, and proposes low offset design guidelines and an offset cancellation scheme. The experimental results show good agreement with the theoretical analysis and the drastic improvement of the offset error.

This paper presents a scan design for delay fault testability of 2-rail logic circuits. The flip flops used in the scan design are based on master-slave ones. The proposed scan design provides complete fault coverage in delay fault testing of 2-rail logic circuits. In two-pattern testing with the proposed scan design, initial vectors are set using the set-reset operation, and the scan-in operation for initial vectors is not required. Hence, the test application time is reduced to about half that of the enhanced scan design. Because the additional function is only the set-reset operation of the slave latch, the area overhead is small. The evaluation shows that the differences in the area overhead of the proposed scan design from those of the standard scan design and the enhanced scan design are 2.1 and -14.5 percent on average, respectively.

This paper proposes a method providing efficient test compression. The proposed method is for robust testable path delay fault testing with scan design facilitating two-pattern testing. In the proposed method, test data are interleaved before test compression using statistical coding. This paper also presents test architecture for two-pattern testing using the proposed method. The proposed method is experimentally evaluated from several viewpoints such as compression rates, test application time and area overhead. For robust testable path delay fault testing on 11 out of 20 ISCAS89 benchmark circuits, the proposed method provides better compression rates than the existing methods such as Huffman coding, run-length coding, Golomb coding, frequency-directed run-length (FDR) coding and variable-length input Huffman coding (VIHC).

Eigen-beamforming (EB) transmission for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is an effective means to maximize the receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in a noise-limited environment, but suffers a performance degradation when strong interference signals exist. In this letter, we propose an interference cancellation method for EB signals by constructing a new receive beamforming vector which jointly utilizes the EB matrix and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) spatial demultiplexing. The proposed method is shown to outperform the conventional EB receiver in the entire cell range, with a significant increase in the effective signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) near the cell boundary.

For the purpose of the application of odor to information technology, we have developed an odor-emitting apparatus coupled with chemical capsules made of alginic acid polymer. This apparatus consists of a chemical capsule cartridge including chemical capsules of odor ingredients, valves to control odor emission, and a temperature control unit. Different odors can be easily emitted by using the apparatus. We have developed an integrated system of vision, audio and olfactory information in which odor strength can be controlled coinciding with on-screen moving images based on analytical results from the odor scanner.

Multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) is a promising wireless access technique for the next generation mobile communications systems, in which broadband packet data services will dominate. Hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is an indispensable error control technique for high quality packet data transmission. The HARQ throughput performance of multi-code MC-CDMA degrades due to the presence of residual inter-code interference (ICI) after frequency-domain equalization (FDE). To reduce the residual ICI and improve the throughput performance, a frequency-domain soft interference cancellation (FDSIC) technique can be applied. An important issue is the generation of accurate residual ICI replica for FDSIC. In this paper, low-density parity-check coded (LDPC-coded) MC-CDMA HARQ is considered. We generate the residual ICI replica from a-posteriori log-likelihood ratio (LLR) of LDPC decoder output and evaluate, by computer simulation, the throughput performance in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. We show that if the residual ICI is removed, MC-CDMA can provide a throughput performance superior to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).