In this letter, we first analyze the delay of the WLAN discovery scheme specified for 3GPP and WLAN interworking networks. Theoretical analysis indicates that the delay of the discovery scheme given by 3GPP increases linearly with the number of WLAN channels needed to be scanned. To reduce the discovery delay, we then propose an effective WLAN discovery scheme utilizing the cellular network to aid in the broadcasting the information of WLANs. Thus the number of WLAN channels required to be scanned for users is greatly reduced. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by analysis and simulation.

A new method of cancellation of IM3 using current feedback has been proposed for a multi-stage RFIC amplifier. In order to cancel the IM3 present in an output signal of the amplifier, the IIP3 level and IM3 phase of the amplifier are adjusted by means of feedback circuit techniques, so that the target specification is satisfied. By estimating the IIP3 level and IM3 phase variations for two states in situations with and without feedback possessing linear factors, the parameters of a feedback circuit can be calculated. To confirm the validity of the method, we have investigated two approaches; one including an analytical approach to designing a two-stage feedback amplifier, achieving an IIP3 level improvement of 14.8 dB. The other method involves the fabrication of single-stage amplifiers with and without feedback, operating at 850 MHz, both of which were designed as an integrated circuit using a 0.18 µm SiGe BiCMOS process. The fabricated IC's were tested using a load-pull measurement system, and a good agreement between the estimated and measured IIP3 level and IM3 phase variations has been achieved. Further studies show that the error in these variations, as estimated by the method, has been found to be less than 1.5 dB and 15 degrees, respectively, when the load admittance at 1701 MHz was greater than 1/50 S.

In H.264/AVC, the quantized coefficients are scanned in a zigzag pattern. But the zigzag scanning is not always efficient for the directional spatial predictions in the intra coding of H.264/AVC. In this letter, we propose an adaptive scanning using the pixel similarity of the neighboring pixels to achieve enhanced intra coding performance. The proposed method reduces the bit rate approximately 2% compared with H.264/AVC without video quality degradation.

It is well-known that, in DS-CDMA downlink signal transmission, frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can replace rake combining to achieve much improved bit error rate (BER) performance in severe frequency-selective fading channel. However, in uplink signal transmission, as each user's signal goes through a different channel, a severe multi-user interference (MUI) is produced and the uplink BER performance severely degrades compared to the downlink. When a small spreading factor is used, the uplink BER performance further degrades due to inter-chip interference (ICI). In this paper, we propose a frequency-domain multi-stage soft interference cancellation scheme for the DS-CDMA uplink and the achievable BER performance is evaluated by computer simulation. The BER performance comparison of the proposed cancellation technique and the multi-user detection (MUD) is also presented.

The physical origin of stress-induced leakage currents (SILC) in ultra-thin SiO2 films is described. Assuming a two-step trap-assisted tunneling process accompanied with an energy relaxation process of trapped electrons, conditions of trap sites which are origin of SICL are quantitatively found. It is proposed that the trap site location and the trap state energy can be explained by a mean-free-path of hole in SiO2 films and an atomic structure of the trap site by the O vacancy model.

A precoding scheme is described for multiple-input and multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems with a QR-decomposition maximum likelihood detector (MLD) incorporated with a parallel interference canceller (PIC) at a receiver. Transmit antenna ranking based on received substream signal power or per-substream minimum Euclidean distances is fed back to a transmitter. Based on the ranking information, precoding matrices are determined as permutation matrices such that specific packets are transmitted from transmit antennas with higher channel quality over the whole subcarriers. The simulation results demonstrated that precoding effectively utilizes PIC by reducing the possibility that all substreams are incorrectly decoded and thus improves the transmission performance of a QR-decomposition MLD with PIC.

We develop a maximum likelihood estimation scheme for correcting the carrier frequency offsets prior to the general intercarrier interference (ICI) self-cancellation in the OFDM systems. Since the same data symbols employed for ICI self-cancellation are also used for frequency offset estimation, the proposed scheme does not consume additional bandwidth. The combined use of the estimation algorithm and ICI self-cancellation scheme provides both frequency offset compensation and ICI reduction hence improves the system performance greatly. The effectiveness of the proposed estimation-cancellation scheme is further verified by calculating the bit error rates of various OFDM receivers, and substantial improvements are found.

We propose a gradient-limited affine projection algorithm (GL-APA), which can achieve fast and double-talk-robust convergence in acoustic echo cancellation. GL-APA is derived from the M-estimation-based nonlinear cost function extended for evaluating multiple error signals dealt with in the affine projection algorithm (APA). By considering the nonlinearity of the gradient, we carefully formulate an update equation consistent with multiple input-output relationships, which the conventional APA inherently satisfies to achieve fast convergence. We also newly introduce a scaling rule for the nonlinearity, so we can easily implement GL-APA by using a predetermined primary function as a basis of scaling with any projection order. This guarantees a linkage between GL-APA and the gradient-limited normalized least-mean-squares algorithm (GL-NLMS), which is a conventional algorithm that corresponds to the GL-APA of the first order. The performance of GL-APA is demonstrated with simulation results.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing is an attractive technique to achieve very high-speed transmission with a limited bandwidth. Recently, we proposed an iterative frequency-domain interference cancellation (FDIC) for single-carrier MIMO (SC-MIMO) multiplexing. In our previous work, assuming that the interference from the other antennas can be perfectly cancelled in FDIC, one-dimensional minimum mean square error (1D-MMSE) frequency-domain equalization (FDE) was used. However, the residual interference remains after performing FDIC. In this paper, to improve the transmission performance with iterative FDIC, we replace 1D-MMSE FDE by 2D-MMSE FDE, which takes the residual interference from the other antennas after FDIC into account. We investigate, by computer simulation, the throughput performance of rate compatible punctured turbo coded hybrid ARQ (RCPT-HARQ) with MIMO multiplexing in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel.

The 2-dimensional (2-D) Hilbert curve is a one-to-one mapping between 2-D space and one-dimensional (1-D) space. It is studied actively in the area of digital image processing as a scan technique (Hilbert scan) because of its property of preserving the spacial relationship of the 2-D patterns. Currently there exist several Hilbert scan algorithms. However, these algorithms have two strict restrictions in implementation. First, recursive functions are used to generate a Hilbert curve, which makes the algorithms complex and computationally expensive. Second, both sides of the scanned rectangle must have same size and each size must be a power of two, which limits the application of the Hilbert scan greatly. In this paper, a Pseudo-Hilbert scan algorithm based on two look-up tables is proposed. The proposed method improves the Hilbert scan to be suitable for real-time processing and general application. The simulation indicates that the Pseudo-Hilbert scan can preserve point neighborhoods as much as possible and take advantage of the high correlation between neighboring lattice points. It also shows competitive performance of the Pseudo-Hilbert scan in comparison with other scan techniques.

This paper proposes a new channel estimation method and a new interference cancellation scheme for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems in the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI). The proposed channel estimation method uses special training sequences (TSs) to have a desirable crest-factor of the transmitted training signal, and to prevent the influence of ISI on the channel estimation performance. By using the recommended training sequences, the ill-conditioned problem of the least square (LS) filter integrated in the proposed channel estimator can be avoided. The proposed interference cancellation scheme uses the estimated channel coefficients and the channel state information (CSI) to reproduce the interference components, which are then iteratively cancelled from the received signals. To reduced the error-floor of the demodulated symbols using for the calculations of the interference components, the so-called remodulation technique is also included in the proposed interference cancellation scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation method outperforms conventional channel estimation methods, especially in the presence of ISI and if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is larger than 15 dB. The combination of the proposed method with a space-time block code (STBC) to combat the interference influences results in an excellent system performance in terms of symbol error ratio (SER). In comparison with a STBC MIMO-OFDM system with sufficient guard interval (GI), this combination gains 1.52 dB of SNR at the same SER of 1.110-6 even after performing only one iteration of interference cancellation.

Band connections employed in active cancellation circuits for effective reduction of digital substrate noise are proposed. An almost-odd-symmetrical noise characteristic is utilized for canceling out noises. Advancing this idea, interlaced connections of four bands are also proposed. Excess cancellation by those bands is more effective for noise reduction in a guard ring than a cancellation by two bands. Use of L-shaped bands on the basis of the interlaced connection suppresses the noise more. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed band connections reduce the noise.

Automatic detection of normal mammograms, as a "first look" for breast cancer, is a new approach to computer-aided diagnosis. This approach may be limited, however, by two main causes. The first problem is the presence of poorly separable "crossed-distributions" in which the correct classification depends upon the value of each feature. The second problem is overlap of the feature distributions that are extracted from digitized mammograms of normal and abnormal patients. Here we introduce a new Support Vector Machine (SVM) based method utilizing with the proposed uncrossing mapping and Local Probability Difference (LPD). Crossed-distribution feature pairs are identified and mapped into a new features that can be separated by a zero-hyperplane of the new axis. The probability density functions of the features of normal and abnormal mammograms are then sampled and the local probability difference functions are estimated to enhance the features. From 1,000 ground-truth-known mammograms, 250 normal and 250 abnormal cases, including spiculated lesions, circumscribed masses or microcalcifications, are used for training a support vector machine. The classification results tested with another 250 normal and 250 abnormal sets show improved testing performances with 90% sensitivity and 89% specificity.

We determine the annealing dynamics of AsGa antisite defects in As ion-implanted GaAs. An Arrhenius plot of the carrier decay rate or the defect density vs. the annealing temperature in the high temperature regime gives an energy EPA, which is different from true activation energy. The annealing time dependence of EPA obtained by the two diffusion models (self diffusion of AsGa antisite defects and VGa vacancy assisted diffusion of AsGa antisite defects) are compared with EPA's obtained from already published works. The results prove that the diffusion of AsGa antisite defects is assisted by the VGa vacancy defects that exist in a high density.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can replace the conventional rake combining while offering significantly improved bit error rate (BER) performance for the downlink DS-CDMA in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, the presence of residual inter-chip-inference (ICI) after FDE produces orthogonality distortion among the spreading codes and the BER performance degrades as the level of multiplexing increases. In this paper, we propose a joint MMSE frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and ICI cancellation to improve the BER performance of the DS-CDMA downlink. In the proposed scheme, the residual ICI replica in the frequency-domain is generated and subtracted from each frequency component of the received signal after MMSE-FDE. The MMSE weight at each iteration is derived taking into account the residual ICI. The effect of the proposed ICI cancellation scheme is confirmed by computer simulation.

This paper presents an efficient technique for solving a Boolean matching problem in cell-library binding, where the number of cells in the library is large. As a basis of the Boolean matching, we use the notion NP-representative (NPR): two functions have the same NPR if one can be obtained from the other by a permutation and/or complementation(s) of the variables. By using a table look-up and a tree-based breadth-first search strategy, our method quickly computes the NPR for a given function. Boolean matching of the given function against the whole library is determined by checking the presence of its NPR in a hash table, which stores NPRs for all the library functions and their complements. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through experimental results, which show that it is more than two orders of magnitude faster than the Hinsberger-Kolla's algorithm.

To improve Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) receiver performance, we need to use better signal processing algorithm. However, it is impossible to modify the signal processing algorithm in DAB commercial hardware. In addition, the notebook PC based software radio research platform allows convenient acquisition of the massive radio data at variant environments and online analysis with variable signal processing procedure more easily. We have developed the first prototype portable software radio research platform for DAB which consists of a USB RF receiver module, USB interface and PC based software for device controlling and signal processing. Iterative decoding and ICI cancellation are also added to improve the performance in mobile channels.

Frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the BER performance of DS- and MC-CDMA systems in a severe frequency-selective fading channel. However, since the frequency-distorted signal cannot be completely equalized, the residual inter-code interference (ICI) limits the BER performance improvement. 4G systems must support much higher variable rate data services. Orthogonal multicode transmission technique has flexibility in offering variable rate services. However, the BER performance degrades as the number of parallel codes increases. In this paper, we propose an iterative frequency-domain soft interference cancellation (IFDSIC) scheme for multicode DS- and MC-CDMA systems and their achievable BER performances are evaluated by computer simulation.

A novel two-dimensional (2D) beam scanning antenna array using composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is proposed. The antenna array consists of a set of CRLH LWAs and a Butler matrix (BM) feeding network. The direction of the beam can be scanned two-dimensionally in one plane by changing frequency and in the other plane by switching the input ports of the BM. A four-element antenna array in the microstrip line configuration operating at 10.5 GHz is designed with the assistance of full-wave simulations based on the method of moment (MoM) and the finite-element method (FEM). The antenna array is fabricated and radiation characteristics are measured. The wide range 2D beam scanning operation with the angle from -30 deg to +25 deg in one plane by sweeping frequency from 10.25 GHz to 10.7 GHz and with four discrete angles of -46 deg, -15 deg, +10 deg, and +35 deg in the other plane by switching the input port is achieved.

This paper describes a new low-power write driver circuit for mobile hard disk drive preamplifiers. To achieve low power consumption, we developed a write driver circuit with a single-stage MOS transistor as the current driver, which both switches and controls the write current. We also developed a reflection cancellation method to suppress the distortion of the write current waveform during write transition. Fabricated using 0.35-µm SOI-BiCMOS technology, this write driver circuit consumes low power, 380 mW (at 100 MHz).