The objective of this paper is to develop the theoretical foundation to the pilot-assisted channel estimation using delay-time domain windowing for the coherent detection of OFDM signals. The pilot-assisted channel estimation using delay-time domain windowing is jointly used with polynomial interpolation, decision feedback and Wiener filter. A closed-form BER expression is derived. The impacts of the delay-time domain window width, multipath channel decay factor, the maximum Doppler frequency are discussed. The theoretical analysis is confirmed by computer simulation.

Ag and Pd electrical contact pairs are separated at constant separating speeds (5, 10 and 20 mm/s) in a DC 42 V/8.4 A resistive circuit. The motion of the breaking arc is observed with a high-speed video camera. For Ag contacts, the motion of the breaking arc becomes stable at a certain critical gap at separating speeds of 10 mm/s and 20 mm/s, and the breaking arc moves extensively at the separating speed of 5 mm/s. For Pd contacts, the breaking arc moves extensively regardless of the separating speed. These results are attributed to the following causes. For Ag contacts, the difference in the motion of arc spots at each separating speed is changed by the difference in the total energy input to the contacts. For Pd contacts, the temperature of the contact surfaces is kept high because of the lower thermal conductivity of Pd than Ag.

A new level shifter is proposed in this paper that mitigates the contention problem between its pull-up and pull-down switches without suffering the delay penalty. Comparing this new one with two conventional shifters (CLS-1 and CLS-2) indicates that CLS-1 and CLS-2 have the delay times which are 308% and 26% slower than the proposed shifter when VDDL/VDDH=0.3 and the fan-out=2, respectively. In addition, the comparison of power-delay products shows CLS-2 consumes 28.5% more energy than the proposed shifter. For the layout area, the proposed shifter needs only 15% more than CLS-2. By comparing the propagation delay times, the power-delay products, and the area overhead, the proposed shifter is considered very suitable to future Very Deep Sub-Micron (VDSM) technologies with low-voltage applications.

This paper presents an inversion algorithm for dynamic Bayesian networks towards robust speech recognition, namely DBNI, which is a generalization of hidden Markov model inversion (HMMI). As a dual procedure of expectation maximization (EM)-based model reestimation, DBNI finds the 'uncontaminated' speech by moving the input noisy speech to the Gaussian means under the maximum likelihood (ML) sense given the DBN models trained on clean speech. This algorithm can provide both the expressive advantage from DBN and the noise-removal feature from model inversion. Experiments on the Aurora 2.0 database show that the hidden feature model (a typical DBN for speech recognition) with the DBNI algorithm achieves superior performance in terms of word error rate reduction.

A movable electrode in conventional electromechanical contacts often shows a bounce against the opposite electrode during a make and break operation. Frequent bounces are troublesome. We studied this phenomenon with conventional reed switches using a slowly increasing and decreasing driving current. Judging from the measured data, Coulomb's electrostatic force cannot be neglected in efforts to suppress bounce.

Error control codes have extensively been applied to semiconductor memories using high density RAM chips with wide I/O data, e.g., with 8-bit or 16-bit I/O data. Recently, spotty byte errors called s-spotty byte errors are newly defined as t or fewer bits errors in a byte having length b bits, where 1 ≤ t ≤ b. This paper proposes another type of spotty byte errors, i.e., m-spotty byte errors, where more than t bits errors in a byte may occur due to hit by high energetic particles. For these errors, this paper presents generalized m-spotty byte error control codes with minimum m-spotty distance d.

In orthogonal frequency-division multiplex access (OFDMA) uplink, the carrier-frequency offsets (CFOs) between the multiple transmitters and the receiver introduce inter-carrier interference (ICI) and severely degrade the performance. In this paper, based on the perfect estimation of each user's CFO, we propose two low-complexity iterative algorithms to cancel ICI due to CFOs, which are denoted as the basic algorithm and the improved algorithm with decision-feedback equalization (DFE), respectively. For the basic one, two theorems are proposed that yield a sufficient condition for the convergence of iterations. Moreover, the interference-power-evolution (IPE) charts are proposed to evaluate the convergence behavior of this interference cancellation algorithm. Motivated by the IPE chart, the procedure of DFE is introduced into the iterations, which is the basic idea of the improved algorithm. For this improved algorithm, the error-propagation effect are analyzed and suppressed by an efficient stopping criterion. From IPE charts and simulation results, it can be easily observed that the basic algorithm has the same capability of ICI cancellation as the linear optimal minimum mean square error (MMSE) method, but offers lower complexity, while the improved algorithm with DFE outperforms the MMSE method in terms of the bit-error rate (BER) performance.

LDCs system with finite-rate error-free feedback is proposed in this letter. The optimal transmission codeword is selected at the receiver and the codeword index is sent to the transmitter. A simple random search algorithm is introduced for codebook generation. Moreover, the max-min singular value criterion is adopted for codeword selection. Simulation results showed that, with only 3-4 feedback bits, the low-complexity Zero-Forcing receiver can approach the Maximum-Likelihood (ML) performance.

A hierarchical representation formed by an octree for a volume ray casting is a well-known data structure to skip over transparent regions requiring little preprocessing and storage. However, it accompanies unnecessary comparison and level shift between octants. We propose a new data structure named half-skewed octree, which is an auxiliary octree to support the conventional octree. In preprocessing step, a half-skewed octree selects eight different child octants in each generation step compared with the conventional octree. During rendering, after comparing an octant of the conventional octree with corresponding octant of the half-skewed octree simultaneously at the same level, a ray chooses one of two octants to jump over transparent regions farther away. By this method, we can reduce unnecessary comparison and level shift between octants. Another problem of a conventional octree structure is that it is difficult to determine a distance from the boundary of a transparent octant to opposite boundary. Although we exploit the previously proposed distance template, we cannot expect the acceleration when a ray direction is almost parallel to the octant's boundary. However, our method can solve it without additional operations because a ray selects one octant to leap farther away. As a result, our approach is much faster than the method using conventional octree while preserving image quality and requiring minimal storage.

In this paper, we propose a predictive block-constrained trellis-coded quantization (BC-TCQ) to quantize cepstral coefficients for distributed speech recognition. For prediction of the cepstral coefficients, the first order auto-regressive (AR) predictor is used. To quantize the prediction error signal effectively, we use the BC-TCQ. The quantization is compared to the split vector quantizers used in the ETSI standard, and is shown to lower cepstral distance and bit rates.

The linearity and noise required by GSM and UMTS receivers make the design of a CMOS mixer for these applications so challenging. A new technique for IP2 improvement in Zero-IF active mixers is presented in this paper. This inductor-less technique is based on canceling the parasitic capacitor of common source node of the switching transistors and synthesizing resistive impedance. Using this technique, a reconfigurable down converter mixer works from 900 MHz to 2.4 GHz is designed supporting GSM, DCS, PCS, UMTS and IEEE802.11 b-g standards. The mixer IIP2 is higher than 71 dBm in GSM and UMTS bands. The mixer conversion gain is higher that 12 dB in all frequency bands. The design is done in 65 nm CMOS technology and consumes 10 mA from a 1.2 V supply. The design meets the performance required for all mentioned standards, while its area and power is comparable with high performance single band mixers.

The paper describes a low complexity tree-structure based user scheduling algorithm in an up-link transmission of MLD-based multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems. An M-branch selection algorithm, which selects M most-possible best branches at each step, is proposed to maximize the whole system sum-rate capacity. To achieve the maximum capacity in multi-user MIMO systems, antennas configuration and user selection are preformed simultaneously. Then according to the selected number of antennas for each user, different transmission schemes are also adopted. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithms obtain near optimal performance with far low complexity than the full search procedure.

Two ways of introducing alternation for context-free grammars and pushdown automata are compared. One is the usual way which combines "states" with alternation [1], [4], [7], and the other is the way used in [6] to define the alternating context-free grammar, i.e., alternation is governed by the variables of the grammar. In this paper the latter way is taken over to define a new type of alternating pushdown automaton by combining the "pushdown symbols" of the pushdown automaton with alternation. We have derived a characterization of the original alternating context-free grammars in terms of such a new type of alternating pushdown automaton without states. It is also shown that, if (non-alternating) states are introduced as an additional feature for this type of pushdown automaton, then the resulting alternating pushdown automaton has exactly the same expressive power as the original alternating pushdown automaton.

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.

The present paper describes a quality enhancement of speech corrupted by additive background noise in a single channel system. The proposed approach is based on the introduction of perceptual criteria using a frequency-weighting filter in a subtractive-type enhancement process. This newly developed algorithm allows for an automatic adaptation in the time and frequency of the enhancement system and finds a suitable noise estimate according to the frequency of the corrupted speech. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can efficiently remove additive noise related to various types of noise corruption.

In this paper, we introduce a syntactically embedded (s-embedded) language, and consider its principal congruence. The following three results are proved, where PL is the principal congruence of a language L, and W(L) is the residual of L. (1) For a language K, s-embedded in M, K is equal to a PM class. (2) For a language K, s-embedded in an infix language M, K is equal to a PW(M) class. (3) For a nonempty s-embedded language L, if L is double-unitary, then L is equal to a PW(M) class. From the above results, we can obtain those for principal congruence of some codes. For example, Ln is equal to a PLn+1 class for an inter code L of index n.

This paper proposes effective energy feature normalization methods for robust speech recognition in noisy environments. We first develop an energy subtraction method and a modified method for the Log-energy Dynamic Range Normalization (ERN) using inverse function. We then present the hybrid method combining the energy subtraction and the modified ERN. Using Aurora2.0 database for representative evaluations, a significant performance improvement over the ERN method is demonstrated.

Over the past ten years, the demand for low-cost, low-power, and small form-factor portable wireless devices has led to the integration of RF transceivers on the same silicon as digital processors to form wireless systems-on-a-chip. This paper describes the challenges in designing CMOS systems-on-a-chip for wireless communications. RF transceiver building blocks for signal amplification, frequency translation, and frequency selectivity are examined with special emphasis on low noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, mixers, and frequency synthesizers. System-on-a-chip integration issues such as leakage currents of digital logic, calibration techniques, and noise coupling are also discussed.

In this paper, a new operational amplifier is presented that improves the specifications such as dc gain, common mode rejection ratio. To obtain these improvements, we have used the two important concepts of feedback and bulk amplification.

This paper proposes a Mel-Wiener filter to enhance Mel-LPC spectra in the presence of additive noise. The transfer function of the proposed filter is defined by using a first-order all-pass filter instead of unit delay. The filter coefficients are estimated based on minimization of the sum of the square error on the linear frequency scale without applying the bilinear transformation and efficiently implemented in the autocorrelation domain. The proposed filter does not require any time-frequency conversion, which saves a large amount of computational load. The performance of the proposed system is comparable to that of ETSI AFE. The optimum filter order is found to be 3, and thus filtering is computationally inexpensive. The computational cost of the proposed system except VAD is 53% of ETSI AFE.