This paper presents a new low-dropout (LDO) regulator with low-quiescent, high-drive and fast-transient performance. This is based on a new composite power transistor composed of a shunt feedback class-AB embedded gain stage and the application of dynamic-biasing schemes to both the error amplifier as well as the composite power transistor. The proposed LDO regulator has been simulated and validated using BSIM3 models and GLOBALFOUNDRIES 0.18-µm CMOS process. The simulation results have shown that the LDO regulator consumes 4.7 µA quiescent current at no load, regulating the output at 1 V from a minimum 1.2 V supply. It is able to deliver up to 450 mA load current with a dropout of 200 mV. It can be stabilized using a 4.7 µF output capacitor with a 0.1 Ω ESR resistor. The maximum transient output voltage is 64.6 mV on the basis of a load step change of 450 mA/10 ns under typical condition. The full load transient response is less than 350 ns.

Change history in project revisions provides helpful information on handling bugs. Existing studies on predicting bugs mainly focus on resulting bug patterns, not these change patterns. When a code hunk is copied onto several files, the set of original and copied hunks often need to be consistently maintained. We assume that it is a normal state when all of hunks survive or die in a specific revision. When partial change occurs on some duplicated hunks, they are regarded as suspicious hunks. Based on these assumptions, suspicious cases can be predicted and the project's developers can be alerted. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to detect various change smells based on revision history and code hunk tracking. The change smells are suspicious change patterns that can result in potential bugs, such as partial death of hunks, missed refactoring or fix, backward or late change. To detect these change smells, three kinds of hunks – add, delete, and modify – are tracked and analyzed by an automated tool. Several visualized graphs for each type have been suggested to improve the applicability of the proposed technique. We also conducted experiments on large-scale open projects. The case study results show the applicability of the proposed approach.

In this letter, we propose a simple but effective buffer management scheme to achieve fair bandwidth sharing with a FIFO scheduling algorithm, that is, Dynamic Detection and Expulsion (DDE). The DDE scheme dynamically detects buffer occupancy and then precisely expels resided packets on demand through simple comparisons. Simulation results under various traffic conditions show that DDE can arrive at more robust and better fairness, and lower implementation complexity than that of a well-known Pushout (PO) scheme.

We propose a system that, using video information, segments the mouth region from a face image and then detects the protrusion of the tongue from inside the oral cavity. Initially, under the assumption that the mouth is closed, we detect both mouth corners. We use a set of specifically oriented Gabor filters for enhancing horizontal features corresponding to the shadow existing between the upper and lower lips. After applying the Hough line detector, the extremes of the line that was found are regarded as the mouth corners. Detection rate for mouth corner localization is 85.33%. These points are then input to a mouth appearance model which fits a mouth contour to the image. By segmenting its bounding box we obtain a mouth template. Next, considering the symmetric nature of the mouth, we divide the template into right and left halves. Thus, our system makes use of three templates. We track the mouth in the following frames using normalized correlation for mouth template matching. Changes happening in the mouth region are directly described by the correlation value, i.e., the appearance of the tongue in the surface of the mouth will cause a decrease in the correlation coefficient through time. These coefficients are used for detecting the tongue protrusion. The right and left tongue protrusion positions will be detected by analyzing similarity changes between the right and left half-mouth templates and the currently tracked ones. Detection rates under the default parameters of our system are 90.20% for the tongue protrusion regardless of the position, and 84.78% for the right and left tongue protrusion positions. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of real-time tongue protrusion detection in vision-based systems and motivates further investigating the usage of this new modality in human-computer communication.

A key traffic engineering problem in the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)-based network is the determination of optimal link weights. From the network operators' point of view, there are two approaches to determining a set of link weights: Start-time Optimization (SO) and Run-time Optimization (RO). We previously presented a Preventive Start-time Optimization (PSO) scheme that determines an appropriate set of link weights at start time. It can counter both unexpected network congestion and network instability and thus overcomes the drawbacks of SO and RO, respectively. The previous work adopts a preventive start-time optimization algorithm with limited candidates, named PSO-L (PSO for Limited candidates). Although PSO-L relaxes the worst-case congestion, it does not confirm the optimal worst-case performance. To pursue this optimality, this paper proposes a preventive start-time optimization algorithm with a wide range of candidates, named PSO-W (PSO for Wide-range candidates). PSO-W upgrades the objective function of SO that determines the set of link weights at start time by considering all possible single link failures; its goal is to minimize the worst-case congestion. Numerical results via simulations show that PSO-W effectively relaxes the worst-case network congestion compared to SO, while it avoids the network instability caused by the run-time changes of link weights caused by RO. At the same time, PSO-W yields performance superior to that of PSO-L.

For the 3D face recognition numerous methods have been proposed, but little attention has been given to the local-based representation for the texture map of the 3D models. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D face recognition approach based on locally extracted Geodesic Pseudo Zernike Moment Array (GPZMA) of the texture map when only one exemplar per person is available. In the proposed method, the function of the PZM is controlled by the geodesic deformations to tackle the problem of face recognition under the expression and pose variations. The feasibility and effectiveness investigation for the proposed method is conducted through a wide range of experiments using publicly available BU-3DFE and Bosphorus databases including samples with different expression and pose variations. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the performance of three state-of-the-art benchmark approaches. The encouraging experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much higher accuracy than the benchmarks in single-model databases.

We address the stability property of the FAST TCP congestion control algorithm. Based on a continuous-time dynamic model of the FAST TCP network, we establish that FAST TCP in itself is globally exponentially stable without any specific conditions on the congestion control parameter or the update gain. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the global exponential stability of FAST TCP.

This letter provides a tight upper bound on the bit error rate (BER) over the Nakagami-m fading channel for the dual carrier modulation (DCM) scheme, which is adopted by the multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) system. Its tightness is verified with the existing result for Rayleigh fading channel, i.e., for m=1, which would be also valid for a more general fading environment.

Manufacturing defects in the deep sub-micron VLSI process and aging resulted problems of devices during lifecycle are inevitable, and fault-tolerant routing algorithms are important to provide the required communication for NoCs in spite of failures. The proposed algorithm, referred to as scalable and reconfigurable fault-tolerant distributed routing (RFDR), partitions the system into nine regions using the concept of divide-and-conquer. It is a distributed algorithm, and each router guarantees fault-tolerance within one's own region and the system can be still sustained with multiple fault areas. The proposed RFDR has excellent scalability with hardware cost keeping constant independent of system size. Also it is completely reconfigurable when new nodes fail. Simulations under various synthetic traffic patterns show its better performance compared to Extended-XY routing algorithm. Moreover, there is almost no hardware overhead compared to Logic-Based Distributed Routing (LBDR), but the fault-tolerance capacity is enhanced in the proposed algorithm. Hardware cost is reduced 37% compared to Reconfigurable Distributed Scalable Predictable Interconnect Network (R-DSPIN) which only supports single fault region.

The design of an energy-efficient wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transponder is proposed and effectiveness of the proposed WDM transponder is experimentally studied. The proposed WDM transponder interworking with the link-aggregation technique possessed by a layer 2 switch can achieve power saving depending on traffic volume variations by utilizing an adaptive interface control. Monitoring methods for the link connectivity of a sleep link are also discussed.

Multi-core processors have been attracting a great deal of attention. In the domain of signal processing for communications, the current trends toward rapidly evolving standards and formats, and toward algorithms adaptive to dynamic factors in the environment, require programmable solutions that possess both algorithm flexibility and low implementation complexity. Reconfigurable architectures have demonstrated better tradeoffs between algorithm flexibility, implementation complexity, and energy efficiency. This paper presents a reconfigurable homogeneous memory-based FFT processor (MBFFT) architecture integrated in a single chip to provide hybrid SISO/MIMO OFDM wireless communication systems. For example, a reconfigurable MBFFT processor with eight processing elements (PEs) can be configured for one DVB-T/H with N=8192 and two 802.11n with N=128. The reconfigurable processors can perfectly fit the applications of Software Defined Radio (SDR) which requires more hardware flexibility.

A novel signaling scheme is proposed for iterative channel estimation and data decoding in fast fading channels. The basic idea is to bias the occurrence probability of transmitted symbols. A priori information about the bias is utilized for channel estimation. The bias-based scheme is constructed as a serially concatenated code, in which a convolutional code and a biased nonlinear block code are used as the outer and inner codes, respectively. This construction allows the receiver to estimate channel state information (CSI) efficiently. The proposed scheme is numerically shown to outperform conventional pilot-based schemes in terms of spectral efficiency for moderately fast fading channels.

We describe a series of system measurements investigating the performance of a burst-mode or transient-suppressed (TS)-EDFA, specifically designed to reduce the impact of gain transients in dynamic optical networks. We assess the performance of this TS-EDFA in a variety of network contexts. We compare the performance of the TS-EDFA with conventional amplifiers (C-EDFAs) and show its compatibility with supplementary gain control techniques. Finally, we measure gain-transient accumulation along long links using a recirculating transmission loop and show that, for packet-transmission, the number of hops is limited by accumulated transients for a C-EDFA, but limited by accumulated noise for the TS-EDFA.

This paper firstly analysis the coherent correlation, non-coherent accumulation detector used in weak satellite signal detection mathematically and statistically, and derives its single threshold based on the CFAR (constant false alarm rate). And then the paper improved the detector under the situation of more than one satellite existing with different signal power. Based on this new type of detector, a threshold calculation method is introduced considering the effect of near-far problem in the weak signal detection. Finally the method is verified and compared to the traditional single threshold with simulated data and collected intermediate frequency real data. The results show that this new threshold method can detect signal efficiently with lower false alarm possibility and larger detection possibility.

In ubiquitous sensor networks, extra energy savings can be achieved by selecting the filtering solution to counter the attack. This adaptive selection process employs a fuzzy rule-based system for selecting the best solution, as there is uncertainty in the reasoning processes as well as imprecision in the data. In order to maximize the performance of the fuzzy system the membership functions should be optimized. However, the efforts required to perform this optimization manually can be impractical for commonly used applications. This paper presents a GA-based membership function optimizer for fuzzy adaptive filtering (GAOFF) in ubiquitous sensor networks, in which the efficiency of the membership functions is measured based on simulation results and optimized by GA. The proposed optimization consists of three units; the first performs a simulation using a set of membership functions, the second evaluates the performance of the membership functions based on the simulation results, and the third constructs a population representing the membership functions by GA. The proposed method can optimize the membership functions automatically while utilizing minimal human expertise.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are systems that translate one's thoughts into commands to restore control and communication to severely paralyzed people, and they are also appealing to healthy people. One of the challenges is to improve the performance of BCIs, often measured by the accuracy and the trial duration, or the information transfer rate (ITR), i.e., the mutual information per unit time. Since BCIs are communications between a user and a system, error control schemes such as forward error correction and automatic repeat request (ARQ) can be applied to BCIs to improve the accuracy. This paper presents reliability-based ARQ (RB-ARQ), a variation of ARQ designed for BCIs, which employs the maximum posterior probability for the repeat decision. The current results show that RB-ARQ is more effective than the conventional methods, i.e., better accuracy when trial duration was the same, and shorter trial duration when the accuracy was the same. This resulted in a greater information transfer rate and a greater utility, which is a more practical performance measure in the P300 speller task. The results also show that such users who achieve a poor accuracy for some reason can benefit the most from RB-ARQ, which could make BCIs more universal.

Although the Marching Cube (MC) algorithm is very popular for displaying images of voxel-based objects, its slow surface extraction process is usually considered to be one of its major disadvantages. It was pointed out that for the original MC algorithm, we can limit vertex calculations to once per vertex to speed up the surface extraction process, however, it did not mention how this process could be done efficiently. Neither was the reuse of these MC vertices looked into seriously in the literature. In this paper, we propose a “Group Marching Cube” (GMC) algorithm, to reduce the time needed for the vertex identification process, which is part of the surface extraction process. Since most of the triangle-vertices of an iso-surface are shared by many MC triangles, the vertex identification process can avoid the duplication of the vertices in the vertex array of the resultant triangle data. The MC algorithm is usually done through a hash table mechanism proposed in the literature and used by many software systems. Our proposed GMC algorithm considers a group of voxels simultaneously for the application of the MC algorithm to explore interesting features of the original MC algorithm that have not been discussed in the literature. Based on our experiments, for an object with more than 1 million vertices, the GMC algorithm is 3 to more than 10 times faster than the algorithm using a hash table. Another significant advantage of GMC is its compatibility with other algorithms that accelerate the MC algorithm. Together, the overall performance of the original MC algorithm is promoted even further.

Digital RF solutions have been shown to be advantageous in various design aspects, such as accurate modeling, design reuse, and scaling when migrating to the next CMOS process node. Consequently, the majority of new low-cost and feature cell phones are now based on this approach. However, another equally important aspect of this approach to wireless transceiver SoC design, which is instrumental in allowing fast and low-cost productization, is in creating the inherent capability to assess performance and allow for low-cost built-in calibration and compensation, as well as characterization and final-testing. These internal capabilities can often rely solely on the SoCs existing processing resources, representing a zero cost adder, requiring only the development of the appropriate algorithms. This paper presents various examples of built-in measurements that have been demonstrated in wireless transceivers offered by Texas Instruments in recent years, based on the digital-RF processor (DRPTM) technology, and highlights the importance of the various types presented; built-in self-calibration and compensation, built-in self-characterization, and built-in self-testing (BiST). The accompanying statistical approach to the design and productization of such products is also discussed, and fundamental terms related with these, such as 'soft specifications', are defined.

This paper presents an accurate and systematic method to simulate the interference imposed on the input/output (I/O) ports of electronic equipment under the electrical fast transients/burst (EFT/B) test. The equivalent circuit of the EFT/B generator and the coupling clamp are modeled respectively. Firstly, a transfer function (TF) of the EFT pulse-forming network is constructed with the latent parameters based on circuit theory. In the TF, two negative real parameters characterize the non-oscillation process of the network while one complex conjugate pair characterizes the damping-oscillation process. The TF of the pulse-forming network is therefore synthesized in the equivalent circuit of the EFT/B generator. Secondly, the standard coupling clamp is modeled based on the scatter (S) parameter obtained by using a vector network analyzer. By applying the vector fitting method during the rational function approximation, a macromodel of the coupling clamp can be obtained and converted to a Spice compatible equivalent circuit. Based on the aforementioned procedures, the interference imposed on the I/O ports can be simulated. The modeling methods are validated experimentally, where the interference in differential mode and common mode is evaluated respectively.

Existing time synchronization schemes in sensor networks were all developed to be energy-efficient, precise, and robust, but none of them were developed with security in mind. We have developed a secure, accurate and energy-efficient time synchronization protocol (SAEP). SAEP achieves accurate time synchronization service with significantly reducing the number of message exchanges. Also, it safeguards against Byzantine failure, in which nodes drop, modify, or delay time information in an attempt to disrupt the time synchronization service in multi-hop networks. SAEP takes a distributed approach where each sensor independently makes decisions based only on the information collected from multiple adjacent nodes, thus achieving a high level of resistance to various attacks while minimizing the energy cost. We investigate the misbehavior of a maliciously compromised node and analyze how SAEP can combat these attacks. In our experiment SAEP outperforms the existing time synchronization protocol in accuracy, energy consumption and it is even resilient to multiple capture attacks.