In this paper, horizontal (where an opamp is shared in two adjacent stages) and vertical (where an opamp is shared across two paths) opamp sharing techniques for a two-path band-pass (BP) ΔΣ modulator are described, and input-feedforward two-path fourth-order BP ΔΣ modulators that have only two opamps are proposed. The proposed modulators are based on the horizontal or vertical opamp sharing technique. They can be realized with both a summation circuit using a switched capacitor (SC) network and a second-order high-pass filter (HPF) with a horizontal shared opamp or a double-sampling first-order HPF with a vertical shared opamp, which are based on an SC first-order HPF with an opamp. These techniques can reduce the number of opamps with no additional component and the chip area as well as realize lower power consumption.

We demonstrate a wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) based on wavelength-locked Fabry-Perot laser diodes and thin-film filters. Twelve Fast Ethernet signals are bi-directionally transmitted over the multi-branch optical distribution network (ODN). The ODN has distributed branch nodes and bus networks.

In this review paper we showcase recent activities on silicon photonics science and technology research in Hong Kong regarding two important topical areas--microresonator devices and optical nonlinearities. Our work on silicon microresonator filters, switches and modulators have shown promise for the nascent development of on-chip optoelectronic signal processing systems, while our studies on optical nonlinearities have contributed to basic understanding of silicon-based optically-pumped light sources and helium-implanted detectors. Here, we review our various passive and electro-optic active microresonator devices including (i) cascaded microring resonator cross-connect filters, (ii) NRZ-to-PRZ data format converters using a microring resonator notch filter, (iii) GHz-speed carrier-injection-based microring resonator modulators and 0.5-GHz-speed carrier-injection-based microdisk resonator modulators, and (iv) electrically reconfigurable microring resonator add-drop filters and electro-optic logic switches using interferometric resonance control. On the nonlinear waveguide front, we review the main nonlinear optical effects in silicon, and show that even at fairly modest average powers two-photon absorption and the accompanied free-carrier linear absorption could lead to optical limiting and a dramatic reduction in the effective lengths of nonlinear devices.

This paper introduces an adaptive low complexity pre-processing filter to improve the coding performance of seriously degraded video sequences that is caused by the additive noise. The additive noise leads to a decrease in coding performance due to the high frequency components. By incorporating local statistics and quantization parameter into filtering process, the spurious noise is significantly attenuated and coding efficiency is improved for given quantization step size. In order to reduce the complexity of the pre-processing filter, the simplified local statistics and quantization parameter are introduced. The simulation results show the capability of the proposed algorithm.

Development of an artificial reverberator for low-memory requirements is an issue of importance in applications such as mobile multimedia devices. One possibility is to use an All-Pass Filter (APF), which is embedded in the feedback loop of the comb filter network. In this paper, we propose a reverberator employing time-varying APFs to increase the reverberation performance. By changing the gain of the APF, we can increase the number of frequency peaks perceptually. Thus, the resulting reverberation sounds much more natural, even with less memory, than the conventional approach. In this paper, we perform theoretical and perceptual analyses of artificial reverberators employing time-varying APF. Through the analyses, we derive the degree of phase variation of the APF that is perceptually acceptable. Based on the analyses, we propose a method of designing artificial reverberators associated with the time-varying APFs. Through subjective tests, it is shown that the proposed method is capable of providing perceptually comparable sound quality to the conventional methods even though it uses less memory.

A multi-path structure is proposed for reduction in effect of digital substrate noise which degrades analog circuit performance. As an example low-pass filters are implemented in a 0.18-µm CMOS process. 11-dBm reduction in digital substrate noise is achieved as compared with a conventional structure.

Combination of mutually complementary features is necessary to cope with various changes in pattern classification between normal and pathological voices. This paper proposes a method to improve pathological/normal voice classification performance by combining heterogeneous features. Different combinations of auditory-based and higher-order features are investigated. Their performances are measured by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and a classification and regression tree (CART) method. The proposed classification method by using the CART analysis is shown to be an effective method for pathological voice detection, with a 92.7% classification performance rate. This is a noticeable improvement of 54.32% compared to the MFCC-based GMM algorithm in terms of error reduction.

In this paper, a frequency transformation for designing polyphase transfer functions is proposed. A modification to the bilinear LP-LP transformation, which assigns both stopband edges on negative frequency range whereas passband edges are on positive one, results polyphase transfer functions. Design examples show validity of the proposed method.

A novel dual mode bandpass filter (BPF) with improved spurious response is presented in this letter. To obtain low insertion loss, the coupling structure using the dual mode resonator and the feeding scheme using coplanar-waveguide (CPW) are constructed on the two sides of a dielectric substrate. A defected ground structure (DGS) is designed on the ground plane of the CPW to achieve the goal of spurious suppression of the filter. The filter has been investigated numerically and experimentally. Measured results show a good agreement with the simulated analysis.

A scheme for a low-voltage CMOS syllabic-companding log domain filter with wide dynamic range is proposed and its prototype is presented. A nodal voltage which is fixed in a conventional filter based on the dynamically adjustable biasing (DAB) technique is adapted for change of input envelope to achieve wide dynamic range. Externally linear and time invariant (ELTI) relation between an input and an output is guaranteed by a state variable correction (SVC) circuit which is also proposed for low-voltage operation. To demonstrate the proposed scheme, a fifth-order Chebychev low-pass filter with 100-kHz cutoff frequency is designed and fabricated in a standard 0.35-µm CMOS process. The filter has a 78-dB dynamic range and consumes 200-µW power from a 0.8-V power supply.

A novel Uniform Discrete Multitone (DMT) transceiver is proposed, utilizing a wavelet packet based filter bank transmultiplexer in conjunction with a DMT transceiver. The proposed transceiver decomposes the channel spectrum into subbands of equal bandwidth. The objective is to minimize the bit error rate (BER), which is increased by channel-noise amplification. This noise amplification is due to the Zero-Forcing equalization (ZFE) technique. Quantization of the channel-noise amplification is presented, based on post-equalization signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and probability of error in all subbands of the Uniform DMT system. A modified power loading algorithm is applied to allocate variable power according to subband gains. A BER performance comparison of the Uniform DMT with variable and uniform power-loading and with a conventional DMT system in a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) channel is presented.

A novel low insertion-loss and wideband microstrip bandpass filter has been designed and tested. The basic configuration of this novel dual-mode filter is a square ring resonator with direct-connected orthogonal feed lines, and dual-perturbation elements are introduced within the resonator at symmetrical location. The effects of the size of the perturbation element are studied. A new filter having wider bandwidth and transmission zeros are presented. The proposed filter responses are in good agreement with the simulations and experiments.

Visual tracking is required by many vision applications such as human-computer interfaces and human-robot interactions. However, in daily living spaces where such applications are assumed to be used, stable tracking is often difficult because there are many objects which can cause the visual occlusion. While conventional tracking techniques can handle, to some extent, partial and short-term occlusion, they fail when presented with complete occlusion over long periods. They also cannot handle the case that an occluder such as a box and a bag contains and carries the tracking target inside itself, that is, the case that the target invisibly moves while being contained by the occluder. In this paper, to handle this occlusion problem, we propose a method for visual tracking by a particle filter, which switches tracking targets autonomously. In our method, if occlusion occurs during tracking, a model of the occluder is dynamically created and the tracking target is switched to this model. Thus, our method enables the tracker to indirectly track the "invisible target" by switching its target to the occluder effectively. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.

This paper presents the ultrawideband filters for UWB fullband (range of 3.1-10.6 GHz) applications. This filter consists of ring filter for wide-bandwidth and coupled line structure for suppressing unwanted passband in upper and lower stopbands. Especially, the filter structure was realized on silicon substrate using thin film technology, adequate for wafer level packaging, which can be integrated with CMOS UWB chipset that is currently on development. To minimize the dimension of the filter, the Hilbert structure was applied in ring filter and the meander shaped broadside coupled structure was also adopted in the coupled line structure. The size of the fully realized filter structure is 4.43.6 mm2. The insertion loss in passband is 1.5 dB and the return loss is larger than 15 dB, respectively. The group delay in center frequency is 0.2 ns and the group delay variation is less than 0.15 ns.

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of RF filter characteristics on the system performance of an impulse radio. The impulse radio system transmits modulated pulses having very short time duration. Information can be extracted in the receiver side based on the cross-correlation between received and reference pulses. Accordingly, the pulse distortion due to in-band group delay variation can cause serious degradation in system performance. In general, RF band pass filters inevitably cause non-uniform group delays to the signal passing through the filter that are proportional to its skirt characteristic due to its resonance phenomenon. In this work, a small signal scattering parameter, S21, which is a frequency domain parameter, and its Fourier transform are utilized to characterize the output pulse waveform under the condition that the input and output ports are matched. The output pulse waveform of the filter is predicted based on the convolution integral between the input pulse and filter transfer function, and the analysis result is compared with previously reported experimental result. The resulting bit error rate performances in a bi-phase modulation and a pulse position modulation based impulse radio system are also calculated. Moreover, improvement of system performance by the pulse shaping method, a potential solution for pulse waveform distortion, is analyzed.

In this paper, a notch-band implemented UWB bandpass filter was proposed. The filter was realized by integrating a full ultra-wideband bandpass filter using broadside coupling structure with a bandstop filter using in-line open stub. The in-line open stub was installed in the removed area in the broadside coupled microstrip conductors, which demonstrated a narrow notch-band performance. The proposed filters were designed based on the electromagnetic simulation and fabricated using a wet etching system. Parameter study of length dependence of the notch-band was carried out. The first resonant frequency of the in-line stub appears when the length is approximately equal to one quarter of the guided wavelength. Based on this fact, the notch-band can be adjusted to almost any specified band in the UWB passband. A three-section notch-band implemented filter demonstrated good characteristics: its full frequency bandwidth form 2.8 GHz to 10.2 GHz, good insertion loss of 0.6 dB and 1.0 dB at the centers of the first and second bands respectively, and flat and small group delay of less than 0.40 ns over main pass band, and a large attenuation stopband about 55 dB at 5.63 GHz. A lowpass filter was also introduced in order to improve the out-band performance, by which the measured results show an excellent attenuation better than 30 dB from 10.4 GHz to 17.8 GHz.

In this paper, we propose a multipath en-route filtering method to deal with the problems caused by black hole attacks and selective forwarding attacks. Our result shows that the method is more resilient to these problems up to a certain number of compromised nodes than the statistical en-route filtering scheme.

Bandpass filters with broad bandwidth (up to 70%), very wide upper stopband (nearest spurious passband occurs up to five times of passband center frequency (f0)), good stopband rejection performance (better than -30-40 dB in the whole stopband region), and matching with the conventional low cost printed circuit board process with low dielectric constant substrates are proposed in this paper. The proposed filters are designed using parallel-coupled vertically installed planar stepped-impedance resonators (VIPSIRs), which adopt the inherent nature of very tight coupling of VIP coupled line and extremely high impedance of VIP line. The extremely tightly coupled line enables the proposed filters having very wide passband and the extremely high impedance of VIP line leads to extremely large low-to-high impedance ratio that pushes the nearest spurious passband up to 5f0. Both VIP coupled line and VIP high impedance line are analyzed and characterized by the design charts. The design procedures based on the design charts are verified by several experimental examples. The measured results agree very well with the simulated ones.

A periodically loaded ultra wideband (UWB) bandpass filter based on the electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) concept is presented. Compact wideband filters with steep transition bands can be designed easily using this novel methodology. Unit cells in the EBG circuit model are realized by capacitive and inductive parallel loading of a transmission line. These unit cells are cascaded to realize bandpass filters whose bandwidth depends on the reactive loading of unit cells. The number of unit cells determines the steepness of the band edges of the filter. The main advantage lies in the fact that the size of unit cells can be small because electrical length of transmission line segments in unit cells can be chosen arbitrarily, hence the final filter structure becomes small in size. A microstrip filter with 60% bandwidth is designed and the physical size is compared with a conventional wideband bandpass filter designed with quarter wavelength admittance inverters.

This study presents a class of miniature parallel-coupled bandpass filters with good selectivity and stopband rejection. Capacitive terminations are introduced to the conventional anti-parallel coupled-lines, and lumped-element K-inverters are employed, to achieve both size reduction and spurious suppression. Additionally, the capacitive cross-coupling effect can be introduced to obtain three transmission zeros to enhance the selectivity. Suitable equivalent-circuit models, along with design formulae, are also established. Specifically, via design examples, this work demonstrates the feasibility of proposed filter structures in microstrip configuration. Compared to the conventional parallel-coupled filters, the proposed filters exhibit over 60% size reduction, improved selectivity, and wider stopbands up to four times the center frequency.