Despite logic families based on floating-gate MOS (FGMOS) transistors achieve significant reductions in terms of power and transistor count, these logics have had little impact on VLSI design due to their sensitivity to noise. In order to attain robustness to this phenomenon, Positive-Feedback Floating-Gate logic (PFFGL) uses a differential architecture and positive feedback; data obtained from a 0.5µm ON Semiconductors test chip and from SPICE simulations shows PFFGL to be immune to noise from parasitic couplings as well as to leakage even when minimum device size is used.

Proof of Retrievability (POR) is a protocol by which a client can distribute his/her data to cloud servers and can check if the data stored in the servers is available and intact. After that, network coding-based POR has been applied to improve network throughput. Although many network coding-based PORs have been proposed, most of them have not achieved the following practical features: direct repair and dynamic operations. In this paper, we propose the D2-POR scheme (Direct repair and Dynamic operations in network coding-based POR) to address these shortcomings. When a server is corrupted, the D2-POR can support the direct repair in which the data stored in the corrupted server can be repaired using the data directly provided by healthy servers. The client is thus free from the burden of data repair. Furthermore, the D2-POR allows the client to efficiently perform dynamic operations, i.e., modification, insertion and deletion.

In this paper, we report the design of an organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) driver circuit for the actuator of an organic fluid pump, which can be integrated in a portable-size fully-organic artificial lung. Compared to traditional pump designs, lightness, compactness and scalability are achieved by adopting a creative pumping mechanism with a completely organic-material-based system concept. The transportable fluid volume is verified to be flexibly adjustable, enabling on-demand controllability and scalability of the pump's fluid-flow rate. The simulations, based on an accurate surface-potential OTFT compact model, demonstrate that the necessary driving waveforms can be efficiently generated and adjusted to the actuator requirements. At the actuator-driving-circuit frequency of 0.98Hz, an all-organic fluid pump with 40cm length and 0.2cm height is able to achieve a flow rate of 0.847L/min, which satisfies the requirements for artificial-lung assist systems to a weakened normal lung.

In this letter, a new scheme for multirate coprime sampling and reconstructing of sparse multiband signals with very high carrier frequencies is proposed, where the locations of the signal bands are not known a priori. Simulation results show that the new scheme can simultaneously reduce both the number of sampling channels and the sampling rate for perfect reconstruction, compared to the existing schemes requiring high number of sampling channels or high sampling rate.

This paper investigates the impact of hidden nodes (HNs) on on-demand access point (AP) wake-up that is employed to realize energy-efficient wireless LANs (WLANs). The considered wake-up signaling exploits IEEE 802.11 signals transmitted by a WLAN station (STA) to remotely activate a sleeping AP: a STA with communication demands transmits a series of WLAN frames with their length corresponding to the wake-up ID. A wake-up receiver attached to each AP detects the length of WLAN frames with the low-power operations of envelope detection and on-off-keying (OOK) demodulation. Since WLAN frames constituting a wake-up signal are transmitted by a STA following carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) protocol, they are vulnerable to the well-known hidden node (HN) problem. The impact of HNs on wake-up signaling is different from that on data communications since the wake-up receiver employs unconventional frame length detection to extract the information on the wake-up ID from the received signal. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of HNs on wake-up failure probability with theoretical and experimental evaluations. If the degradation of wake-up signalling due to HNs is observed for a STA, the corresponding STA may suffer from collisions due to the same HNs for its data communications even if it manages to succeed in the wake-up process. In this case, the wake-up operation itself may not be necessary. Therefore, we also compare the impact of HNs on wake-up signaling and that on data communications after the wake-up process. These results and discussions provide us with an insight on the impact of HNs on on-demand AP wake-up exploiting WLAN signals.

Drive-by download attacks force users to automatically download and install malware by redirecting them to malicious URLs that exploit vulnerabilities of the user's web browser. In addition, several evasion techniques, such as code obfuscation and environment-dependent redirection, are used in combination with drive-by download attacks to prevent detection. In environment-dependent redirection, attackers profile the information on the user's environment, such as the name and version of the browser and browser plugins, and launch a drive-by download attack on only certain targets by changing the destination URL. When malicious content detection and collection techniques, such as honeyclients, are used that do not match the specific environment of the attack target, they cannot detect the attack because they are not redirected. Therefore, it is necessary to improve analysis coverage while countering these adversarial evasion techniques. We propose a method for exhaustively analyzing JavaScript code relevant to redirections and extracting the destination URLs in the code. Our method facilitates the detection of attacks by extracting a large number of URLs while controlling the analysis overhead by excluding code not relevant to redirections. We implemented our method in a browser emulator called MINESPIDER that automatically extracts potential URLs from websites. We validated it by using communication data with malicious websites captured during a three-year period. The experimental results demonstrated that MINESPIDER extracted 30,000 new URLs from malicious websites in a few seconds that conventional methods missed.

Pairing-based cryptography has realized a lot of innovative cryptographic applications such as attribute-based cryptography and semi homomorphic encryption. Pairing is a bilinear map constructed on a torsion group structure that is defined on a special class of elliptic curves, namely pairing-friendly curve. Pairing-friendly curves are roughly classified into supersingular and non supersingular curves. In these years, non supersingular pairing-friendly curves have been focused on from a security reason. Although non supersingular pairing-friendly curves have an ability to bridge various security levels with various parameter settings, most of software and hardware implementations tightly restrict them to achieve calculation efficiencies and avoid implementation difficulties. This paper shows an FPGA implementation that supports various parameter settings of pairings on non supersingular pairing-friendly curves for which Montgomery reduction, cyclic vector multiplication algorithm, projective coordinates, and Tate pairing have been combinatorially applied. Then, some experimental results with resource usages are shown.

This paper empirically validates battery-less sensor activation via wireless energy transmission to release sensors from wires and batteries. To seamlessly extend the coverage and activate sensor nodes distributed in any indoor environment, we proposed multi-point wireless energy transmission with carrier shift diversity. In this scheme, multiple transmitters are employed to compensate path-loss attenuation and orthogonal frequencies are allocated to the multiple transmitters to avoid the destructive interference that occurs when the same frequency is used by all transmitters. In our previous works, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme was validated theoretically and also empirically by using just a spectrum analyzer to measure the received power. In this paper, we develop low-energy battery-less sensor nodes whose consumed power and required received power for activation are respectively 142µW and 400µW. In addition, we conduct indoor experiments in which the received power and activation of battery-less sensor node are simultaneously observed by using the developed battery-less sensor node and a spectrum analyzer. The results show that the coverage of single-point and multi-point wireless energy transmission without carrier shift diversity are, respectively, 84.4% and 83.7%, while the coverage of the proposed scheme is 100%. It can be concluded that the effectiveness of the proposed scheme can be verified by our experiments using real battery-less sensor nodes.

A low-cost prototypic Kinect-based rehabilitation system was developed for recovering balance capability of stroke patients. A total of 16 stroke patients were recruited to participate in the study. After excluding 3 patients who failed to finish all of the rehabilitation sessions, only the data of 13 patients were analyzed. The results exhibited a significant effect in recovering balance function of the patients after 3 weeks of balance training. Additionally, the questionnaire survey revealed that the designed system was perceived as effective and easy in operation.

The recent cyber-attacks utilize various malware as a means of attacks for the attacker's malicious purposes. They are aimed to steal confidential information or seize control over major facilities after infiltrating the network of a target organization. Attackers generally create new malware or many different types of malware by using an automatic malware creation tool which enables remote control over a target system easily and disturbs trace-back of these attacks. The paper proposes a generation method of malware behavior patterns as well as the detection techniques in order to detect the known and even unknown malware efficiently. The behavior patterns of malware are generated with Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) of API call sequences of malware. Consequently, we defined these behavior patterns as a “feature-chain” of malware for the analytical purpose. The initial generation of the feature-chain consists of extracting API call sequences with API hooking library, classifying malware samples by the similar behavior, and making the representative sequences from the MSA results. The detection mechanism of numerous malware is performed by measuring similarity between API call sequence of a target process (suspicious executables) and feature-chain of malware. By comparing with other existing methods, we proved the effectiveness of our proposed method based on Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) algorithm. Also we evaluated that our method outperforms other antivirus systems with 2.55 times in detection rate and 1.33 times in accuracy rate for malware detection.

Distributed compressed video sensing (DCVS), combining advantages of compressed sensing and distributed video coding, is developed as a novel and powerful system to get an encoder with low complexity. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how to explore the method to achieve an effective video recovery through utilizing realistic signal characteristics as much as possible. Based on this, we present a novel spatiotemporal dictionary learning (DL) based reconstruction method for DCVS, where both the DL model and the l1-analysis based recovery with correlation constraints are included in the minimization problem to achieve the joint optimization of sparse representation and signal reconstruction. Besides, an alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMM) based numerical algorithm is outlined for solving the underlying optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods, with 0.03-4.14 dB increases in PSNR and a 0.13-15.31 dB gain for non-key frames.

An on-chip monitoring circuit using a sub-sampling scheme, which consists of a 6-bit flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a 51-phase phase-locked loop (PLL)-based frequency synthesizer, is proposed to analyze the signal integrity of a single-ended 8-Gb/s octal data rate (ODR) chip-to-chip interface with a source synchronous clocking scheme.

A novel activation method for a B dopant implanted in a Si substrate using a soft X-ray undulator was examined. As the photon energy of the irradiated soft X-ray approached the energy of the core level of Si 2p, the activation ratio increased. The effect of soft X-ray irradiation on B activation was remarkable at temperatures lower than 400°C. The activation energy of B activation by soft X-ray irradiation (0.06 eV) was lower than that of B activation by furnace annealing (0.18 eV). The activation of the B dopant by soft X-ray irradiation occurs at low temperature, although the activation ratio shows small values of 6.2×10-3 at 110°C. The activation by soft X-ray is caused not only by thermal effects, but also electron excitation and atomic movement.

In this paper, a vehicular antenna design scheme that considers vehicular body effects is proposed. A wire antenna for the global positioning system (GPS) and long-term evolution (LTE) systems is implemented on a plastic plate and then mounted on a windshield of the vehicle. Common outputs are used to allow feed sharing. It is necessary to increase the GPS right-hand circularly polarization (RHCP) gain near the zenith and to reduce the axis ratio (AR). For LTE, we need to increase the horizontal polarization (HP) gain. In addition, for LTE, multiband characteristics are required. In order to achieve the specified performance, the antenna shape is optimized via a Pareto genetic algorithm (PGA). When an antenna is mounted on the body, antenna performance changes significantly. To evaluate the performance of an antenna with complex shape mounted on a windshield, a commercial electromagnetic simulator (Ansoft HFSS) is used. To apply electromagnetic results output by HFSS to the PGA algorithm operating in the MATLAB environment, a MATLAB-to-HFSS linking program via Visual BASIC (VB) script was used. It is difficult to carry out the electromagnetic analysis on the entire body because of the limitations of the calculating load and memory size. To overcome these limitations, we consider only that part of the vehicle's body that influences antenna performance. We show that a series of optimization steps can minimize the degradation caused by the vehicle`s body. The simulation results clearly show that it is well optimized at 1.575GHz for GPS, and 0.74 ∼ 0.79GHz and 2.11 ∼ 2.16GHz for LTE, respectively.

In this letter, several new families of binary sequence pairs with period N=np, where p is a prime and gcd(n,p)=1, and optimal correlation values 1 and -3 are constructed. These classes of binary sequence pairs are based on Chinese remainder theorem. The constructed sequence pairs have optimum balance among 0's and 1's.

A partitioning parallelization of the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition, pMOEA/D, is proposed in this letter to achieve significant time reductions for expensive bi-objective optimization problems (BOPs) on message-passing clusters. Each sub-population of pMOEA/D resides on a separate processor in a cluster and consists of a non-overlapping partition and some extra overlapping individuals for updating neighbors. Additionally, sub-populations cooperate across separate processors by the hybrid migration of elitist individuals and utopian points. Experimental results on two benchmark BOPs and the wireless sensor network layout problem indicate that pMOEA/D achieves satisfactory performance in terms of speedup and quality of solutions on message-passing clusters.

Blood pressure measurement by auscultatory method is a compulsory skill that is required by all healthcare practitioners. During the measurement, they must concentrate on recognizing the Korotkoff sounds, looking at the sphygmomanometer scale, and constantly deflating the cuff pressure simultaneously. This complex operation is difficult for the new learners and they need a lot of practice with the supervisor in order to guide them on their measurements. However, the supervisor is not always available and consequently, they always face the problem of lack of enough training. In order to help them mastering the skill of measuring blood pressure by auscultatory method more efficiently and effectively, we propose using a sensor device to capture the signals of Korotkoff sounds and cuff pressure during the measurement, and display the signal changes on a visualization tool through wireless connection. At the end of the measurement, the learners can verify their skill on deflation speed and recognition of Korotkoff sounds using the graphical view, and compare their measurements with the machine instantly. By using this device, the new learners do not need to wait for their supervisor for training but can practice with their colleagues more frequently. As a result, they will be able to acquire the skill in a shorter time and be more confident with their measurements.

This paper proposes a rate adjustment scheme for inbound data traffic on a virtualized host. Most prior studies on network virtualization have only focused on outbound traffic, yet many cloud applications rely on inbound traffic performance. The proposed scheme adjusts the inbound rates of virtual network interfaces dynamically in proportion to the bandwidth demands of the virtual machines.

The individual steps of UV imprint lithography have been explained in detail from the points of manufacturing nano-structures. The applications to photonic devices have been also introduced.

This paper presents efficient and easily implementable methods for the characteristic analysis and tolerance analysis of nonlinear resistive circuits using integer programming. In these methods, the problem of finding all characteristic curves or all solution sets (regions of possible operating points) is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem, and it is solved by a high-performance integer programming solver such as CPLEX. It is shown that the proposed methods can easily be implemented without making complicated programs, and that all characteristic curves or all solution sets are obtained by solving mixed integer programming problems several times. Numerical examples are given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods.