We have fabricated printed active antenna for flexible information tag which have a loop antenna combined with step-edge vertical channel organic field-effect transistor (SVC-OFET). Fabrication using printing process, characterization of SVC-OFETs, and performances of active antenna elements are discussed in detail.

As sensitive magnetic sensors, magnetometers based on superconducting quantum interference devices can be used for the detection of weak magnetic fields. These signals can be generated by diverse origins, for example, brain electric activity, myocardium electric activity, and nuclear precession of hydrogen protons. In addition, weak current induced in the low-temperature detectors, for example, transition-edge sensors can be detected using SQUIDs. And, change of magnetic flux quantum generated in a superconducting ring can be detected by SQUID, which can be used for realization of mechanical force. Thus, SQUIDs are key elements in precision metrology. In Korea, development of low-temperature SQUIDs based on Nb-Josephson junctions was started in late 1980s, and Nb-based SQUIDs have been used mainly for biomagnetic measurements; magnetocardiography and magnetoencephalography. High-Tc SQUIDs, being developed in mid 1990s, were used for magnetocardiography and nondestructive evaluation. Recently, SQUID-based low-field nuclear magnetic resonance technology is under development. In this paper, we review the past progress and recent activity of SQUID applications in Korea, with focus on biomagnetic measurements.

This letter proposes a low-complexity soft-detection algorithm for modified dual-carrier modulation (MDCM) in WiMedia ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. In order to reduce the complexity of soft-output maximum-likelihood detection (soft-MLD), which gives the optimal performance for MDCM symbols, the proposed algorithm utilizes the following three methods: real/imaginary separation, multiplierless distance calculation, and candidate set reduction. Through these methods, the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity of soft-MLD by 97%, while preventing the deterioration of its optimality. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by simulations of 640–1024 Mbps transmission modes of the latest Release 1.5 standard of the WiMedia UWB.

As an application of low electric field to biomedical engineering, this paper attempts to study the dose-effect of biological effects caused by msPEF with experiments on HeLa cells. MTT assay was used to trace the cell electroporation and examine cell viability. It is observed that with the increasing electric field intensity and pulse numbers, IRE effects will occur successively.

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a well-known feature extraction method for supervised subspace learning in statistical pattern recognition. In this paper, a novel method of LDA based on a new L1-norm optimization technique and its variances are proposed. The conventional LDA, which is based on L2-norm, is sensitivity to the presence of outliers, since it used the L2-norm to measure the between-class and within-class distances. In addition, the conventional LDA often suffers from the so-called small sample size (3S) problem since the number of samples is always smaller than the dimension of the feature space in many applications, such as face recognition. Based on L1-norm, the proposed methods have several advantages, first they are robust to outliers because they utilize the L1-norm, which is less sensitive to outliers. Second, they have no 3S problem. Third, they are invariant to rotations as well. The proposed methods are capable of reducing the influence of outliers substantially, resulting in a robust classification. Performance assessment in face application shows that the proposed approaches are more effectiveness to address outliers issue than traditional ones.

We extend the Nonparametric Discriminant Analysis (NDA) algorithm to a semi-supervised dimensionality reduction technique, called Semi-supervised Nonparametric Discriminant Analysis (SNDA). SNDA preserves the inherent advantages of NDA, that is, relaxing the Gaussian assumption required for the traditional LDA-based methods. SNDA takes advantage of both the discriminating power provided by the NDA method and the locality-preserving power provided by the manifold learning. Specifically, the labeled data points are used to maximize the separability between different classes and both the labeled and unlabeled data points are used to build a graph incorporating neighborhood information of the data set. Experiments on synthetic as well as real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A direction-of-arrival estimation (DoA) scheme that uses a uniform circular array (UCA) is proposed for near-field sources, where multiple pairs-of-subarrays exist with central symmetry. First, multiple generalized ESPRIT (G-ESPRIT) spectrums are obtained by applying the conventional G-ESPRIT algorithm to each of multiple pairs-of-subarrays. Second, a parallel spectrum is found by adding up the reciprocals of these G-ESPRIT spectrums and taking the reciprocal of the total. The locations of peaks in the parallel spectrum give the DoAs being estimated. When a DoA approaches the translation direction of two subarrays, the conventional G-ESPRIT spectrum is broken by a false peak. Since the translation directions of pairs-of-subarrays are different from each other, the false peak, due to the DoA approaching one of translation directions, does not exist simultaneously in all G-ESPRIT spectrums. The parallel concatenation of the spectrums suppresses the false peak and enhances the true DoA peaks. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme reduces the root mean square error of the DoA estimation, compared with the conventional G-ESPRIT algorithm.

This article describes the frequency response and the applications of the optical electric-field sensor consisting of a 1 mm1 mm1 mm CdTe crystal mounted on the tip of an optical fiber, which theoretically possesses the potential to cover the frequency band from below megahertz to terahertz. We utilize a capacitor, GTEM-Cell, and standard gain horn antennas for applying a free-space electric field to the optical sensor at frequencies from 20 kHz to 1 GHz, from 1 GHz to 18 GHz, and from 10 to 180 GHz, respectively. An electric-field measurement demonstrates its flat frequency response within a 6-dB range from 20 kHz to 50 GHz except for the resonance due to the piezo-electric effect at a frequency around 1 MHz. The sensitivity increases due to the resonance of the radio frequency wave propagating in the crystal at the frequencies higher than 50 GHz. These experimental results demonstrate that the optical electric-field sensor is a superior tool for the wide-band measurement which is impossible with conventional sensors such as a dipole, a loop, and a horn antenna. In transient electrostatic discharge measurements, electric-field mapping, and near-field antenna measurements, the optical electric-field sensor provide the useful information for the deterioration diagnosis and the lifetime prognosis of electric circuits and devices. These applications of the optical electric-field sensor are regarded as promising ways for sowing the seeds of evolution in electric-field measurements for antenna measurement, EMC, and EMI.

This paper presents the design of a second-order and a fourth-order bandpass filter (BPF) for 60 GHz millimeter-wave applications in 0.18 µm CMOS technology. The proposed on-chip BPFs employ the folded open loop structure designed on pattern ground shields. The adoption of a folded structure and utilization of multiple transmission zeros in the stopband permit the compact size and high selectivity for the BPF. Moreover, the pattern ground shields obviously slow down the guided waves which enable further reduction in the physical length of the resonator, and this, in turn, results in improvement of the insertion losses. A very good agreement between the electromagnetic (EM) simulations and measurement results has been achieved. As a result, the second-order BPF has the center frequency of 57.5 GHz, insertion loss of 2.77 dB, bandwidth of 14 GHz, return loss less than 27.5 dB and chip size of 650 µm810 µm (including bonding pads) while the fourth-order BPF has the center frequency of 57 GHz, insertion loss of 3.06 dB, bandwidth of 12 GHz, return loss less than 30 dB with chip size of 905 µm810 µm (including bonding pads).

The present paper introduces a prototype design and experimental results for a multi-user MIMO linear precoding system. A base station and two mobile stations are implemented by taking full advantage of the software-defined radio. The base station consists of general purpose signal analyzers and signal generators controlled by a personal computer. Universal software radio peripherals are used as mobile stations. Linear spatial precoding and a simple two-way channel estimation technique are adopted in this experimental system. In-lab and field transmission experiments are carried out, and the bit error rate performance is evaluated. The impact of the channel estimation error under average channel gain discrepancy between two mobile stations is analyzed through computer simulations. Channel estimation error is shown to have a greater influence on the mobile station with the greater average channel gain.

Dynamic Programming (DP) based Track-Before-Detect (TBD) algorithm is effective in detecting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) targets. However, its complexity increases exponentially as the dimension of the target state space increases, so the exact implementation of DP-TBD will become computationally prohibitive if the state dimension is more than two or three, which greatly prevents its applications to many realistic problems. In order to improve the computational efficiency of DP-TBD, a thresholding process based DP-TBD (TP-DP-TBD) is proposed in this paper. In TP-DP-TBD, a low threshold is first used to eliminate the noise-like (with low-amplitude) measurements. Then the DP integration process is modified to only focuses on the thresholded higher-amplitude measurements, thus huge amounts of computation devoted to the less meaningful low-amplitude measurements are saved. Additionally, a merit function transfer process is integrated into DP recursion to guarantee the inheritance and utilization of the target merits. The performance of TP-DP-TBD is investigated under both optical style Cartesian model and surveillance radar model. The results show that substantial computation reduction is achieved with limited performance loss, consequently TP-DP-TBD provides a cost-efficient tradeoff between computational cost and performance. The effect of the merit function transfer on performance is also studied.

This letter proposes a multiuser switched scheduling scheme with per-user threshold and post user selection and provides a generic analytical framework for determining the optimal feedback thresholds. The proposed scheme applies an individual feedback threshold for each user rather than a single common threshold for all users to achieve some capacity gain due to the flexibility of threshold selection as well as a lower scheduling outage probability. In addition, since scheduling outage may occur with a non-negligible probability, the proposed scheme employs post user selection in order to further improve the ergodic capacity, where the user with the highest potential for a higher channel quality than other users is selected. Numerical and simulation results show that the capacity gain by post user selection is significant when random sequence is used.

In this paper, we derive a fast polynomial basis multiplier for GF(2m) defined by pentanomials xm+xk3+xk2+xk1+1 with 1 ≤ k1 < k2 < k3 ≤ m/2 using the presented method by Park and Chang. The proposed multiplier has the time delay TA+(2+⌈log2(m-1)⌉) TX or TA+(3+⌈log2(m-1)⌉) TX which is the lowest one compared with known multipliers for pentanomials except for special types, where TA and TX denote the delays of one AND gate and one XOR gate, respectively. On the other hand, its space complexity is very slightly greater than the best known results.

We deal with the scattering of a scalar plane wave by a half plane with a sinusoidally deformed edge from a straight edge by a physical optics approximation. The normal incidence of a plane wave to an edge is assumed. A contribution of an edge to the field integral is asymptotically evaluated and the basic properties of the scattering caused by the edge deformation is clarified. The scattering pattern has peaks at specific scattering angles, which agree with diffraction angles calculated by the well-known grating formula for normal incidence. Some numerical examples are shown and it is shown that the results are in good agreement with the results obtained by the GTD method for low angle incidence.

This paper describes downlink throughput performances measured in a mobile broadband wireless access (MBWA) system field trial with Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Handoff Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (FLASH-OFDM). The field trial results show that the downlink cell sizes are 0.4 km2, 0.6 km2, and 1.7 km2 when the sector antenna heights are 19 m, 58 m, and 84 m, respectively, assuming the following items. (1) The cell shape is circular. (2) The cell edge is defined as the location where the average downlink throughput is 1.5 Mbit/s.

In this letter, a low complexity decoder for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) channel is proposed employing Quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (QOSTBC). The complexity of the proposed decoding algorithm involved grows linearly with the number of transmit antennas and order of Galois Field.

In this note we suggest a new parallelizable mode of operation for message authentication codes (MACs). The new MAC algorithm iterates a pseudo-random function (PRF) FK:{0,1}m → {0,1}n, where K is a key and m,n are positive integers such that m ≥ 2n. The new construction is an improvement over a sequential MAC algorithm presented at FSE2008, solving positively an open problem posed in the paper – the new mode is capable of fully parallel execution while achieving rate-1 efficiency and “full n-bit” security. Interestingly enough, PMAC-like parallel structure, rather than CBC-like serial iteration, has beneficial side effects on security. That is, the new construction is provided with a more straightforward security proof and with an even better (“-free”) security bound than the FSE 2008 construction.

Structured quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes have been adopted in many wireless communication standards, such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi and WPAN. To completely support the variable code rate (multi-rate) and variable code length (multi-length) implementation for universal applications, the partial-parallel layered LDPC decoder architecture is straightforward and widely used in the decoder design. In this paper, we propose a high parallel LDPC decoder architecture for WiMAX system with dedicated ASIC design. Different from the block by block decoding schedule in most partial-parallel layered architectures, all the messages within each layer are updated simultaneously in the proposed fully-parallel layered decoder architecture. Meanwhile, the message updating is separated into bit-serial style to reduce hardware complexity. A 6-bit implementation is adopted in the decoder chip, since simulations demonstrate that 6-bit quantization is the best trade-off between performance and complexity. Moreover, the two-layer concurrent processing technique is proposed to further increase the parallelism for low code rates. Implementation results show that the decoder chip saves 22.2% storage bits and only takes 2448 clock cycles per iteration for all the code rates defined in WiMAX standard. It occupies 3.36 mm2 in SMIC 65 nm CMOS process, and realizes 1056 Mbps throughput at 1.2 V, 110 MHz and 10 iterations with 115 mW power occupation, which infers a power efficiency of 10.9 pJ/bit/iteration. The power efficiency is improved 63.6% in normalized comparison with the state-of-art WiMAX LDPC decoder.

In this paper, we compare the decoding error rates in the error floors for non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over general linear groups with those for non-binary LDPC codes over finite fields transmitted through the q-ary memoryless symmetric channels under belief propagation decoding. To analyze non-binary LDPC codes defined over both the general linear group GL(m, F2) and the finite field F2m, we investigate non-binary LDPC codes defined over GL(m3, F2m4). We propose a method to lower the error floors for non-binary LDPC codes. In this analysis, we see that the non-binary LDPC codes constructed by our proposed method defined over general linear group have the same decoding performance in the error floors as those defined over finite field. The non-binary LDPC codes defined over general linear group have more choices of the labels on the edges which satisfy the condition for the optimization.

From an information-theoretic point of view, it is well known that the capacity of relay channels comprising of three terminals is much greater than that of two terminal direct channels especially for low SNR region. Previously invented relay coding strategies have not been designed to achieve this relaying gain occurring in the low SNR region. In this paper, we propose a new simple coding strategy for a relay channel with low SNR or, equivalently, for a very noisy relay channel. The multiplicative repetition is utilized to design this simple coding strategy. We claim that the proposed strategy is simple since the destination and the relay can decode with almost the same computational complexity by sharing the same structure of decoder. An appropriate static power allocation which yields the maximum throughput close to the optimal one in low SNRs is also suggested. Under practical constraints such as equal time-sharing etc., the asymptotic performance of this simple strategy is within 0.5 dB from the achievable rate of a relay channel. Furthermore, the performance at few thousand bits enjoys a relaying gain by approximately 1 dB.