This paper presents an automatic gain control (AGC) system suitable for 60GHz direct conversion receivers. By using a two step gain control algorithm with high-pass filter cutoff frequency switching, the proposed AGC system realizes fast settling time and wide dynamic range simultaneously. The paper also discusses wide-bandwidth variable gain amplifier (VGA) design. By introducing digitally-controlled resistors and gain flattening capacitors, the proposed VGA realizes wide gain range while compensating gain variations due to parasitic capacitance of MOS switches. The AGC system is implemented in a transceiver chipset where RFIC and BBIC are fabricated in 90nm CMOS and 40nm CMOS respectively. The measurement shows excellent dynamic range of 47dB with +/-1dB gain accuracy within 1µs settling time, which satisfies the stringent requirements of the IEEE802.11ad standard.

Self-resonant helical antenna and capacitor-loaded helical antenna of the same dimension for coupled-resonant wireless power transfer is discussed. At first, fundamental difference of the self-resonant and the capacitor-loaded antenna is demonstrated by calculating electric- and magnetic-coupling coefficient. Next, performance of the helical antennas are discussed from viewpoints of 1) transmission efficiency, 2) undesired emission, 3) near-field leakage, 4) effect of human body and 5) effect of conductivity. We have found that the self-resonant helical antenna has an advantage in low transmission loss due to a conductivity of wire. On the other hand, the capacitor-loaded antenna has an advantage in low emission, long transfer distance, and low influence of resonant frequency from human body. This is because both electric-field coupling and magnetic-field coupling are dominant for the self-resonant antenna while only magnetic-field coupling is dominant in the capacitor-loaded antenna.

In this paper, a 24GHz transformer-coupled VCO is presented for a wide linear tuning range in the 0.13-µm CMOS process. The measured results of the proposed VCO show that the center frequency is 23.5GHz with 7.4% frequency tuning range. The output frequency curve has wide linear tuning region (5.5%) at the middle of the curve. Also, the VCO exhibits good phase noise of -110.23dBc/Hz at an offset frequency of 1 MHz. It has a compact chip size of 430 × 500µm2. The VCO core DC power consumption is 5.4mW at 1.35V VDD.

In this paper, an efficient multi-modal medical image fusion approach is proposed based on local features contrast and bilateral sharpness criterion in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. Compared with other multiscale decomposition analysis tools, the nonsubsampled contourlet transform not only can eliminate the “block-effect” and the “pseudo-effect”, but also can represent the source image in multiple direction and capture the geometric structure of source image in transform domain. These advantages of NSCT can, when used in fusion algorithm, help to attain more visual information in fused image and improve the fusion quality. At the same time, in order to improve the robustness of fusion algorithm and to improve the quality of the fused image, two selection rules should be considered. Firstly, a new bilateral sharpness criterion is proposed to select the lowpass coefficient, which exploits both strength and phase coherence. Secondly, a modified SML (sum modified Laplacian) is introduced into the local contrast measurements, which is suitable for human vision system and can extract more useful detailed information from source images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than the conventional fusion algorithm in terms of both visual quality and objective evaluation criteria.

This letter introduces innovative VAD based on horizontal spectral entropy with long-span of time (HSELT) feature sets to improve mobile ASR performance in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions. Since the signal characteristics of nonstationary noise change with time, we need long-term information of the noisy speech signal to define a more robust decision rule yielding high accuracy. We find that HSELT measures can horizontally enhance the transition between speech and non-speech segments. Based on this finding, we use the HSELT measures to achieve high accuracy for detecting speech signal form various stationary and nonstationary noises.

We propose a novel method for knowledge consolidation based on a knowledge graph as a next step in relation extraction from text. The knowledge consolidation method consists of entity consolidation and relation consolidation. During the entity consolidation process, identical entities are found and merged using both name similarity and relation similarity measures. In the relation consolidation process, incorrect relations are removed using cardinality properties, temporal information and relation weight in given graph structure. In our experiment, we could generate compact and clean knowledge graphs where number of entities and relations are reduced by 6.1% and by 17.4% respectively with increasing relation accuracy from 77.0% to 85.5%.

Two voltage controlled current source (VCCS) models of double-channel p-type lateral extended drain MOS (DPLEDMOS) are firstly proposed to analyze the energy recovery circuit (ERC) efficiency of PDP data driver IC. In terms of the mathematical function between ID and VDS, the VCCS models are created. The presented models can be embedded in system software Saber to simulate the ERC waveform of data driver IC. A test board and a PDP system are used to verify the accuracy of the VCCS models. The experimental measurements agree with the simulation results very well and the maximum model error is 3.89%. Simulation results also show that the ERC efficiency of PDP data driver IC is influenced by three factors: the value of charge time TERC, the drain current ID, and the capacitance of CL. In an actual PDP system, TERC is restricted and CL is changeless. The ERC efficiency of PDP data driver IC can be improved significantly by using DPLEDMOS which has higher ID capacity. The proposed VCCS models of DPLEDMOS can be used to predict the ERC efficiency accurately.

This paper presents a fine-grain bit-serial reconfigurable VLSI architecture using multiple-valued switch blocks and binary logic modules. Multiple-valued signaling is utilized to implement a compact switch block. A binary-controlled current-steering technique is introduced, utilizing a programmable three-level differential-pair circuit to implement a high-performance low-power arbitrary two-variable binary function, and increase the noise margins in comparison with the quaternary-controlled differential-pair circuit. A current-source sharing technique between a series-gating differential-pair circuit and a current-mode D-latch is proposed to reduce the current source count and improve the speed. It is demonstrated that the power consumption and the delay of the proposed multiple-valued cell based on the binary-controlled current-steering technique and the current-source-sharing technique are reduced to 63% and 72%, respectively, in comparison with those of a previous multiple-valued cell.

Aiming to alleviate the visual tracking problem of drift which reduces the abilities of almost all online visual trackers, a robust visual tracker (called CCMM tracker) is proposed with a coupled-classifier based on multiple representative appearance models. The coupled-classifier consists of root and head classifiers based on local sparse representation. The two classifiers collaborate to fulfil a tracking task within the Bayesian-based tracking framework, also to update their templates with a novel mechanism which tries to guarantee an update operation along the “right” orientation. Consequently, the tracker is more powerful in anti-interference. Meanwhile the multiple representative appearance models maintain features of the different submanifolds of the target appearance, which the target exhibited previously. The multiple models cooperatively support the coupled-classifier to recognize the target in challenging cases (such as persistent disturbance, vast change of appearance, and recovery from occlusion) with an effective strategy. The novel tracker proposed in this paper, by explicit inference, can reduce drift and handle frequent and drastic appearance variation of the target with cluttered background, which is demonstrated by the extensive experiments.

This paper presents a novel topic modeling (TM) approach for discovering meaningful topics for Web APIs, which is a potential dimensionality reduction way for efficient and effective classification, retrieval, organization, and management of numerous APIs. We exploit the possibility of conducting TM on multi-labeled APIs by combining a supervised TM (known as Labeled LDA) with ontology. Experiments conducting on real-world API data set show that the proposed method outperforms standard Labeled LDA with an average gain of 7.0% in measuring quality of the generated topics. In addition, we also evaluate the similarity matching between topics generated by our method and standard Labeled LDA, which demonstrates the significance of incorporating ontology.

Nowadays, many interface devices or training systems have been developed with recent developments in IT technology, but only a few training systems for developmentally disabled people have been introduced. In this paper, we present a real-time, interactional and situational training system based on augmented reality in order to improve cognitive capability and adaptive ability in the daily lives of developmentally disabled people. Our system is specifically based on serving food in restaurants. It allows disabled people wearing the HMD attached with camera to conduct the training to cope with a series of situations safely while serving customers food and drinks and take the training session as much as they want. After experimenting on our presented system for 3 months, we found that they actively participated in the training and their cognitive abilities increasingly went faster through repeated training, resulting in the improvement in their cognitive ability and their ability to deal with situations.

This paper presents a 20 GHz push-push VCO realized by a 10 GHz super-harmonic coupled quadrature oscillator for a quadrature 60 GHz frequency synthesizer. The output nodes are peaked by a tunable second harmonic resonator. The proposed VCO is implemented in 65 nm CMOS process. It achieves a tuning range of 3.5 GHz from 16.1 GHz to 19.6 GHz with a phase noise of -106 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The power consumption of the core oscillators is 10.3 mW and an FoM of -181.3 dBc/Hz is achieved.

A 5.6-GHz 1-V balanced LC-tank Colpitts voltage controlled oscillator is designed and implemented with a TSMC 0.18-µm CMOS process. This proposed Colpitts VCO circuit adopts two single-ended complementary LC-tank VCOs coupled by two pairs of varactors. The proposed VCO operates at low power consumption because it has the same dc current path as the np-MOSFETs. The Measured results of the proposed VCO achieve tuning range of 670 MHz from 5.23 to 5.9 GHz while the controlled voltage is tuned from 0 to 1-V, phase noise of -118.8 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency from the carrier of 5.6 GHz and output power of -10.97 dBm at the supply voltage of 1 V. The power consumption of the core circuit is 1.79 mW and the chip area including pads is 0.451 (0.55 0.82) mm2.

Pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is a new type of artificial neural network specific for image processing applications. It is a single layer, two dimensional network with neurons which have 1:1 correspondence to the pixels of an input image. It is convenient to process the intensities and spatial locations of image pixels simultaneously by applying a PCNN. Therefore, we propose a modified PCNN with anisotropic synaptic weight matrix for image edge detection from the aspect of intensity similarities of pixels to their neighborhoods. By applying the anisotropic synaptic weight matrix, the interconnections are only established between the central neuron and the neighboring neurons corresponding to pixels with similar intensity values in a 3 by 3 neighborhood. Neurons corresponding to edge pixels and non-edge pixels will receive different input signal from the neighboring neurons. By setting appropriate threshold conditions, image step edges can be detected effectively. Comparing with conventional PCNN based edge detection methods, the proposed modified PCNN is much easier to control, and the optimal result can be achieved instantly after all neurons pulsed. Furthermore, the proposed method is shown to be able to distinguish the isolated pixels from step edge pixels better than derivative edge detectors.

This paper proposes an ASIC design support tool set for non-pipelined asynchronous circuits with bundled-data implementation. This tool set consists of seven tools to automate design processes of bundled-data implementation such as the generation of design constraints, timing verification, and delay adjustment considering a given latency constraint. With the proposed design flow which combines the proposed tool set and commercial CAD tools, most of design processes from an RTL model is fully automated. In the experiments, to show the effectiveness of energy consumption in bundled-data implementation compared to synchronous counterpart, this paper synthesizes several circuits with a latency constraint which is generated from the synchronous counterpart with the minimum clock cycle time.

A self-assembled monolayer having a benzophenone unit as a photoreactive terminal group (BP-SAM) was prepared on an indium-tin oxide (ITO) electrode, on which a hole-transport layer of a phenoxazine-dioctylfluorene copolymer (H5) was spin-coated and irradiated with UV light. After washing the physisorbed H5 molecules, contact angle measurement and ellipsometry showed that the H5 molecules can be tethered to the ITO surface via the BP-SAM. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) were prepared in the structure of ITO/H5 hole transport layer/tris(8-hydroxyquinolato) aluminum/bathocuproin/LiF/Al electrode with and without the BP-SAM layer on the surface of ITO. The device with the BP-SAM showed higher current density and higher luminance due to the improvement of contact at the ITO/H5 interface by forming covalent bonds via the BP-SAM.

We report enhanced photocurrent properties of dye/Au-loaded titanium dioxide (TiO2) films on Au gratings. Au-loaded TiO2 nanopowders were first synthesized by a modified sol-gel method and then prepared by the impregnation method. We also fabricated dye-sensitized solar cells, which were composed of Au grating/Au-TiO2/TMPyP-SCC LbL (20 bilayers)/electrolyte/ITO substrates. Short-circuit photo-current measurements showed that Au-loaded TiO2 with grating-coupled surface plasmon excitation can enhance the short-circuit photocurrentof the fabricated cells.

Precoding is an excellent choice for complementing the MIMO systems. Linear precoding techniques offer better performance at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) while non-linear techniques perform better at higher SNRs. In addition, the non-linear techniques can achieve near optimal capacity at the expense of reasonable levels of complexity. However, precoding depends on the knowledge of the wireless channel. Recent work on MIMO systems have shown that channel-knowledge at the transmitter, in either full or partial forms, can increase the channel capacity and system performance considerably. Therefore, hybrid techniques should be deployed in order to obtain a better trade-off in terms of complexity and performance. In this paper, we present a hybrid precoding technique which deals with the condition of partial channel-knowledge while offering robustness against the effects of correlation and poorly scattered channels while at the same time keeping low levels of complexity and high performance.

High phase noise is a common problem in ring oscillators. Continuous conduction of the transistor in an analog tuning method degrades the phase noise of ring oscillators. In this paper, a digital control tuning which completely switches the transistors on and off, and a 1/f noise reduction technique are employed to reduce the phase noise. A 14-bit control signal is employed to obtain a small frequency step and a wide tuning range. Furthermore, multiphase ring oscillator with a sub-feedback loop topology is used to obtain a stable quadrature outputs with even number of stages and to increase the output frequency. The measured DCO has a frequency tuning range from 554 MHz to 2.405 GHz. The power dissipation is 112 mW from 1.8 V power supply. The phase noise at 4 MHz offset and 2.4 GHz center frequency is -134.82 dBc/Hz. The FoM is -169.9 dBc/Hz which is a 6.3 dB improvement over the previous oscillator design.

The electrostatic characteristics of broadside-coupled striplines in a shield are investigated with the mode-matching method. The Fourier series is employed to describe electrostatic potential distributions. Numerical results are shown for coupled transmission line cell applications.