A new frequency estimator for a single real-valued sinusoid signal in white noise is proposed. The new estimator uses the Pisarenko Harmonic Decomposer (PHD) estimator to get a coarse frequency estimate and then makes use of multiple correlation lags to obtain an adjustment term. For the limited-length single sinusoid, its correlation has the same frequency as itself but with a non-zero phase. We propose to use Taylor series to expand the correlation at the PHD coarse estimated frequency with amplitude and phase of the correlation into consideration. Simulation results show that this new method improves the estimation performance of the PHD estimator. Moreover, when compared with other existing estimator, the mean square frequency error of the proposed method is closer to the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for certain SNR range.

In this paper, a rat-race hybrid coupler based on an open complementary split ring resonator (OCSRR) is presented. By embedding the OCSRR in the microstrip transmission line, slow-wave effect is introduced to achieve size reduction. The proposed rat-race coupler size is 37% smaller than the conventional rat-race coupler. Besides, the proposed coupler provides better third harmonic suppression up to 35 dB. The simulated results are compared with the measured data and good agreement is reported.

A planar miniaturized branch-line coupler with harmonic suppression property for UHF band applications is presented in this paper. By properly synthesizing the LC-tanks that employ artificial transmission lines, two pairs of quarter-wavelength branch-lines to respectively meet characteristic impedances of 35.4 and 50 ohms can be obtained with the coupler. For the operating band, it can achieve good 3 dB power division with a 90° phase difference in the outputs of the through and coupled arms. The coupler also has a small area of 20.5(L)18(W) mm2, corresponding to 0.11 λg0.1 λg at 922 MHz. Compared with conventional couplers, the proposed design not only offers a wide bandwidth of more than 230 MHz within 1° or 1 dB, but also works with additional harmonic suppression for achieving better performance. Therefore, the proposed branch-line coupler with a compact size is well suitable for power division application.

A single tone pseudo-noise generator with a harmonic-eliminated waveform is proposed for measuring noise tolerance of analog IPs. In the waveform, the harmonics up to the thirteenth are eliminated by combining seven rectangular waves with 22.5-degree spacing phases. The proposed waveform includes only high region frequency harmonic components, which are easily suppressed by a low-order filter. This characteristic enables simple circuit implementation for a sine wave generator. In the circuit, the harmonic eliminated waveform generator is combined with a current controlled oscillator and a frequency adjustment circuit. The single tone pseudo-noise generator can generate power line noise from 20 MHz to 220 MHz with 1 MHz steps. The SFDR of 40 dB is obtained at the noise frequency of 100 MHz. The circuit enables the measurement of frequency response characteristics measurements such as PSRR.

A sub-harmonic RF transmitter architecture with simultaneous power combination and carrier-leakage cancellation is proposed. It employs an 8-phase ring-type voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), sub-harmonic mixers, driver amplifiers, and a balun. A signal power is combined with its 180° phase-shifted signal through the balun. Simultaneously carrier-leakage generating in sub-harmonic mixers is canceled by its phase difference. The proposed transmitter achieved 1 dBm 1-dB output compression point (P-1dB) under 1.8 V supply and -40 dBm carrier-leakage in 5 GHz band.

In this article, a simple structure of the Wilkinson power divider which can suppress the nth harmonics of the Wilkinson power divider is proposed. By replacing the quarter wavelength transmission lines of the conventional Wilkinson power divider with the equivalent P-type transmission lines, a compact power divider which can suppress the nth harmonic is achieved. Design equations of proposed P-type line are achieved by ABCD matrices. To verify the design approach, the proposed power divider is designed, simulated (by ADS, CST Studio, and Sonnet simulators), and fabricated at 1 GHz to suppress the fifth harmonic. The proposed structure is 46% of the conventional Wilkinson power divider, while maintaining the characteristics of the conventional Wilkinson power divider at the fundamental frequency. The insertion losses at the fifth harmonic are larger than 35 dB. Furthermore, the second to seventh harmonic are suppressed by least 10 dB. Here is an excellent agreement between simulated results and measured results.

In this paper, the performance of the soft-decision-and-forward (SDF) protocol in the cooperative communication network with one source, one relay, and one destination, where each node has two transmit and receive antennas, is analyzed in terms of the bit error rate (BER) obtained from the pairwise error probability (PEP). Using the moment generating function and Q-function approximation, the PEP of SDF protocol is calculated and we confirm that the SDF with two antennas achieves the full diversity order. For the slow-varying Rayleigh fading channel, the optimal power allocation ratio can be determined so as to minimize the average PEP (or BER). Due to the difficulty of deriving the optimal value analytically, an alternative strategy of maximizing the product signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of direct and relay links, which we call the suboptimal power allocation, is considered. Through a numerical analysis, we show that the performance gap between the suboptimal and optimal power allocation strategies is negligible in the high SNR region.

In wireless OFDM systems, the system performance is suffered from frequency offset and symbol timing offset due to the Doppler effect. Using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) for traditional signal transformation from the time-domain into frequency-domain, and vice versa, the system performance may be severely degraded. To make the OFDM system that can tolerate the above problems, we have considered that the harmonic transform can be applicable to the traditional signal transformation, thereby improving the system performance. In this paper, we combine the good characteristics of harmonic transform and instantaneous frequency to be a novel transformation for wireless OFDM systems. We propose a modified discrete harmonic transform (MDHT) which can be performed adaptively. Our proposed scheme called the modified discrete harmonic transform OFDM (MDHT-OFDM scheme). We derive the equations of the novel discrete harmonic transform which are suitable for wireless OFDM systems and the novel channel estimation cooperated with the novel transformation. The proposed channel estimation is performed in both time-domain and frequency-domain. The performance of a MDHT-OFDM scheme is evaluated by means of a simulation. We compare the performance of a MDHT-OFDM scheme with one of the conventional DFT-OFDM scheme in the term of symbol error rate (SER). MDHT-OFDM scheme can achieve better performance than that of the conventional DFT-OFDM scheme in mitigating the Doppler spread.

In this paper a new electromagnetic (EM) interference analysis is proposed using the total harmonic distortion (THD) measurement of the audio signal by the 900 MHz cordless telephones. The cordless telephone network in 900 MHz was built up to be weak in EM interference. 400 and 800 Hz of the sine-wave signal were used in transmitter (TX) system, and the receiver (RX) system was exposed to the EM interference. The THD value varies as the level of the exposed EM interference changes. The model of the cordless telephone also affects the THD value. By using fluctuation of the THD value depending on the amount of the exposure, the threshold value of the interference electric field strength was derived. Based on the derived threshold value of the electric field strength, validity of the regulation value for low power radio devices by CISPR 22 [CLASS B] and FCC is discussed.

The design of microstrip bandpass filters using stepped-impedance resonators (SIRs) is examined. The passband center frequency for the WCDMA-FDD (uplink band) Japanese cellular system is 1950 MHz with a 60-MHz bandwidth. The SIR physical characteristic can be designed using a SIR characteristic chart based on second harmonic suppression. In our filter design, passband design charts were obtained through the design procedure. Tchebycheff and maximally flat bandpass filters of any bandwidth and any number of steps can be designed using these passband design charts. In addition, sharp skirt characteristics in the passband can be realized by having two transmission zeros at both adjacent frequency bands by using open-ended quarter-wavelength stubs at input and output ports. A new even-mode harmonics suppression technique is proposed to enable a wide rejection band having a high suppression level. The unloaded quality factor of the resonator used in the proposed filters is greater than 240.

A direct-conversion receiver integrated with the CMOS subharmonic frequency tripler (SFT) for V-band applications is designed, fabricated and measured using 0.13-µm CMOS technology. The receiver consists of a low-noise amplifier, a down-conversion mixer, an output buffer, and an SFT. A fully differential SFT is introduced to relax the requirements on the design of the frequency synthesizer. Thus, the operational frequency of the frequency synthesizer in the proposed receiver is only 20 GHz. The fabricated receiver has a maximum conversion gain of 19.4 dB, a minimum single-side band noise figure of 10.2 dB, the input-referred 1-dB compression point of -20 dBm and the input third order inter-modulation intercept point of -8.3 dB. It draws only 15.8 mA from a 1.2-V power supply with a total chip area of 0.794 mm0.794 mm. As a result, it is feasible to apply the proposed receiver in low-power wireless transceiver in the V-band applications.

A scalable speech codec consisting of a harmonic codec as the core layer and MDCT-based transform codec as the enhancement layer is often required to provide both very low-rate core communication and fine granular scalability. This structure, however, has a serious drawback for practical use because a time delay caused by transform in each layer is accumulated, resulting in a long overall codec delay. In this letter, a new MDCT structure is proposed to reduce the overall codec delay by eliminating the accumulation of time delay by each transform. In the proposed structure, the time delay is first reduced by forcing two transforms to share a common look-ahead. The error components of MDCT caused by the look-ahead sharing are then analyzed and compensated in the decoder, resulting in perfect reconstruction. The proposed structure reduces the codec delay by the frame size, with an equivalent coding efficiency.

In this Letter, a residual acoustic echo suppression method is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication in an automobile environment. The echo signal is normally a human voice with harmonic characteristics in a hands-free communication environment. The proposed algorithm estimates the residual echo signal by emphasizing its harmonic components. The estimated residual echo is used to obtain the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) information at the acoustic echo canceller output. Then, the SIR based Wiener post-filter is constructed to reduce both the residual echo and noise. The experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm is superior to the conventional residual echo suppression algorithm in terms of the echo return loss enhancement (ERLE) and the segmental signal-to-noise ratio (SEGSNR).

This paper proposes a novel delay-locked loop (DLL) with fast-locking property. The improved fast-locking successive approximation register-controlled (IFSAR) scheme can decrease the locking time to n+4 periods and be harmonic-free, where n is the bits' number of the control code for a delay line. According to the simulation result in 180 nm CMOS technology, the DLL can cover the operating range from 70 MHz to 500 MHz and dissipate 10.44 mW at 500 MHz.

We investigated the relationship between ambient illumination and psychological effect by applying a modified color harmony model. We verified the proposed model by analyzing correlation between psychological value and modified color harmony score. Experimental results showed the possibility to obtain the best color for illumination using this model.

This paper presents the mixed time-frequency steady-state analysis method for efficient simulation of circuits whose excitation frequencies are widely separated. These circuits can be written by multitime partial differential equations. In this paper, an axis of the slow time-scale is formulated in the time domain and another axis of the fast time-scale is formulated in the frequency domain. We show that computational cost, however, is not dependent on the interval of frequencies, whereas for the harmonic balance or transient analysis, it increases as the interval of frequencies increases.

A fast and accurate method for Generalized Harmonic Analysis is proposed. The proposed method estimates the parameters of a sinusoid and subtracts it from a target signal one by one. The frequency of the sinusoid is estimated around a peak of Fourier spectrum using binary search. The binary search can control the trade-off between the frequency accuracy and the computation time. The amplitude and the phase are estimated to minimize the squared sum of the residue after extraction of estimated sinusoids from the target signal. Sinusoid parameters are recalculated to reduce errors introduced by the peak detection using windowed Discrete-Time Fourier Transform. Audio signals are analyzed by the proposed method, which confirms the accuracy compared to existing methods. The proposed algorithm has high degree of concurrency and is suitable to be implemented on Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). The computational throughput can be made higher than the input audio signal rate.

Time-resolved microscopic optical second harmonic generation (TRM-SHG) imaging measurement revealed quantitatively the potential drop at the electrode contact of pentacene field effect transistors (FET). An activation of the SH signal at the edge of Ag-source electrode indicates the presence of large potential drop at pentacene-Ag contact during device operation, whereas negligible potential drop was observed at pentacene-Au contact. These findings agree with the injection characteristics of electrodes owing to the relationship between the work function of the metal and the HOMO level of pentacene.

Harmonic balance (HB) method is well known principle for analyzing periodic oscillations on nonlinear networks and systems. Because the HB method has a truncation error, approximated solutions have been guaranteed by error bounds. However, its numerical computation is very time-consuming compared with solving the HB equation. This paper proposes an algebraic representation of the error bound using Grobner base. The algebraic representation enables to decrease the computational cost of the error bound considerably. Moreover, using singular points of the algebraic representation, we can obtain accurate break points of the error bound by collisions.

This letter evaluates a transmitter architecture using harmonic images in D/A conversion for generating RF signals. In generating harmonic images, the problems such as intermodulation distortion of DAC were investigated. We developed an evaluation system with two bandpass filter and a buffer amplifier. It was experimentally found that the RF signal up to around 400 MHz can be generated by a commonly used 14-bit DAC at the sampling rates of around 40 MHz with EVM less than 6.6%. This letter also presents a more feasible transmitter example having an IF stage with harmonic image extraction scheme and a typical RF upconversion stage.