An improved Max-Log-Map (MLM) turbo equalization algorithm called Scaled Max-Log-Map (SMLM) iterative equalization is presented. Simulations show that the scheme can dramatically outperform the MLM besides it is insensitive to SNR mismatch. Unfortunately, its performance is still much worse than that of Log-Map (LM) with exact SNR over high-loss channels. Accordingly, we also propose a new SNR estimation algorithm based on the reliability values of soft output extrinsic information of SMLM decoder. Using the new scheme, we obtain good performance close to that of LM with ideal knowledge of SNR.

In this letter, we first analyze the delay of the WLAN discovery scheme specified for 3GPP and WLAN interworking networks. Theoretical analysis indicates that the delay of the discovery scheme given by 3GPP increases linearly with the number of WLAN channels needed to be scanned. To reduce the discovery delay, we then propose an effective WLAN discovery scheme utilizing the cellular network to aid in the broadcasting the information of WLANs. Thus the number of WLAN channels required to be scanned for users is greatly reduced. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by analysis and simulation.

This paper describes a broadband active terminal circuit and its application to a distributed amplifier. In this study, we first analyzed and compared three types of active terminal circuits using representative circuit configurations, namely, an active terminal circuit with a common-emitter BJT, an active terminal circuit with a Darlington BJT pair, and an active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs. The simulation results showed that the active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs kept the matching condition up to high frequency. After the simulation, we fabricated a distributed amplifier that used an active terminal circuit with cascode-connected BJTs. The RF amplifier achieved a flat gain of 9.7 1.0 dB over a range of 3-15 GHz.

In arithmetic circuits for digital signal processing, radixes other than two are often used to make circuits faster. In such cases, radix converters are necessary. However, in general, radix converters tend to be complex. This paper considers design methods for p-nary to binary converters. First, it considers Look-Up Table (LUT) cascade realizations. Then, it introduces a new design technique called arithmetic decomposition by using LUTs and adders. Finally, it compares the amount of hardware and performance of radix converters implemented by FPGAs. 12-digit ternary to binary converters on Cyclone II FPGAs designed by the proposed method are faster than ones by conventional methods.

In this paper, we propose an efficient resource discovery scheme for large-scale ubiquitous computing environments, which supports scalable semantic searches and load balancing among resource discovery resolvers. Here, the resources are described based on the concepts defined in the ontological hierarchy. To semantically search the resources in a scalable manner, we propose a semantic vector space and semantic resource discovery network in which the resources are organized based on their respective semantic distances. Most importantly, landmarks are introduced for the first time to reduce the dimensionality of the vector space. Computer simulation with CAN verifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

A new radio-frequency (RF) radiated immunity/susceptibility test method using four-septum TEM cell is proposed. A rotating-EM field can be generated inside the cell by feeding four-different RF DSB-SC signals to four septa arranged in the cell. Since a polarization plane of the rotating-EM field rotates in a low speed, the immunity/susceptibility test for the EM field with various polarizations can be conducted more easily. In this paper, a technique for generating the rotating-EM field in the cell is investigated. The basic characteristics of the cell and the rotating-EM field by using the technique are clarified. To verify the validity of this test method, a RF radiated susceptibility of a printed circuit board is measured. The measured results are verified by comparing with the theoretical results based on modified telegrapher's equations.

This paper proposes a frequency diversity scheme using only even-numbered samples for single-carrier transmission with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE). In the proposed scheme, a periodical frequency spectrum generated by using only even-numbered samples in the time domain provides the frequency redundancy, which is utilized for frequency diversity. Moreover, in order to avoid the data rate reduction due to the decrease in the samples within one block, the high-level modulation is applied to each sample and the transmitting power of each sample can be doubled for the equivalent power transmission instead. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a steeper BER curve than the typical SC-FDE over frequency selective fading channels, while the typical SC-FDE is more favorable than the proposed scheme over flat fading channels. Moreover, the proposed scheme still retains its characteristic even when channel estimation and channel coding are additionally taken into account.

Over the past ten years, the demand for low-cost, low-power, and small form-factor portable wireless devices has led to the integration of RF transceivers on the same silicon as digital processors to form wireless systems-on-a-chip. This paper describes the challenges in designing CMOS systems-on-a-chip for wireless communications. RF transceiver building blocks for signal amplification, frequency translation, and frequency selectivity are examined with special emphasis on low noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, mixers, and frequency synthesizers. System-on-a-chip integration issues such as leakage currents of digital logic, calibration techniques, and noise coupling are also discussed.

In this paper, a new operational amplifier is presented that improves the specifications such as dc gain, common mode rejection ratio. To obtain these improvements, we have used the two important concepts of feedback and bulk amplification.

In H.264/AVC, the quantized coefficients are scanned in a zigzag pattern. But the zigzag scanning is not always efficient for the directional spatial predictions in the intra coding of H.264/AVC. In this letter, we propose an adaptive scanning using the pixel similarity of the neighboring pixels to achieve enhanced intra coding performance. The proposed method reduces the bit rate approximately 2% compared with H.264/AVC without video quality degradation.

In this paper, we use a modified Gaussian filter to improve enlargement accuracy of the arbitrary scale LP enlargement method, which is based on the Laplacian pyramid representation (so called "LP method"). The parameters of the proposed algorithm are extracted through a theoretical analysis and an experimental estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed modified Gaussian filter is effective for the arbitrary scale LP enlargement method.

Embedded memories have been used extensively in modern SoC designs. In order to estimate the power consumption of an entire design correctly, an accurate memory power models are needed. However, the memory power model that is commonly used in commercial EDA tools is too simple to estimate the power consumption accurately. In this work, we develop two methods to improve the accuracy of memory power estimation. Our enhanced memory power model can consider not only the operation mode of memory access, but also the address switching effects with scaling capability. The proposed approach is very useful to be combined with the memory compiler to generate accurate power model for any specified memory size without extra characterization costs. Then the proposed dummy modular approach can link our enhanced memory power model into the existing power estimation flow smoothly. The experimental results have shown that the average error of our memory power model is only less than 5%.

This paper describes a new criterion for speech recognition using an integrated confidence measure to minimize the word error rate (WER). The conventional criteria for WER minimization obtain the expected WER of a sentence hypothesis merely by comparing it with other hypotheses in an n-best list. The proposed criterion estimates the expected WER by using an integrated confidence measure with word posterior probabilities for a given acoustic input. The integrated confidence measure, which is implemented as a classifier based on maximum entropy (ME) modeling or support vector machines (SVMs), is used to acquire probabilities reflecting whether the word hypotheses are correct. The classifier is comprised of a variety of confidence measures and can deal with a temporal sequence of them to attain a more reliable confidence. Our proposed criterion for minimizing WER achieved a WER of 9.8% and a 3.9% reduction, relative to conventional n-best rescoring methods in transcribing Japanese broadcast news in various environments such as under noisy field and spontaneous speech conditions.

We study quantum entanglement by Schmidt decomposition for some typical quantum algorithms. In the Shor's exponentially fast algorithm the quantum entanglement holds almost maximal, which is a major factor that a classical computer is not adequate to simulate quantum efficient algorithms.

Blueweb is a self-organizing Bluetooth-based multihop network equipped with a scatternet formation algorithm and a modified source routing protocol. In this paper, we first review the basic Blueweb network. Then we focus on a heuristic automatic configuration algorithm which can be used to partition a large-scale Blueweb network. This algorithm contains three main functional blocks including route master selection, node assignment, and subnet number decision. The route master selection block selects new route masters at a low computation cost. The node assignment block assigns nodes to each newly configured subnet in order to minimize the average route query cost. The subnet number decision block determines the optimal number of subnet which achieves the largest system performance improvement ratio at minimum operation cost. With these three functional blocks, optimal network configuration for Blueweb routing protocol can be determined. Computer simulations show that a configured Blueweb achieves higher network capacity than an unconfigured Blueweb.

This paper proposes the most effective deployment scenario of the passive double-star (PON) system to provide multiple broadband services, such as high speed Internet access and broadcast services. The deployment costs of the two major PON technologies, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and 10 Gbps time division multiplexing (TDM), are analyzed using the latest cost trend and the most popular access network architecture. These two technologies are compared using the cost analysis results to identify the cost-effective scenarios of PON system deployment. Based on the comparison, this paper reveals that the WDM network becomes cost effective when the service penetration and the shift ratio becomes high.

In this paper, we propose a new preemptive scheme with release message in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. In the proposed scheme, when a low priority burst is preempted at some intermediate node, two RELEASE messages are sent immediately from the intermediate node to both source and destination nodes (two-way release message transmission), and the RELEASE messages release the corresponding wavelengths for the preempted burst. We consider six wavelength selection rules for the preemption and evaluate the performances of the selection rules by simulations. Numerical examples show that our scheme utilizes wavelengths effectively and, with the optimal selection rule, can decrease the burst loss probability in a large-scale DWDM network.

In numerical simulations of microwave structures using the alternating-direction implicit finite-difference time-domain (ADI-FDTD) method, the time marching scheme comprises two sub-iterations, where different updating schemes for evaluating E and H fields at each sub-iteration can be adopted. In this paper, the E-field implicit-updating (EFIU) and H-field implicit-updating (HFIU) schemes are compared with each other especially with regard to the implementation of local boundary conditions.

Two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for processing image is conventionally designed by line-based architectures, which are simple and have low complexity. However, they suffer from two main shortcomings - the memory required for storing intermediate data and the long latency of computing wavelet coefficients. This work presents a new block-based architecture for computing lifting-based 2-D DWT coefficients. This architecture yields a significantly lower buffer size. Additionally, the latency is reduced from N2 down to 3N as compared to the line-based architectures. The proposed architecture supports the JPEG2000 default filters and has been realized in ARM-based ALTERA EPXA10 Development Board at a frequency of 44.33 MHz.

The most time consuming operation to verify a signature with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm is a multi-scalar multiplication with two scalars. Efficient methods for its computation are the Shamir method and the Interleave method, whereas the performance of those methods can be improved by using general base-2 representations of the scalars. In exchange for the speed-up, those representations require the precomputation of several points that must be stored. In the case of two precomputed points, the Interleave method and the Shamir method provide the same, optimal efficiency. In the case of more precomputed points, only the Interleave method can be sped-up in an optimal way and is currently more efficient than the Shamir method. This paper proposes a new general base-2 representation of the scalars that can be used to speed up the Shamir method. It requires the precomputation of ten points and is more efficient than any other representation that also requires ten precomputed points. Therefore, the proposed method is the first to improve the Shamir method such that it is faster than the Interleave method.