Four calculation techniques for the Q-factor determination of resonant structures are compared on the basis of the influence of the VNA measurement uncertainty. The influence is evaluated using Monte Carlo calculations. On the basis of the deviation, the dispersion, and the effect of nearby resonances, the circle fitting method is the most appropriate technique. Although the 3dB method is the most popular technique, the Q-factors calculated by this method exhibit deviations, and the sign and amount of the deviation depend on the measurement setup. Comparisons using measurement data demonstrate that the uncertainty of the dielectric loss tangent calculated by the circle fitting method is less than a third of those calculated by the other three techniques.

An RGB-LED driver with a pulse-skipping-modulation boost converter is proposed to fix the reference voltage for lowering down the circuit complexity. A high-voltage LDO and a bandgap reference circuit are built into the chip. The proposed converter outputs a different voltage in response to a different color of LEDs. The output voltages for driving six red, six green, and six blue LEDs in series are 13.5V, 20V, and 21.5V, respectively. The proposed LDO and bandgap reference circuit work with supply voltages from 8V to 12V. The settling time for changing colors is lower than 300µs, better than the unfixed-reference-voltage methods. The proposed circuit was fabricated by using 0.25-µm BCD 60V technology, and the chip area was 1.9 × 1.7mm2.

This paper studies the design of cooperative beamforming (CB) and cooperative jamming (CJ) for the physical layer security of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network in the presence of multiple multi-antenna eavesdroppers. The secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem of such a network is to maximize the difference of two concave functions, a problem which is non-convex and has no efficient solution. Based on the inner convex approximation (ICA) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) techniques, we propose two novel low-complexity schemes to design CB and CJ for SRM in the AF network. In the first strategy, relay nodes adopt the CB only to secure transmission. Based on ICA, this design guarantees convergence to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution of the SDR of the original problem. In the second strategy, the optimal joint CB and CJ design is studied and the proposed joint design can guarantee convergence to a KKT solution of the original problem. Moreover, in the second strategy, we prove that SDR always has a rank-1 solution for the SRM problem. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed schemes.

Honeycomb structures are widely used in aerospace industry because of the lightweight and durable properties they provide. Here we propose to use a honeycomb core as the wave guiding structure in Radial Line Slot Antennas (RLSAs). This paper quantifies the propagation characteristics, especially the loss due to the honeycomb. At 32GHz, by choosing the proper cell size, both good isotropy and reasonably low effective dielectric constants are realized with the honeycomb as a spacer in a radial line waveguide. To estimate the material loss factor, several methods are compared and a factor of about 0.014∼0.018dB/mm is predicted and measured. A fabricated 90cm diameter honeycomb RLSA suffers about a 3.5∼5dB loss, which coincides with the estimates using the predicted loss factor.

This paper introduces a partially parallel inter-chip link architecture for asynchronous multi-chip Network-on-Chips (NoCs). The multi-chip NoCs that operate as a large NoC have been recently proposed for very large systems, such as automotive applications. Inter-chip links are key elements to realize high-performance multi-chip NoCs using a limited number of I/Os. The proposed asynchronous link based on level-encoded dual-rail (LEDR) encoding transmits several bits in parallel that are received by detecting the phase information of the LEDR signals at each serial link. It employs a burst-mode data transmission that eliminates a per-bit handshake for a high-speed operation, but the elimination may cause data-transmission errors due to cross-talk and power-supply noises. For triggering data retransmission, errors are detected from the embedded phase information; error-detection codes are not used. The throughput is theoretically modelled and is optimized by considering the bit-error rate (BER) of the link. Using delay parameters estimated for a 0.13 µm CMOS technology, the throughput of 8.82 Gbps is achieved by using 10 I/Os, which is 90.5% higher than that of a link using 9 I/Os without an error-detection method operating under negligible low BER (<10-20).

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an indispensable tool for low visibility ground surface measurement owing to its robustness against optically harsh environments such as adverse weather or darkness. As a leading-edge approach for SAR image processing, the coherent change detection (CCD) technique has been recently established; it detects a temporal change in the same region according to the phase interferometry of two complex SAR images. However, in the case of general damage assessment following an earthquake or mudslide, the technique requires not only the detection of surface change but also an assessment for height change quantity, such as occurs with a building collapse or road subsidence. While the interferometric SAR (InSAR) approach is suitable for height assessment, it is basically unable to detect change if only a single observation is made. To address this issue, we previously proposed a method of estimating height change according to phase interferometry of the coherence function obtained by dual band-divided SAR images. However, the accuracy of this method significantly degrades in noisy situations owing to the use of the phase difference. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a novel height estimation method by exploiting the frequency characteristic of coherence phases obtained by each SAR image multiply band-divided. The results obtained from numerical simulations and experimental data demonstrate that our proposed method offers accurate height change estimation while avoiding degradation in the spatial resolution.

One of the most important problems in web services application is the integration of different existing services into a new composite service. Existing work has the following disadvantages: (i) developers are often required to provide a composite service model first and perform formal verifications to check whether the model is correct. This makes the synthesis process of composite services semi-automatic, complex and inefficient; (ii) there is no assurance that composite services synthesized by using the fully-automatic approaches are correct; (iii) some approaches only handle simple composition problems where existing services are atomic. To address these problems, we propose a correct assurance approach for automatically synthesizing composite services based on finite state machine model. The syntax and semantics of the requirement model specifying composition requirements is also proposed. Given a set of abstract BPEL descriptions of existing services, and a composition requirement, our approach automatically generate the BPEL implementation of the composite service. Compared with existing approaches, the composite service generated by utilizing our proposed approach is guaranteed to be correct and does not require any formal verification. The correctness of our approach is proved. Moreover, the case analysis indicates that our approach is feasible and effective.

Substrate noise coupling in RF receiver front-end circuitry for LTE wireless communication was examined by full-chip level simulation and on-chip measurements, with a demonstrator built in a 65nm CMOS technology. A CMOS digital noise emulator injects high-order harmonic noises in a silicon substrate and induces in-band spurious tones in an RF receiver on the same chip through substrate noise interference. A complete simulation flow of full-chip level substrate noise coupling uses a decoupled modeling approach, where substrate noise waveforms drawn with a unified package-chip model of noise source circuits are given to mixed-level simulation of RF chains as noise sensitive circuits. The distribution of substrate noise in a chip and the attenuation with distance are simulated and compared with the measurements. The interference of substrate noise at the 17th harmonics of 124.8MHz — the operating frequency of the CMOS noise emulator creates spurious tones in the communication bandwidth at 2.1GHz.

A three dimensional (3D) chip stack featuring a 4096-bit wide I/O demonstrator incorporates an in-place waveform capturer on an intermediate interposer within the stack. The capturer includes probing channels on paths of signaling as well as in power delivery and collects analog waveforms for diagnosing circuits within 3D integration. The collection of in-place waveforms on vertical channels with through silicon vias (TSVs) are demonstrated among 128 vertical I/O channels distributed in 8 banks in a 9.9mm × 9.9mm die area. The analog waveforms confirm a full 1.2-V swing of signaling at the maximum data transmission bandwidth of 100GByte/sec with sufficiently small deviations of signal skews and slews among the vertical channels. In addition, it is also experimentally confirmed that the signal swing can be reduced to 0.75V for error free data transfer at 100GByte/sec, achieving the energy efficiency of 0.21pJ/bit.

In the paper [4], the authors generalized the Cipolla-Lehmer method [2][5] for computing square roots in finite fields to the case of r-th roots with r prime, and compared it with the Adleman-Manders-Miller method [1] from the experimental point of view. In this paper, we compare these two methods from the theoretical point of view.

This paper proposes a novel approach for integrating spectral feature extraction and acoustic modeling in hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech synthesis. The statistical modeling process of speech waveforms is typically divided into two component modules: the frame-by-frame feature extraction module and the acoustic modeling module. In the feature extraction module, the statistical mel-cepstral analysis technique has been used and the objective function is the likelihood of mel-cepstral coefficients for given speech waveforms. In the acoustic modeling module, the objective function is the likelihood of model parameters for given mel-cepstral coefficients. It is important to improve the performance of each component module for achieving higher quality synthesized speech. However, the final objective of speech synthesis systems is to generate natural speech waveforms from given texts, and the improvement of each component module does not always lead to the improvement of the quality of synthesized speech. Therefore, ideally all objective functions should be optimized based on an integrated criterion which well represents subjective speech quality of human perception. In this paper, we propose an approach to model speech waveforms directly and optimize the final objective function. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperformed the conventional methods in objective and subjective measures.

Two types of low-coherence millimeter-wave sources for photonic millimeter-wave ellipsometry are compared. A broadband signal (125-GHz bandwidth) or a narrowband one (0.5-GHz bandwidth) is used to measure the complex relative dielectric constants of purified water, and the narrowband signal is revealed to be suitable for accurate measurement.

For the past couple of decades, the usage of the Web as a platform for deploying software products has become incredibly popular. Web applications became more prevalent, as well as more complex. Countless Web applications have already been designed, developed, tested, and deployed on the Internet. However, it is noticeable that many common functionalities are present among these vast number of applications. This paper proposes an approach based on a database containing information from previous test artifacts. The information is used to generate test scenarios for Web applications under test. We have developed a tool based on our proposed approach, with the aim of reducing the effort required from software test engineers and professionals during the test planning and creation stage of software engineering. We evaluated our approach from three viewpoints: comparison between our approach and manual generation, qualitative evaluation by professional software engineers, and comparison between our approach and two open-source tools.

In this paper we report on experiences gained and lessons learned by the use of the Timed OTS/CafeOBJ method in the formal verification of TESLA source authentication protocol. These experiences can be a useful guide for the users of the OTS/CafeOBJ, especially when dealing with such complex systems and protocols.

This paper presents an artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA) to solve the multicast routing problem, which is abstracted as a Steiner tree problem in graphs. AFSA adopts a 0-1 encoding scheme to represent the artificial fish (AF), which are then subgraphs in the original graph. For evaluating each AF individual, we decode the subgraph into a Steiner tree. Based on the adopted representation of the AF, we design three AF behaviors: randomly moving, preying, and following. These behaviors are organized by a strategy that guides AF individuals to perform certain behaviors according to certain conditions and circumstances. In order to investigate the performance of our algorithm, we implement exhaustive simulation experiments. The results from the experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other intelligence algorithms and can obtain the least-cost multicast routing tree in most cases.

Pseudo-random sequences with high linear complexity play important roles in many domains. We give linear complexity of generalized cyclotomic quaternary sequences with period pq over Z4 via the weights of its Fourier spectral sequence. The results show that such sequences have high linear complexity.

We proposes a new adaptive spectral masking method of algebraic vector quantization (AVQ) for non-sparse signals in the modified discreet cosine transform (MDCT) domain. This paper also proposes switching the adaptive spectral masking on and off depending on whether or not the target signal is non-sparse. The switching decision is based on the results of MDCT-domain sparseness analysis. When the target signal is categorized as non-sparse, the masking level of the target MDCT coefficients is adaptively controlled using spectral envelope information. The performance of the proposed method, as a part of ITU-T G.711.1 Annex D, is evaluated in comparison with conventional AVQ. Subjective listening test results showed that the proposed method improves sound quality by more than 0.1 points on a five-point scale on average for speech, music, and mixed content, which indicates significant improvement.

With the development of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), the interference among global navigation satellite systems, known as the radio frequency compatibility problem, has become a matter of great concern to system providers and user communities. The acceptable compatibility threshold should be determined in the radio frequency compatibility assessment process. However, there is no common standard for the acceptable threshold in the radio frequency compatibility assessment. This paper firstly introduces the comprehensive radio frequency compatibility methodology combining the spectral separation coefficient (SSC) and code tracking spectral sensitivity coefficient (CT_SSC). Then, a method for determination of the acceptable compatibility threshold is proposed. The proposed method considers the receiver processing phase including acquisition, code and carrier tracking and data demodulation. Simulations accounting for the interference effects are carried out at each time step and every place on earth. The simulations mainly consider the signals of GPS, Galileo and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) in the L1 band. Results show that all of the sole systems are compatible with other GNSS systems with respect to a special receiver configuration used in the simulations.

Collaborative business has been increasingly developing with the environment of globalization and advanced information technologies. In a collaboration environment with multiple organizations, participants from different organizations always have different views about modeling the overall business process due to different knowledge and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, flexible support, privacy preservation and process reuse are important issues that should be considered in business process management across organizational boundaries. This paper presents a novel approach of modeling interorganizational business process for collaboration. Our approach allows for modeling loosely coupled interorganizational business process considering different views of organizations. In the proposed model, organizations have their own local process views of modeling business process instead of sharing pre-defined global processes. During process cooperation, local process of an organization can be invisible to other organizations. Further, we propose the coordination mechanisms for different local process views to detect incompatibilities among organizations. We illustrate our proposed approach by a case study of interorganizational software development collaboration.

Developers often face difficulties while using APIs. API usage patterns can aid them in using APIs efficiently, which are extracted from source code stored in software repositories. Previous approaches have mined repositories to extract API usage patterns by simply applying data mining techniques to the collection of method invocations of API objects. In these approaches, respective functional roles of invoked methods within API objects are ignored. The functional role represents what type of purpose each method actually achieves, and a method has a specific predefined order of invocation in accordance with its role. Therefore, the simple application of conventional mining techniques fails to produce API usage patterns that are helpful for code completion. This paper proposes an improved approach that extracts API usage patterns at a higher abstraction level rather than directly mining the actual method invocations. It embraces a multilevel sequential mining technique and uses categorization of method invocations based on their functional roles. We have implemented a mining tool and an extended Eclipse's code completion facility with extracted API usage patterns. Evaluation results of this tool show that our approach improves existing code completion.