To improve metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET) performance, flat interface between gate insulator and silicon (Si) should be realized. In this paper, the influence of Si surface roughness on electrical characteristics of MOSFET with hafnium oxynitride (HfON) gate insulator formed by electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma sputtering was investigated for the first time. The surface roughness of Si substrate was reduced by Ar/4.9%H2 annealing utilizing conventional rapid thermal annealing (RTA) system. The obtained root-mean-square (RMS) roughness was 0.07nm (without annealed: 0.18nm). The HfON was formed by 2nm-thick HfN deposition followed by the Ar/O2 plasma oxidation. The electrical properties of HfON gate insulator were improved by reducing Si surface roughness. It was found that the current drivability of fabricated nMOSFETs was remarkably increased by reducing Si surface roughness. Furthermore, the reduction of Si surface roughness also leads to decrease of the 1/f noise.

In this letter, we exploit a new framework for detecting the non-specific object via combing the top-down and bottom-up cues. Specifically, a novel supervised discriminative dictionaries learning method is proposed to learn the coupled dictionaries for the object and non-object feature spaces in terms of the top-down cue. Different from previous dictionary learning methods, the new data reconstruction residual terms of coupled feature spaces, the sparsity penalty measures on the representations and an inconsistent regularizer for the learned dictionaries are all incorporated in a unitized objective function. Then we derive an iterative algorithm to alternatively optimize all the variables efficiently. Considering the bottom-up cue, the proposed discriminative dictionaries learning is then integrated with an unsupervised dictionary learning to capture the objectness windows in an image. Experimental results show that the non-specific object detection problem can be effectively solved by the proposed dictionary leaning framework and outperforms some established methods.

A 125MHz 64-phase delay-locked loop (DLL) is implemented for time recovery in a digital wire-line system. The architecture of the proposed DLL comprises a coarse-locking circuit added to a conventional DLL circuit, which consists of a delay line including a bias circuit, phase detector, charge pump, and loop filter. The proposed coarse-locking circuit reduces the locking time of the DLL and prevents harmonic locking, regardless of the duty cycle of the clock. In order to verify the performance of the proposed coarse-locking circuit, a 64-phase DLL with an operating frequency range of 40 to 200MHz is fabricated using a 0.18-µm 1-poly 6-metal CMOS process with a 1.8V supply. The measured rms and peak-to-peak jitter of the output clock are 3.07ps and 21.1ps, respectively. The DNL and INL of the 64-phase output clock are measured to be -0.338/+0.164 LSB and -0.464/+0.171 LSB, respectively, at an operating frequency of 125MHz. The area and power consumption of the implemented DLL are 0.3mm2 and 12.7mW, respectively.

The millimeter-wave band suffers strong attenuation due to rain. While calculating the link budget for a wireless system using this frequency band, the behavior of rain, attenuation due to rain, and the amount of degradation must be accurately understood. This paper presents an evaluation of the influence of rain and its attenuation on link performance in a Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) millimeter-wave model mesh network. Conventional statistical analyses including cumulative rain rate distribution and specific rain attenuation constants are performed on data collected from 2009 onwards. The unique effects arising due to the highly localized behaviors of strong rainfalls have become clear and are characterized in terms of variograms rather than correlation coefficients. Spatial separation even in the small network here with links of less than 1 km provides effective diversity branches for better availability performance.

An energy-efficient ΔΣ modulator using a novel switched-capacitor-based integrator has been investigated. The proposed dynamic integrator uses a common-source configuration, where a MOSFET turns off after the charge redistribution is completed. Thus, only the subthreshold current flows through the integrator, resulting in high energy efficiency. A constant threshold voltage works as the virtual ground in conventional opamp-based integrators. The performance has been estimated for a 2nd-order ΔΣ modulator by transistor-level circuit simulation assuming a 0.18-µm standard CMOS technology. An FOM of 29fJ/conv-step was obtained with a peak SNDR of 82.6dB for a bandwidth and a sampling frequency of 20kHz and 5MHz, respectively.

In this letter, we present a radix-R regular interconnection pattern family of factorizations for the WHT-FFT with identical stage-to-stage interconnection pattern in a unified form, where R is any power of 2. This family of algorithms has identical sparse matrix factorization in each stage and can be implemented in a merged butterfly structure, which conduce to regular and efficient memory managing scalable to high radices. And in each stage, the butterflies with same twiddle factor set are aggregated together, which can reduce the twiddle factor evaluations or accesses to the lookup table. The kinds of factorization can also be extended to FFT, WHT and SCHT with identical stage-to-stage interconnection pattern.

This letter presents a novel method based on sparsity, to solve the problem of deinterleaving pulse trains. The proposed method models the problem of deinterleaving pulse trains as an underdetermined system of linear equations. After determining the mixing matrix, we find sparsest solution of an underdetermined system of linear equations using basis pursuit denoising. This method is superior to previous ones in a number of aspects. First, spurious and missing pulses would not cause any performance reduction in the algorithm. Second, the algorithm works well despite the type of pulse repetition interval modulation that is used. Third, the proposed method is able to separate similar sources.

To realize usability in software, GUI (Graphical User Interface) layouts must be consistent because consistency allows end users to operate software based on previous experiences. Often consistency can be achieved by user interface guidelines, which realize consistency in a software package as well as between various software packages within a platform. Because end users have different experiences and perceptions, GUIs based on guidelines are not always usable for end users. Thus, it is necessary to realize consistency without guidelines. Herein we propose a method to realize consistent GUIs where existing software packages are surveyed and common patterns for window layouts, which we call layout rules, are specified. Our method uses these layout rules to arrange the windows of GUIs. Concretely, source programs of developed GUIs are analyzed to identify the layout rules, and then these rules are used to extract parameters to generate source programs of undeveloped GUIs. To evaluate our method, we applied it to existing GUIs in software packages to extract the layout rules from several windows and to generate other windows. The evaluation confirms that our method easily realizes layout consistency.

A high-speed and low-power 8-bit subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on 65-nm CMOS technology was fabricated. Rather than using digital foreground calibration, an analog-centric approach was adopted to reduce power dissipation. An offset cancelling charge-steering amplifier and capacitive-averaging technique effectively reduce the offset, noise, and power dissipation of the ADC. Moreover, the circuit used to compensate the kickback noise current from the comparator can also reduce the power dissipation. The reference-voltage generator for the fine ADC is composed of a fine ladder and a capacitor providing an AC signal path. This configuration reduces the power dissipation of the selection signal drivers for the analog multiplexer. A test chip fabricated using 65-nm digital CMOS technology achieved a high sampling rate of 1GHz, a low power dissipation of 17.5mW, and a figure of merit of 118fJ/conv.-step.

This paper describes an ultrasonic system that estimates the cell quantity of an artificial culture bone, which is effective for appropriate treat with a composite of this material and Bone Marrow Stromal Cells. For this system, we examine two approaches for analyzing the ultrasound waves transmitted through the cultured bone, including stem cells to estimate cell quantity: multiple regression and fuzzy inference. We employ two characteristics from the obtained wave for applying each method. These features are the amplitude and the frequency; the amplitude is measured from the obtained wave, and the frequency is calculated by the cross-spectrum method. The results confirmed that the fuzzy inference method yields the accurate estimates of cell quantity in artificial culture bone. Using this ultrasonic estimation system, the orthopaedic surgeons can choose the composites that contain favorable number of cells before the implantation.

In recent years, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems that operate up to under 3T are being used in clinical practice in Japan. In order to achieve the requirements of higher image quality and shorter imaging times, devices that utilize high magnetic fields (> 3T) and high power electromagnetic (EM) wave pulses have been developed. The rise of the static magnetic field is proportional to the increase of the EM wave frequency which raises the issue of variation in capacitance used in the radio frequency (RF) coil for MRI system. In addition, increasing power causes problems of withstanding voltage and these approaches leads to generation of non-uniform magnetic field inside the RF coil. Therefore, we proposed a birdcage coil without the use of lumped circuit elements for MRI systems in previous study. However, it is difficult to fabricate this birdcage coil. Hence, simply-structured birdcage coil with no lumped circuit elements is desired. In this paper, we propose a simply-structured birdcage coil with no lumped circuit elements for a 4T MRI system. In addition, the authors investigated the input impedance and magnetic field distribution of the proposed coil by FDTD calculations and measurements. The results confirm that the proposed birdcage coil matches the performance of the conventional birdcage coil which includes several capacitors.

Travel recommendation and travel diary generation applications can benefit significantly from methods that infer the durations and locations of visits from travelers' GPS data. However, conventional inference methods, which cluster GPS points on the basis of their spatial distance, are not suited to inferring visit durations. This paper presents a pace-based clustering method to infer visit locations and durations. The method contributes two novel techniques: (1) It clusters GPS points logged during visits by considering the speed and applying a probabilistic density function for each trip. Consequently, it avoids clustering GPS points that are near but unrelated to visits. (2) It also includes additional GPS points in the clusters by considering their temporal sequence. As a result, it is able to complete the clusters with GPS points that are far from the visits but are logged during the visits, caused, for example, by GPS noise indoors. The results of an experimental evaluation comparing our proposed method with three published inference methods indicate that our proposed method infers the duration of a visit with an average error rate of 8.7%, notably outperforming the other methods.

The large and complicated safety-critical systems today need to keep changing to accommodate ever-changing objectives and environments. Accordingly, runtime analysis for safe reconfiguration or evaluation is currently a hot topic in the field, whereas information acquisition of external environment is crucial for runtime safety analysis. With the rapid development of web services, mobile networks and ubiquitous computing, abundant realtime information of environment is available on the Internet. To integrate these public information into runtime safety analysis of critical systems, this paper brings forward a framework, which could be implemented with open source and cross platform modules and encouragingly, applicable to various safety-critical systems.

In this Letter, a new face recognition approach based on curvelets and local ternary patterns (LTP) is proposed. First, we observe that the curvelet transform is a new anisotropic multi-resolution transform and can efficiently represent edge discontinuities in face images, and that the LTP operator is one of the best texture descriptors in terms of characterizing face image details. This motivated us to decompose the image using the curvelet transform, and extract the features in different frequency bands. As revealed by curvelet transform properties, the highest frequency band information represents the noisy information, so we directly drop it from feature selection. The lowest frequency band mainly contains coarse image information, and thus we deal with it more precisely to extract features as the face's details using LTP. The remaining frequency bands mainly represent edge information, and we normalize them for achieving explicit structure information. Then, all the extracted features are put together as the elementary feature set. With these features, we can reduce the features' dimension using PCA, and then use the sparse sensing technique for face recognition. Experiments on the Yale database, the extended Yale B database, and the CMU PIE database show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

New media processing applications such as image recognition and AR (Augment Reality) have become into practical on embedded systems for automotive, digital-consumer and mobile products. Many-core processors have been proposed to realize much higher performance than multi-core processors. We have developed a low-power many-core SoC for multimedia applications in 40nm CMOS technology. Within a 210mm2 die, two 32-core clusters are integrated with dynamically reconfigurable processors, hardware accelerators, 2-channel DDR3 I/Fs, and other peripherals. Processor cores in the cluster share a 2MB L2 cache connected through a tree-based Network-on-Chip (NoC). Its total peak performance exceeds 1.5TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second). The high scalability and low power consumption are accomplished by parallelized software for multimedia applications. In case of face detection, the performance scales up to 64 cores and the SoC consumes only 2.21W. Moreover, it can execute the 1080p 48fps H.264 decoding about 520mW by 28 cores and the 4K2K 15fps super resolution about 770mW by 32 cores in one cluster. Exploiting parallelism by low power processor cores, the many-core SoC provides several tens of times better energy efficiency than that of a high performance desk-top quad-core processor.

Let m ≥ 3 be an odd positive integer, n=2m and p be an odd prime. For the decimation factor $d=rac{(p^{m}+1)(p^{m}+p-1)}{p+1}$, the cross-correlation between the p-ary m-sequence {tr1n(αt)} and its all decimated sequences {tr1n(αdt+l)} is investigated, where 0 ≤ l < gcd(d,pn-1) and α is a primitive element of Fpn. It is shown that the cross-correlation function takes values in {-1,-1±ipm|i=1,2,…p}. The result presented in this paper settles a conjecture proposed by Kim et al. in the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory Proceedings paper (pp.1014-1018), and also improves their result.

Cognitive radio (CR) systems aim for more efficient spectrum utilization by having so called secondary users (SUs) transmit on a frequency band reserved for licensed primary users (PUs). The secondary transmissions are allowed provided that no harmful interference will be caused to the PUs. SU terminals with multiple antennas can employ transmit power control with transmit precoding in order to control the interference levels. In most of the existing works, perfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed to be available for the SUs. However, in practical systems where perfect CSI is not available, the SUs are not able to guarantee that the interference constraints are sufficiently satisfied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of spectrum sharing for multiantenna CR systems using estimated CSI. Due to the random nature of the estimation error, we set a probabilistic interference constraint and, in order to satisfy it, provide a density function for the interference power. In addition, we present a power control framework for the SU to meet the probabilistic interference constraint.

Squared-loss mutual information (SMI) is a robust measure of the statistical dependence between random variables. The sample-based SMI approximator called least-squares mutual information (LSMI) was demonstrated to be useful in performing various machine learning tasks such as dimension reduction, clustering, and causal inference. The original LSMI approximates the pointwise mutual information by using the kernel model, which is a linear combination of kernel basis functions located on paired data samples. Although LSMI was proved to achieve the optimal approximation accuracy asymptotically, its approximation capability is limited when the sample size is small due to an insufficient number of kernel basis functions. Increasing the number of kernel basis functions can mitigate this weakness, but a naive implementation of this idea significantly increases the computation costs. In this article, we show that the computational complexity of LSMI with the multiplicative kernel model, which locates kernel basis functions on unpaired data samples and thus the number of kernel basis functions is the sample size squared, is the same as that for the plain kernel model. We experimentally demonstrate that LSMI with the multiplicative kernel model is more accurate than that with plain kernel models in small sample cases, with only mild increase in computation time.

This letter proposes a novel intrusion tolerant system consisting of several virtual machines (VMs) that refresh the target system periodically and by live migration, which monitors the many features of the VMs to identify and replace exhausted VMs. The proposed scheme provides adequate performance and dependability against denial of service (DoS) attacks. To show its efficiency and security, we conduct experiments on the CSIM20 simulator, which showed 22% improvement in a normal situation and approximately 77.83% improvement in heavy traffic in terms of the response time compared to that reported in the literature. We measure and compare the response time. The result show that the proposed scheme has shorter response time and maintains than other systems and supports services during the heavy traffic.

The Generalized Feistel Structure (GFS) is one of the structures used in designs of blockciphers and hash functions. There are several types of GFSs, and we focus on Type 1 and Type 2 GFSs. The security of these structures are well studied and they are adopted in various practical blockciphers and hash functions. The round function used in GFSs consists of two layers. The first layer uses the nonlinear function. Type 1 GFS uses one nonlinear function in this layer, while Type 2 GFS uses a half of the number of sub-blocks. The second layer is a sub-block-wise permutation, and the cyclic shift is generally used in this layer. In this paper, we formalize Type 1.x GFS, which is the natural extension of Type 1 and Type 2 GFSs with respect to the number of nonlinear functions in one round. Next, for Type 1.x GFS using two nonlinear functions in one round, we propose a permutation which has a good diffusion property. We demonstrate that Type 1.x GFS with this permutation has a better diffusion property than other Type 1.x GFS with the sub-block-wise cyclic shift. We also present experimental results of evaluating the diffusion property and the security against the saturation attack, impossible differential attack, differential attack, and linear attack of Type 1.x GFSs with various permutations.