A low-power switching method using a bootstrapping circuit is proposed for a high-speed output driver of transmitter. Compared with a conventional output driver, the proposed scheme employs only nMOSFETs to transmit data. The bootstrapping circuit ensures the proper switching of nMOSFET. The proposed scheme is simulated and fabricated using a 0.18 µm CMOS technology, showing 10.2% lower power consumption than a conventional switching driver at 2.5 Gb/s data rate.

The impact of co-channel deployment of femtocells on existing macro-cellular systems is investigated considering the use of techniques to resolve the loud neighbor problem. There are several approaches to this aim, for example, femtocell power control, interference coordination, and opening access to femtocells. Of these, coordinated scheduling, including power control, and their impact will be the main focus of this work. In the context of 3GPP-LTE, we examine under various operational scenarios the performance in terms of the average and 5% worst user throughput, a useful measure of fairness among users, both for femto and macro cells. Although recent studies have shown that co-channel femtocell has a minor impact on the macrocell performance in average sense, a non-negligible percentage of users may lose their opportunity to get satisfactory data service and, hence, we focus more on the 5% worst users.

In this paper, we propose an interleaving updating framework of disparity and confidence map (IUFDCM) for stereo matching to eliminate the redundant and interfere information from unreliable pixels. Compared with other propagation algorithms using matching cost as messages, IUFDCM updates the disparity map and the confidence map in an interleaving manner instead. Based on the Confidence-based Support Window (CSW), disparity map is updated adaptively to alleviate the effect of input parameters. The reassignment for unreliable pixels with larger probability keeps ground truth depending on reliable messages. Consequently, the confidence map is updated according to the previous disparity map and the left-right consistency. The top ranks on Middlebury benchmark corresponding to different error thresholds demonstrate that our algorithm is competitive with the best stereo matching algorithms at present.

In this letter, we propose a novel resource allocation scheme to enhance downlink system performance for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and time division duplex (TDD) based femtocell networks. In the proposed scheme, the macro base station (mBS) and femto base stations (fBSs) service macro user equipments (mUEs) and femto user equipments (fUEs) in inner and outer zones in different periods to reduce interference substantially. Simulations show the proposed scheme outperforms femtocell networks with fractional frequency reuse (FFR) systems in terms of the system capacity and outage probability for mUEs and fUEs.

Kudekar et al. proved an interesting result in low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes: The belief-propagation (BP) threshold is boosted to the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) threshold by spatial coupling. Furthermore, the authors showed that the BP threshold for code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems is improved up to the optimal one via spatial coupling. In this letter, a phenomenological model for elucidating the essence of these phenomenon, called threshold improvement, is proposed. The main result implies that threshold improvement occurs for spatially-coupled general graphical models.

In this study, a precoding scheme based on QR-decomposition is proposed for mitigating the inter-carrier-interference (ICI) in orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed approach first subjects the ICI matrix to QR decomposition so that the ICI effect is transformed into its spectrally causal equivalent. With this causality, the precoding can then be conducted based on the resultant spectrally causal matrix. In addition, by using the stationary property of the ICI factors, in conjunction with zero padding, we implement the QR-based precoding in a segmentation manner which can significantly alleviate the computational complexity imposed by QR decomposition while eliminating ICI within each segment. This study also analyzes the residue interference power induced by the segmentation. The residue interference power is then accordingly used to determine the order of zero padding. Computer simulations support the validity of the proposed approach.

The performances of the conventional planar type 1T DRAM and the Vertical type 1T DRAM are compared based on structure difference using a fully-consistent device simulator. We discuss the structural advantage of the Vertical type 1T-DRAM in comparison with the conventional planar type 1T-DRAM, and evaluate their performance in each operating mode such as write, erase, read, and hold; and discuss its cell performances such as Cell Current Margin and data retention. These results provide a useful guideline designing the high performance Vertical type 1T-DRAM cell.

In this work, the effect of device dimension variation and metal wiring scheme on the RF performance of MOSFETs based on 0.13-µm RFCMOS technology has been investigated. Two sets of experiments have been carried out. In the first experiment, two types of source metal wiring options, each with various gate poly pitches, have been investigated. The results showed that the extrinsic capacitances (Cegs, Cegd) and parasitic resistances tend to increase with increasing gate poly pitch. Both cutoff frequency (fT) and maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) showed substantial degradation for the larger gate poly pitches. Based on measurement, we propose a simplified model for extrinsic parasitic capacitance as a function of gate poly pitch with different source metal wiring schemes. For the second experiment, the impact of gate metal wiring scheme and the number of gate fingers Nf on the RF performance of MOSFET has been studied. Two different types of gate metal wiring schemes, one with poly layer and the other with M2 layer, are compared. The measurement showed that the capacitance is slightly increased, while gate resistance significantly reduced, with the M2 gate wiring. As a result, fT is slightly degraded but fmax is significantly improved, especially for larger Nf, with the M2 gate wiring. The results in this work provide useful information regarding device dimension and metal wiring scheme for various RF applications of RF CMOS technology.

Recently, the 3-D vertical Floating Gate (FG) type NAND cell arrays with the Sidewall Control Gate (SCG), such as ESCG, DC-SF and S-SCG, are receiving attention to overcome the reliability issues of Charge Trap (CT) type device. Using this novel cell structure, highly reliable flash cell operations were successfully implemented without interference effect on the FG type cell. However, the 3-D vertical FG type cell has large cell size by about 60% for the cylindrical FG structure. In this point of view, we intensively investigate the scalability of the FG width of the 3-D vertical FG NAND cells. In case of the planar FG type NAND cell, the FG height cannot be scaled down due to the necessity of obtaining sufficient coupling ratio and high program speed. In contrast, for the 3-D vertical FG NAND with SCG, the FG is formed cylindrically, which is fully covered with surrounded CG, and very high CG coupling ratio can be achieved. As results, the scaling of FG width of the 3-D vertical FG NAND cell with S-SCG can be successfully demonstrated at 10 nm regime, which is almost the same as the CT layer of recent BE-SONOS NAND.

In this paper, we report the reduction in the base-collector capacitance (CBC) of InP/InGaAs double heterojunction bipolar transistors with buried SiO2 wires (BG-HBT). In a previous trial, we could not confirm a clear difference between the CBC of the conventional HBT and that of the BG-HBT because the subcollector layer was thicker than expected. In this study, the interface between the collector and the subcollector was shifted to the middle of the SiO2 wires by adjusting the growth temperature, and a reduction in CBC with buried SiO2 wires was confirmed. The estimated CBC of the BG-HBT was 7.6 fF, while that of the conventional HBT was 8.6 fF. This 12% reduction was in agreement with the 10% reduction calculated according to the designed size.

Conventional features for Automatic Speech Recognition and Sound Event Recognition such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) have been shown to perform poorly in noisy conditions. We introduce an auditory feature based on the gammatone filterbank, the Selective Gammatone Envelope Feature (SGEF), for Robust Sound Event Recognition where channel selection and the filterbank envelope is used to reduce the effect of noise for specific noise environments. In the experiments with Hidden Markov Model (HMM) recognizers, we shall show that our feature outperforms MFCCs significantly in four different noisy environments at various signal-to-noise ratios.

In heterogeneous cellular networks (HCN), which consists of macrocells and numerous femtocells, efficient interference management schemes between macrocells and femtocells are so crucial to the overall system performance. To mitigate intercell interference in HCN, we propose a new rate-split transmission scheme which has the following characteristics. First, it supports user quality of service (QoS) with the least intercell interference. Second, it is a low complexity and distributed scheme using only Interference to Signal and Noise Ratio (ISNR). An evaluation confirms that the proposed scheme offers better performance than legacy schemes which are not considering user QoS.

In the framework of decentralized supervisory control of timed discrete event systems (TDESs), each local supervisor decides the set of events to be enabled to occur and the set of events to be forced to occur under its own local observation in order for a given specification to be satisfied. In this paper, we focus on fusion rules for the enforcement decisions and adopt the combined fusion rule using the AND rule and the OR rule. We first derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a decentralized supervisor under the combined fusion rule for a given partition of the set of forcible events. We next study how to find a suitable partition.

Applying Distributed Video Coding (DVC) to mobile devices that have limited computation and power resources can be a very challenging problem due to its high-complexity decoding. To address this, this paper proposes a DVC bitstream organizer. The proposed DVC bitstream organizer reduces the complexity associated with repetitive channel decoding and SI generation in a flexible manner. It allows users to choose a means of minimizing the computational complexity of the DVC decoder according to their preferences and the device's resource limitations. An experiment shows that the proposed method increases decoding speeds by up to 25 times.

This letter proposes an efficient Location-Aware Social Routing (LASR) scheme for Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). LASR makes forwarding decisions based on a new metric which uses location information to reflect the node relations and community structure. Simulation results are presented to support the effectiveness of our scheme.

In this paper, a logarithmic adaptive quantization projection (LAQP) algorithm for digital watermarking is proposed. Conventional quantization index modulation uses a fixed quantization step in the watermarking embedding procedure, which leads to poor fidelity. Moreover, the conventional methods are sensitive to value-metric scaling attack. The LAQP method combines the quantization projection scheme with a perceptual model. In comparison to some conventional quantization methods with a perceptual model, the LAQP only needs to calculate the perceptual model in the embedding procedure, avoiding the decoding errors introduced by the difference of the perceptual model used in the embedding and decoding procedure. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme keeps a better fidelity and is robust against the common signal processing attack. More importantly, the proposed scheme is invariant to value-metric scaling attack.

Electrical performances of gate-all-around (GAA) tunneling field-effect transistors (TFETs) based on a silicon germanium (Si1-xGex) layer have been investigated in terms of subthreshold swing (SS), on/off current ratio, on-state current (Ion). Cut-off frequency (fT) and maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) were demonstrated from small-signal parameters such as effective gate resistance (Rg), gate-drain capacitance (Cgd), and transconductance (gm). According to the technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulation results, the current drivability, fT, and fmax of GAA TFETs based on Si1-xGex layer were higher than those of GAA TFETs based on silicon. The simulated devices had 60 nm channel length and 10 nm channel radius. A GAA TFET with x = 0.4 had maximum Ion of 51.4 µA/µm, maximum fT of 72 GHz, and maximum fmax of 610 GHz. Additionally, improvements of performance at the presented device with PNPN junctions were demonstrated in terms of Ion, SS, fT, and fmax. When the device was designed with x = 0.4 and n+ layer width (Wn) = 6 nm, it shows Ion of 271 µA/µm, fT of 245 GHz, and fmax of 1.49 THz at an operating bias (VGS = VDS = 1.0 V).

Spatial Multiplexing with precoding provides an opportunity to enhance the capacity and reliability of multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. However, precoder selection may require knowledeg of all subcarriers, which may cause a large amount of feedback if not properly designed. In addition, if the maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is employed, the conventional precoder selection that maximizes the minimum stream SNR is not optimal in terms of the error probability. In this paper, we propose to reduce the feedback overhead by introducing a ML clustering concept in selecting the optimal precoder for ML detector. Numerical results show that the proposed precoder selection based on the ML clustering provides enhanced performance for ML receiver compared with conventional interpolation and clustering algorithms.

The development of new technologies has undoubtedly promoted the advances of modern education, among which Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have made the education more visually accessible for students. However, classroom education has been the focus of VR applications whereas not much research has been done in promoting sports education using VR technologies. In this paper, an immersive VR system is designed and implemented to create a more intuitive and visual way of teaching tennis. A scalable system architecture is proposed in addition to the hardware setup layout, which can be used for various immersive interactive applications such as architecture walkthroughs, military training simulations, other sports game simulations, interactive theaters, and telepresent exhibitions. Realistic interaction experience is achieved through accurate and robust hybrid tracking technology, while the virtual human opponent is animated in real time using shader-based skin deformation. Potential future extensions are also discussed to improve the teaching/learning experience.

We are interested in retrieving video shots or videos containing particular people from a video dataset. Owing to the large variations in pose, illumination conditions, occlusions, hairstyles and facial expressions, face tracks have recently been researched in the fields of face recognition, face retrieval and name labeling from videos. However, when the number of face tracks is very large, conventional methods, which match all or some pairs of faces in face tracks, will not be effective. Therefore, in this paper, an efficient method for finding a given person from a video dataset is presented. In our study, in according to performing research on face tracks in a single video, we also consider how to organize all the faces in videos in a dataset and how to improve the search quality in the query process. Different videos may include the same person; thus, the management of individuals in different videos will be useful for their retrieval. The proposed method includes the following three points. (i) Face tracks of the same person appearing for a period in each video are first connected on the basis of scene information with a time constriction, then all the people in one video are organized by a proposed hierarchical clustering method. (ii) After obtaining the organizational structure of all the people in one video, the people are organized into an upper layer by affinity propagation. (iii) Finally, in the process of querying, a remeasuring method based on the index structure of videos is performed to improve the retrieval accuracy. We also build a video dataset that contains six types of videos: films, TV shows, educational videos, interviews, press conferences and domestic activities. The formation of face tracks in the six types of videos is first researched, then experiments are performed on this video dataset containing more than 1 million faces and 218,786 face tracks. The results show that the proposed approach has high search quality and a short search time.