In this paper, we present a numerical method for the equiripple approximation of IIR digital filters. The conventional rational Remez algorithm quickly finds the squared magnitude response of the optimal IIR digital filters, and then by factorizing it the equiripple filter is obtained. Unlike the original Remez algorithm for FIR filters, it is difficult for the rational Remez algorithm to explicitly control the ratio of ripples between different bands. In the conventional lowpass filter design, for example, when different weights are given for its passband and stopband, one needs to iteratively design the filter by manually changing the weights in order to achieve the ratio of the weights exactly. To address this problem, we modify the conventional algorithm and make it possible to directly control the ripple ratio. The method iteratively solves eigenvalue problems with controlling the ripple ratio. Using this method, the equiripple solutions with desired weights are obtained automatically.

Power-aware X-filling is a preferable approach to avoiding IR-drop-induced yield loss in at-speed scan testing. However, the ability of previous X-filling methods to reduce launch switching activity may be unsatisfactory, due to low effect (insufficient and global-only reduction) and/or low scalability (long CPU time). This paper addresses this reduction quality problem with a novel GA (Genetic Algorithm) based X-filling method, called GA-fill. Its goals are (1) to achieve both effectiveness and scalability in a more balanced manner and (2) to make the reduction effect of launch switching activity more concentrated on critical areas that have higher impact on IR-drop-induced yield loss. Evaluation experiments are being conducted on both benchmark and industrial circuits, and the results have demonstrated the usefulness of GA-fill.

Item response theory (IRT) is widely used for test analyses. Most models of IRT assume that a subject's responses to different items in a test are statistically independent. However, actual situations often violate this assumption. Thus, conditional independence (CI) tests among items given a latent ability variable are needed, but traditional CI tests suffer from biases. This study investigated a latent conditional independence (LCI) test given a latent variable. Results show that the LCI test can detect CI given a latent variable correctly, whereas traditional CI tests often fail to detect CI. Application of the LCI test to mathematics test data revealed that items that share common alternatives might be conditionally dependent.

We describe a parameter estimation method for a target object in an area that sensors monitor. The parameters to be estimated are the perimeter length, size, and parameter determined by the interior angles of the target object. The estimation method does not use sensor location information, only the binary information on whether each sensor detects the target object. First, the sensing area of each sensor is assumed to be line-segment-shaped, which is a model of an infrared distance measurement sensor. Second, based on the analytical results of assuming line-segment-shaped sensing areas, we developed a unified equation that works with general sensing areas and general target-object shapes to estimate the parameters of the target objects. Numerical examples using computer simulation show that our method yields accurate results.

Today, practical semiconductor products are an integral part of our lives and the infrastructure of society, and this trend will continue in the future. New areas of application will expand into medical, environmental, and agriculture (food)-related fields in addition to the conventional information and communication technology (ICT)-related field. Low-cost semiconductor devices with advanced functions have thus far been realized by miniaturization. However, we are now approaching the physical limit of miniaturization, and also, the investment required for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities has become huge. Under such circumstances, we propose an approach based on semiconductor devices called microcube chips and ideas of semiconductor development, i.e., agile integration and "inch-fab." Our approach is expected to contribute to expanding the range of companies that can fabricate semiconductor devices to include small-size companies, exploring new applications of semiconductor devices, and providing a wide variety of semiconductor devices at a low cost from the semiconductor industry.

Various low power technologies have been developed and applied to LSIs from the point of device and circuit design. A lot more CPU cores as well as function IPs are integrated on a single chip LSI today. Therefore, not only the device and circuit low power technologies, but software power control technologies are becoming more important to reduce active power of application systems. This paper overviews the low power technologies and defines power management platform as a combination of hardware functions and software programming interface. This paper discusses importance of the power management platform and direction of its development.

We propose a packet-based inverse multiplexing method to allow scalable network access with a bigger-pipe physical interface. The method is based on aggregation at the physical layer (APL) that fragments an original packet-flow and distributes the fragments among an adequate numbers of physical links or networks. It allows us to share wavelengths and/or bandwidth resources in optical networks. Its technical feasibility at the speed of newly standardized 100 Gb/s Ethernet (100 GbE) is successfully evaluated by implementing the inverse multiplexing logic functions on a prototype board. We demonstrate super-high-definition video streaming and huge file transfer by transmitting 100 GbE MAC frames over multiple 10 GbE physical links via inverse multiplexing.

'Super Hi-Vision' (SHV) is promising as a future form of television. It is an ultra-high definition TV system that has 16 times the number of pixels of HDTV and employs a 22.2 multichannel sound system. It offers superior presence and gives the impression of reality. The information bitrates of the current prototypes range from 24 to 72 Gbit/s, and a fiber optic transmission system is needed to transfer even just one channel. This paper describes the optical transmission technologies that have been developed for SHV inter-equipment connects and links between outdoor sites and broadcasting stations.

It is known that a heterodyne multimode receiver implemented with a single RF (Radio Frequency) receiver suffers from image-band interference due to imbalance, i.e. the phase error and the gain imbalance of the RF Hilbert transformer. The blind image band interference canceler with deterministic imbalance estimation that has been proposed mitigates the image-band interference. This performance of the image-band interference canceler is analyzed theoretically in this paper. As a result, it is revealed that estimation accuracy of the deterministic imbalance estimation is improved slightly as the imbalance becomes greater. In addition, it is also shown that the deterministic estimation achieves better performance as the power of image-band interference increases. The performance is confirmed by computer simulation.

The performance of spectrum sensing in cognitive radio can be improved by employing multiple antennas. In this letter, the effect of antenna correlation on the performance improvement by deploying multiple antennas in the sensing node of the secondary system is investigated. It is proved mathematically that in the regime of low SNR, with antenna correlation, the secondary sensing node can achieve almost the same performance improvement as that without correlation. Simulation results verify the conclusions.

This letter introduces a blind minimum interference symbol synchronization for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems based on the cyclic prefix (CP). The basic idea of our contribution is to obtain an estimate of the channel-tap powers from the correlation characteristics of the CP. Based on the estimate of the channel-tap powers, a minimum interference metric is proposed. The proposed algorithm has low complexity and can be used to cope with long inter-symbol-interference (ISI) channels with length up to twice the CP length.

This paper presents a resistor-compensation technique for a CMOS bandgap and current reference, which utilizes various high positive temperature coefficient (TC) resistors, a two-stage operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) and a simplified start-up circuit in the 0.35-µm CMOS process. In the proposed bandgap and current reference, numerous compensated resistors, which have a high positive temperature coefficient (TC), are added to the parasitic n-p-n and p-n-p bipolar junction transistor devices, to generate a temperature-independent voltage reference and current reference. The measurements verify a current reference of 735.6 nA, the voltage reference of 888.1 mV, and the power consumption of 91.28 µW at a supply voltage of 3.3 V. The voltage TC is 49 ppm/ in the temperature range from 0 to 100 and 12.8 ppm/ from 30 to 100. The current TC is 119.2 ppm/ at temperatures of 0 to 100. Measurement results also demonstrate a stable voltage reference at high temperature (> 30), and a constant current reference at low temperature (< 70).

Power-aware scheduling of periodic tasks in real-time systems has been extensively studied to save energy while still meeting the performance requirement. Many previous studies use the probability information of tasks' execution cycles to assist the scheduling. However, most of these approaches adopt heuristic algorithms to cope with realistic CPU models with discrete frequencies and cannot achieve the globally optimal solution. Sometimes they even show worse results than non-stochastic DVS schemes. This paper presents an optimal DVS scheme for frame-based real-time systems under realistic power models in which the processor provides only a limited number of speeds and no assumption is made on power/frequency relation. A suboptimal DVS scheme is also presented in this paper to work out a solution near enough to the optimal one with only polynomial time expense. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can save at most 40% more energy compared with previous ones.

We propose a new majority voting scheme for identifying downlink primary scrambling code, where two voting processes with different coherent correlation intervals (CCIs) are simultaneously performed. A false alarm probability and a threshold adjustment for the proposed scheme are investigated, and it is shown by computer simulations that the proposed scheme can perform well over a wide range of frequency offsets.

This paper presents an adaptive magnification transformation based particle swarm optimizer (AMT-PSO) that provides an adaptive search strategy for each particle along the search process. Magnification transformation is a simple but very powerful mechanism, which is inspired by using a convex lens to see things much clearer. The essence of this transformation is to set a magnifier around an area we are interested in, so that we could inspect the area of interest more carefully and precisely. An evolutionary factor, which utilizes the information of population distribution in particle swarm, is used as an index to adaptively tune the magnification scale factor for each particle in each dimension. Furthermore, a perturbation-based elitist learning strategy is utilized to help the swarm's best particle to escape the local optimum and explore the potential better space. The AMT-PSO is evaluated on 15 unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions. The effects of the adaptive magnification transformation mechanism and the elitist learning strategy in AMT-PSO are studied. Results show that the adaptive magnification transformation mechanism provides the main contribution to the proposed AMT-PSO in terms of convergence speed and solution accuracy on four categories of benchmark test functions.

In order to realize multi-service in TDS-OFDM system, a novel multiplexing scheme based on space time block code is proposed along with the corresponding demultiplexing method with low complexity. Simulations show the presented scheme can not only achieve full diversity gain, but also effectively improve the system capacity.

A resource allocation scheme for multi-access MIMO-OFDM systems in uplink was developed to improve power and spectrum efficiency in the frequency and the space domains [1]. The scheme requires a multi-user detector in the receiver and assumes identical spatial crosscorrelation across all subcarriers for any pair of spatially separable users. However, the multi-user detection device may not exist in the receiver and the identical spatial crosscorrelation assumption may not be valid in some operational scenarios. The paper develops a scheme to remedy these problems for multi-access MIMO-OFDM systems without using multi-user detection techniques and the assumption. The proposed scheme aims at minimizing the total user transmit power while satisfying the required data rate, the maximum transmit power constraint, and the bit error rate of each user. The simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

Device modeling techniques for high-frequency circuits operating at over 100 GHz are presented. We have proposed the bond-based design as an accurate high-frequency circuit design method. Because layout parasitic extractions (LPE) are not required in the bond-based design, it can be applied high-frequency circuit design at over 100 GHz. However, customized device models are indispensable for the bond-based design. In this paper, device modeling techniques for high-frequency circuit design using the bond-based design are proposed. The customized device model for MOSFETs, transmission lines and pads are introduced. By using customized device models, the difference between the simulated and measured gains of an amplifier is improved to less than 0.6 dB at 120 GHz.

One high profile intra predictor generation engine is proposed in this paper. Firstly, hardware level algorithm optimization for intra 88 (I8MB) mode is introduced. The original candidate pixels for generating prediction samples of I8MB are replaced with boundary pixels of intra 44 (I4MB) blocks. Based on this adoption, full data reuse between predictors of I4MB and filtered samples of I8MB can be achieved with almost no quality loss. Secondly, one lossless two-44-block based parallel predictor generation flow is proposed. The original predictor generation flow is optimized from 16 stages to 10 stages for I4MB and Intra 1616 (I16MB), which saves 37.5% processing cycles. For I8MB, similar methodology with different processing order of 44 scaled blocks is introduced. Thirdly, fully utilized hardwired engines for I4MB, I16MB and I8MB are proposed in this paper. Except DC (direct current) and plane modes, full data reuse among all intra modes of high profile can be achieved. Fourthly, for DC mode, one combined predictor generation process is introduced and predictor generation of I16MB's DC mode is merged into the process of I4MB's DC mode. Moreover, by configuring proposed hardwired engines, predictor generation of I16MB's plane mode and chrominance plane mode can be accomplished with only 50% cycles of original design. Totally, when compared with original full-mode design and latest dynamic mode reused design, the proposed predictor generation engine can achieve 89.5% and 73.2% saving of processing cycles, respectively. Synthesized by TSMC 0.18 µm technology under worst work conditions (1.62 V, 125°C), with 380 MHz and 37.2 k gates, the proposed design can handle real-time high profile intra predictor generation of Super Hi-Vision 4 k4 k@60 fps. The maximum work frequency of our design under worst condition is 468 MHz.

This paper proposes a region-of-interest (ROI) based H.264 encoder and the VLSI architecture of the ROI detection algorithm. In ROI based video coding system, pre-processing unit to detect ROI should only introduce low computational complexity overhead due to the low power requirement. The Macroblocks (MBs) in ROIs are detected sequentially in the same order of H.264 encoding to satisfy the MB level pipelining of ROI detector and H.264 encoder. ROI detection is performed in a novel estimation-and-verification process with an ROI contour template. Proposed architecture can be configured to detect either single ROI or multiple ROIs in each frame and the throughput of single detection mode is 5.5 times of multiple detection mode. 98.01% and 97.89% of MBs in ROIs can be detected in single and multiple detection modes respectively. Hardware cost of proposed architecture is only 4.68 k gates. Detection speed is 753 fps for CIF format video at the operation frequency of 200 MHz in multiple detection mode with power consumption of 0.47 mW. Compared with previous fast ROI detection algorithms for video coding application, the proposed architecture obtains more accurate and smaller ROI. Therefore, more efficient ROI based computation complexity and compression efficiency optimization can be implemented in H.264 encoder.