This paper presents a gate-block selection algorithm, which can synthesize a proper parameter extractor of the pre-computation-based content-addressable memory (PB-CAM) to enhance power efficiency for specific applications such as embedded systems, microprocessor and SOC, etc. Furthermore, a novel CAM cell design with single bit-line is proposed. The proposed CAM cell design requires only one heavy loading bit-line and merely is constructed with eight transistors. The whole PB-CAM design was described in Spice with TSMC 0.35 µm double-poly quadruple-metal CMOS process. We used Synopsys Nanosim to estimate power consumption. With a 128 words by 32 bits CAM size, the experimental results showed that our proposed PB-CAM effectively reduces 18.21% of comparison operations in the CAM and saves 16.75% in power reduction by synthesizing a proper parameter extractor of the PB-CAM compared with the 1's count PB-CAM. This implies that our proposed PB-CAM is more flexible and adaptive for specific applications.

A new random access channel (RACH) preamble detection scheme using variable coherent correlation intervals (CCIs) is proposed. It is shown first that it is enough to employ two CCIs for supporting a user equipment (UE) velocity of 300 km/h, and then a CCI selection criterion is proposed. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can provide a robust detection performance in time-varying fading channel environments.

In a Direct-Sequence/Spread-Spectrum (DS/SS) system, a RAKE receiver is used to improve a bit error rate (BER) performance. The RAKE receiver can collect more signal energy through independent paths and achieve path diversity. The RAKE receiver obtains further diversity gain through fractional sampling. However, the power consumption of the RAKE receiver increases in proportion to a sampling rate and does not always maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, sampling rate selection schemes have been proposed to reduce the average sampling rate without degrading the BER. These schemes select the tap positions and the sampling rate depending on channel conditions and the power consumption can be reduced. In this paper, sampling rate selection schemes for the DS/SS system are investigated through an experiment since there have been no numerical results through an experiment. Numerical results show that the power consumption can be reduced even through the experiment without the degradation of the BER.

This paper proposes an enhanced method for estimating the a priori Signal-to-Disturbance Ratio (SDR) to be employed in the Acoustic Echo and Noise Suppression (AENS) system for full-duplex hands-free communications. The proposed a priori SDR estimation technique is modified based upon the Two-Step Noise Reduction (TSNR) algorithm to suppress the background noise while preserving speech spectral components. In addition, a practical approach to determine accurately the Echo Spectrum Variance (ESV) is presented based upon the linear relationship assumption between the power spectrum of far-end speech and acoustic echo signals. The ESV estimation technique is then employed to alleviate the acoustic echo problem. The performance of the AENS system that employs these two proposed estimation techniques is evaluated through the Echo Attenuation (EA), Noise Attenuation (NA), and two speech distortion measures. Simulation results based upon real speech signals guarantee that our improved AENS system is able to mitigate efficiently the problem of acoustic echo and background noise, while preserving the speech quality and speech intelligibility.

We propose an iterative channel decoding scheme for two or more multiple correlated sources. The correlated sources are separately turbo encoded without knowledge of the correlation and transmitted over noisy channels. The proposed decoder exploits the correlation of the multiple sources in an iterative soft decision decoding manner for joint detection of each of the transmitted data. Simulation results show that achieved performance for the more than two sources is also close to the Shannon and Slepian-Wolf limit and large additional SNR gain is obtained in comparison with the case of two sources. We also verify through simulation that no significant penalty results from the estimation of the source correlation in the decoding process and the code with a low error floor achieves good performance for a large number of the correlated sources.

This paper proposes a novel reversible image authentication method that does not memorize the parameters for extracting embedded authentication data from an image. The proposed method once distorts an image to hide data for authentication into the image, it recovers the original image from the distorted image unless tamper is applied to the image, i.e., reversible. By comparing extracted data and data generated from the restored image, this method detects image tampering and further localizes tampered regions by the unit of block. The proposed method extracts hidden data without memorization of parameters used in its algorithm. This feature makes the proposed method practical. Whereas any method memorizing parameters faces severe problems with storage and management of parameters, according to the increase in the number of memorized parameters that is caused by serving accurate tamper localization and/or by applying itself to a huge number of image collection, e.g., video sequences. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Following the last proposal of the nonlinear Piece in Hand method, which has 3-layer structure, 2-layer nonlinear Piece in Hand method is proposed. Both of them aim at enhancing the security of existing and future multivariate public key cryptosystems. The new nonlinear Piece in Hand is compared with the 3-layer method and PMI+, which was proposed by Ding, et al.

Content sharing mechanisms in current DRM systems are based on a domain where multiple devices have the same domain key. This can lead to a security weakness as failure of one device means revocation of a domain itself. Furthermore, if a device leaves the domain, all the other devices should update their domain key. This also leads to efficiency problem. This paper proposes the new content sharing scheme based on the user binding DRM without the use of domain key. The proposed scheme improves the previous domain technology in terms of security and efficiency as it removes the use of domain key and only allows content sharing for multiple devices owned by the same user.

In this paper, a new video frame interpolation method based on image morphing for frame rate up-conversion is proposed. In this method, image features are extracted by Scale-Invariant Feature Transform in each frame, and their correspondence in two contiguous frames is then computed separately in foreground and background regions. By using the above two functions, the proposed method accurately generates interpolation frames and thus achieves frame rate up-conversion.

Multimedia traffic on the Internet is rapidly increasing with the advent of broadband networks. However, the Best-Effort (BE) service used with Internet Protocol (IP) networking was never intended to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for each user. Therefore, the realization of QoS guarantees has become a very important issue. Previously, we have proposed a queue management scheme, called Dual Metrics Fair Queuing (DMFQ), to improve fairness and to guarantee QoS. DMFQ improves fairness and throughput by considering the amount of instantaneous and historical network resources consumed per flow. In addition, DMFQ has characteristics of high speed and high scalability because it is hardware oriented. However, DMFQ may be unable to adapt to network fluctuations, given that it has static setup parameters. Moreover, DMFQ is unable to support a multiclass environment. In this paper, we propose a new buffer management scheme based on DMFQ that can adapt flexibly to network conditions and can provide classified services. The proposed scheme stabilizes buffer utilization within a fixed range by controlling the buffer threshold, which affects the calculated packet discard probability. Moreover, by applying the proposed scheme to Differentiated Services (DiffServ), we achieve prioritized buffer management.

Due to the recent increase in electronic devices mounted on automobiles, a large number of connectors, especially low-cost tin plated connectors are being used. As a result, their contact reliability has become problematic. Furthermore, for the connectors which are subjected to fretting wear caused by heat cycle and vibrations, the contact resistance increases because of wear of tin and deposition of oxides, which generates problems of poor contact. This study is intended to analyze the change in contact resistance of tin plated connectors from the start of fretting wear to the end of their lifetime from the viewpoint of practical reliability, and to observe the trace and the characteristics of fretting wear microscopically. This study found that wear and oxidation of tin plated connectors start immediately with fretting wear, and thus accumulation of abrasion powder on fretting areas causes connectors to reach to the end of their useful lifetime quickly. Especially, it was demonstrated that amplitude of fretting has a considerable influence on a connector's lifetime. It is made clear that air-tightness, so-called "gas-tight" of tin in a fretting area influences fretting wear considerably.

The importance of redundant technologies for improving dependability and delay fault testability are growing. This paper presents properties of a class of redundant technologies, namely two-rail logic, and analyzes testability of path delay faults occurring on two-rail logic circuits. The paper reveals the following characteristics of two-rail logic circuits: While the number of paths in two-rail logic circuits is twice that in ordinary single-rail logic circuits, the number of robust testable path delay faults in two-rail logic circuits is twice or more that in the single-rail logic circuits. This suggests two-rail logic circuits are more testable than ordinary single-rail logic circuits. On two-rail logic circuits, there may be some robust testable path delay faults that are functional un-sensitizable for any input vectors consisting of codewords of two-rail codes, i.e. for any input vectors that can occur during fault-free operation. Even if such faults occur, the circuits are still strongly fault secure for unidirectional stuck-at faults as well as they work correctly.

This paper presents a new particle swarm optimizer characterized by growing tree topology. If a particle is stagnated then a new particle is born and is located away from the trap. Depending on the property of objective problems, particles are born successively and the growing swarm constitutes a tree-topology. Performing numerical experiments for typical benchmarks, the algorithm efficiency is evaluated in several key measures such as success rate, the number of iterations and the number of particles. As compared with other basic PSOs, we can suggest that the proposed algorithm has efficient performance in optimization with low-cost computation.

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband double-directional spatio-temporal channel sounding technique using transformation between frequency- and time-domain (FD and TD) signals. Virtual antenna arrays, composed of omnidirectional antennas and scanners, are used for transmission and reception in the FD. After Fourier transforming the received FD signals to TD ones, time of arrival (TOA) is estimated using a peak search over the TD signals, and then angle of arrivals (AOA) and angle of departure (AOD) are estimated using a weighted angle histogram with a multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm applied to the FD signals, inverse-Fourier transformed from the TD signals divided into subregions. Indoor channel sounding results validated that an appropriate weighting reduced a spurious level in the angle histogram by a factor of 0.1 to 0.2 in comparison with that of non-weighting. The proposed technique successfully resolved dominant multipath components, including a direct path, a single reflection, and a single diffraction, in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS environments. Joint TOA and AOA/AOD spectra were also derived from the sounding signals. The spectra illustrated the dominant multipath components (agreed with the prediction by ray tracing) as clusters.

This paper proposes an Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based power minimization method by partitioning into regions, first, with three different VDD's(PM3V), and, secondly, with two different VDD's(PM2V). To reduce the solving time of triple-VDD case (PM3V), we also proposed a partitioned ILP method(p-PM3V). The proposed method provides 29% power saving on the average in the case of triple-VDD compared to the case of single VDD. Power reduction of PM3V compared to Clustered Voltage Scaling (CVS) was about 18%. Compared to the unpartitioned ILP formulation(PM3V), the partitioned ILP method(p-PM3V) reduced the total solution time by 46% at the cost of additional power consumption within 1.3%.

This paper proposes a blind image-band interference canceller that enables heterodyne receivers with only a single receiver chain to demodulate signals in any frequency band. In this paper, such a receiver is called "multimode/multiband heterodyne receiver." If multimode/multiband receivers are desired to receive signals with carrier frequency ranging from several MHz to GHz, then, such receivers are not allowed to have a narrow band RF-BPF (Radio Frequency Band Pass Filter) at the RF front end. However, although heterodyne receivers have been applied to wireless systems due to their high performance, it is known that without an RF-BPF heterodyne receivers suffer from severe image-band interference. Therefore, a blind image-band interference canceller is proposed in this paper to mitigate the image-band interference. Moreover, a novel algorithm based on the CM (Constant Modulus) criterion is proposed to carry out the cancellation. Performance of the blind image-band interference canceller is theoretically analyzed and the performance of the proposed canceller is verified by computer simulation. As a result, it is shown that the blind image-band interference canceller achieves superior performance even in the presence of strong image-band interference, for example, CIR=-40 dB. In summary, the proposed canceller makes it possible for the receiver with the single receiver chain to achieve multimode/multiband communications with high quality.

In order to incorporate the reader/writers (RWs) into mobile electronic devices, miniaturization and flexibility are required. To meet these requirements, we fabricate an ultra-small RW with multiple contactless interfaces by mounting main unit circuits inside the antenna coil and using flexible multi-layer circuit board.

In this letter, we propose an improved block-coded modulation scheme for the Rayleigh fading channel. The proposed coding structure is constructed by providing interblock coding between adjacent blocks. The error performance of an example is simulated. The simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve large coding gain with reasonable decoding complexity.

A novel waveguide power divider based on a coaxial-to-waveguide transition using a H-plane probe is presented. The waveguide consists of split metal blocks and substrates which are alternately stacked. The power divider is realized by arranging identical transitions using coaxial probes short-circuited with metal patterns on the substrate. The parasitic reactance of probes can be canceled out with the metal patterns on the substrate, so it is ease to design the power divider. The advantages of this structure are small footprint, low insertion loss, simple fabrication, and ease of design. A design method of the proposed power divider is described. The fabricated eight-way power divider shows excellent performances at 10 GHz-band.

Three experiments were conducted in this study to investigate the human ability to control pen pressure and pen tilt input, by coupling this control with cursor position, angle and scale. Comparisons between pen pressure input and pen tilt input have been made in the three experiments. Experimental results show that decreasing pressure input resulted in very poor performance and was not a good input technique for any of the three experiments. In "Experiment 1-Coupling to Cursor Position", the tilt input technique performed relatively better than the increasing pressure input technique in terms of time, even though the tilt technique had a slightly higher error rate. In "Experiment 2-Coupling to Cursor Angle", the tilt input performed a little better than the increasing pressure input in terms of time, but the gap between them is not so apparent as Experiment 1. In "Experiment 3-Coupling to Cursor Scale", tilt input performed a little better than increasing pressure input in terms of adjustment time. Based on the results of our experiments, we have inferred several design implications and guidelines.