A DRAM-cell array with 12-F2 twin cell was developed and evaluated in terms of speed, retention time, and low-voltage operation. The write and read-out times of the twin-cell array are shorter than those of a single-cell array by 70% and 40% respectively, because of parallel writing and reading of half charge to and from two memory cells. According to measured retention characteristics of the single cells, the twin-cell array improves retention time by 20% compared with the single-cell array at 1 V and keeps the retention time of the single-cell array at 0.4 V. Furthermore, the cell accepts the plate-driven scheme without the need of a dummy cell, lowering the necessary word-line voltage by 0.4 V.

Minimizing the Side Lobe Level (SLL) and attain highest achievable Beam Collection Efficiency (BCE) is a critical goal for Solar Power Station/Satellite (SPS). If all antennas are uniformly excited then the main beam will carry only a part of the total energy due to the higher SLL. SLL is decreased and BCE is increased by adopting edge tapering for SPS. But edge tapering is a complex technical problem for SPS. So an optimization is needed between uniform amplitude distribution and edge tapering system. We have derived a new method of edge tapering called Isosceles Trapezoidal Distribution (ITD) edge tapering. Only a small number of antennas from each side of the phased array antenna are tapered in this method. ITD edge tapering is almost uniform so it is technically better. We have compared different amplitude distribution systems; uniform, Gaussian, Dolph-Chebyshev and the newly derived ITD method. The SLL reduction in ITD is even lower than those of other kinds of edge tapering. Therefore the amount of losing power in the SLL in ITD is lower. As a result the interference level becomes lower and BCE becomes higher in this method. The higher BCE and better SLL performance than those with uniform distribution can be achieved in ITD with phase error and under unit failed condition.

MC-CDMA is an attractive multi-access method for the next generation high-speed mobile communication systems. The uplink transmission performance is limited by the multi-access interference (MAI) from other users since all users share the same bandwidth. Adaptive antenna array can be used to suppress the MAI and to improve the uplink transmission performance. In this paper, we propose a frequency-domain adaptive antenna array for multi-code MC-CDMA. The proposed frequency-domain adaptive antenna array uses a simple normalized LMS (NLMS) algorithm. Although the NLMS algorithm is used, very fast weight convergence within one MC-CDMA symbol duration is achieved since the weight updating is possible as many times as the number of subcarriers within one MC-CDMA symbol duration.

In this research, a sub-array preconditioner is applied to improve the convergence of conjugate gradient (CG) iterative solver in the fast multipole method and fast Fourier transform (FMM-FFT) implementation on a large-scale finite periodic array antenna with arbitrary geometry elements. The performance of the sub-array preconditioner is compared with the near-group preconditioner in the array antenna analysis. It is found that the near-group preconditioner achieves a little better convergence, while the sub-array preconditioner can be easily constructed and programmed with less CPU-time. The efficiency of the CG-FMM-FFT with high efficient preconditioner has been demonstrated in numerical analysis of a finite periodic array antenna.

This paper presents a simple but high resolution DOA estimation method using second-order differential of MUSIC spectrum. MUSIC method is paid attention as one of "Superresolution" DOA estimation methods because of their brilliant characteristics, however MUSIC also has the problem of estimation accuracy in severe environments like low SNR, small number of snapshots, or incident waves from closely-spaced angles. Especially the case of two or more incident waves from closely-spaced angles, MUSIC often fails in making spectrum peaks that leads inaccurate DOA estimation. We pay attention to the fact that the second-order differential of MUSIC spectrum makes negative peaks around the original DOAs even when MUSIC spectrum does not make peaks there. We try to estimate DOAs not by MUSIC spectrum but by the second-order differential of the MUSIC spectrum, and to find its peaks for being estimated DOAs. The performance of the present method is evaluated in compared with MUSIC and Root-MUSIC methods through computer simulations and experiments.

This paper presents a low cost and portable DOA (Direction Of Arrival) estimation system for surveillance using a modifed beamspace MUSIC (MUltiple Signal Classification) by a quasi-orthogonal multi-beam. This is instead of DFT processing and hardware system consisting of chip-sized phase shifters, a single ADC (Analogue to Digital Converter) and a single TR (TRanceiver) module for an antenna array. In the beamspace MUSIC, generated beampatterns have orthogonal properties. This proposed system cannot make such a beampattern due to the variable range limitation of phase shifter, then we use the quasi-orthogonal beam obtained by the calculation of correlation coefficient for beampattern. We demonstrate the proposed system using 4-element microstrip array antenna and chip-sized phase shifters. The DOA experiment in anechoic chamber confirms the proposed system performance.

Optically controlled beam forming techniques are effective for phased-array antenna control. We have developed the Fourier transform optical beamformer (FT-OBF). The antenna radiation pattern inputted into an amplitude spatial light modulator (A-SLM) is optically Fourier transformed to a specific phase-front light beam equivalent to an antenna excitation in the FT-OBF. Optical signal processing, used the Fourier transform optics, is effective to large-scale, two-dimensional, and high-speed signal processing. To implement a flexible and finer antenna beam pattern control, we use an A-SLM as input image formation of the FT optics. And, to realize a small-size FT-OBF, we use symmetric triplet lenses with convex, concave and convex lens. The total optical system becomes below 1/5 length compared with the length using single lens. Finally, we evaluated the developed FT-OBF with the generated amplitude and phase distributions, which excitation signal of an array antenna. We measured an antenna radiation beam pattern, beam steering and beam width control, in the C-band. Measurement results agreed with theoretical calculated results. These results show the feasibility of the spatial light modulator based FT-OBF.

This paper presents two hardware-friendly low-power oriented fast motion estimation (ME) algorithms and their VLSI implementations. The basic idea of the proposed partial distortion sorting (PDS) algorithm is to disable the search points which have larger partial distortions during the ME process, and only keep those search points with smaller ones. To further reduce the computation overhead, a simplified local PDS (LPDS) algorithm is also presented. Experiments show that the PDS and LPDS algorithms can provide almost the same image quality as full search only with 36.7% computation complexity. The proposed two algorithms can be integrated into different FSBMA architectures to save power consumption. In this paper, the 1-D inter ME architecture [12] is used as an detailed example. Under the worst working conditions (1.62 V, 125) and 166 MHz clock frequency, the PDS algorithm can reduce 33.3% power consumption with 4.05 K gates extra hardware cost, and the LPDS can reduce 37.8% power consumption with 1.73 K gates overhead.

Providing data availability in a high performance computing environment is very important, especially in this data-intensive world. Most clusters either equip with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) devices or use redundant nodes to protect data from loss. However, neither of these can really solve the reliability problem incurred in a striped file system. Striping provides an efficient way to increase I/O throughput both in the distributed and parallel paradigms. But it also reduces the overall reliability of a disk system by N fold, where N is the number of independent disks in the system. Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) is an open source parallel file system which has been widely used in the Linux environment. Its striping structure is good for performance but provides no fault tolerance. We implement Reliable Parallel File System (RPFS) based on PVFS but with reliability support. Our quantitative analysis shows that MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) of our RPFS is better than that of PVFS. Besides, we propose a parity cache table (PCT) to alleviate the penalty of parity updating. The evaluation of our RPFS shows that its read performance is almost the same as that of PVFS (2% to 13% degradation). As to the write performance, 28% to 45% improvement can be achieved depending on the behavior of the operations.

A one dimensional (1-D) based tree structure algorithm is proposed for estimating the 2D-DOAs of the signals impinging on a uniform rectangular array. The key idea of the proposed algorithm is to successively utilize the 1-D MUSIC algorithm several times, in tree structure, to estimate the azimuth and the elevation angles independently. Subspace projectors are exploited in conjunction with the 1-D MUSIC algorithms to decompose the received signal into several signals each coordinated by its own 2D-DOA. The pairing of the azimuth estimates and the associated elevation estimates is naturally determined due to the tree structure of the algorithm.

Ball Grid Array packages in which I/O pins are arranged in a grid array pattern realize a number of connections between chips and PCB, but it takes much time in manual routing. So the demand for automation of package routing is increasing. In this paper, we give the necessary and sufficient condition that all nets can be connected by monotonic routes when a net consists of a finger and a ball and fingers are on the two parallel boundaries of the Ball Grid Array package, and propose a monotonic routing method based on this condition. Moreover, we give a necessary condition and a sufficient condition when fingers are on the two orthogonal boundaries, and propose a monotonic routing method based on the necessary condition.

A novel two-dimensional (2D) beam scanning antenna array using composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is proposed. The antenna array consists of a set of CRLH LWAs and a Butler matrix (BM) feeding network. The direction of the beam can be scanned two-dimensionally in one plane by changing frequency and in the other plane by switching the input ports of the BM. A four-element antenna array in the microstrip line configuration operating at 10.5 GHz is designed with the assistance of full-wave simulations based on the method of moment (MoM) and the finite-element method (FEM). The antenna array is fabricated and radiation characteristics are measured. The wide range 2D beam scanning operation with the angle from -30 deg to +25 deg in one plane by sweeping frequency from 10.25 GHz to 10.7 GHz and with four discrete angles of -46 deg, -15 deg, +10 deg, and +35 deg in the other plane by switching the input port is achieved.

In this paper, an adaptive array antenna is implemented to enhance the performance of digital TV ISDB-T reception. Issues of realizing the proposed array antenna and its implementation by a joint hardware-software solution are also presented in this paper. Instead of using known reference signals, the proposed method utilizes the GI (Guard Interval) and a periodic property of OFDM signal as a constraint to realize MRC (Maximum Ratio Combining) and SMI (Sample Matrix Inversion) adaptive beam-forming algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed system drastically improves the quality of reception. Moreover, the proposed system can achieve excellent performance under the conditions of strong interferences.

This paper describes the experimental performance of eigenbeam multi-input multi-output with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems as measured in a testbed implemented with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The FPGA-testbed, characterized by the software-defined radio (SDR) technique, offers 1/5-scale real time signal processing. Extensive experiments on the testbed confirm the basic operation and performance of eigenbeam MIMO-OFDM with quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). From the packet error rate (PER) performance, we confirm that the eigenbeam 16QAM/MIMO-OFDM scheme with permutation matrix and three transmit antennas (Mt=3) drastically improves the required carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) by approximately 5.6 dB over the scheme without eigenbeam with Mt=2. Furthermore, to determine the impact of Doppler frequency fd, we focus on the transmission interval between the MIMO channel estimation and data transmission. To suppress the required CNR degradation to within 1.5 dB, it is found that the eigenbeam 16QAM/MIMO-OFDM scheme with permutation matrix and Mt=3 permits a transmission interval of approximately 68.5 ms when fd=1 Hz for a 1/5-scale model.

This paper proposes a compact interpolation scheme dedicated to a 1-dimensional position sensitive detector (PSD) with an optical sensing pixel array. The pixels are divided into even- and odd-numbered groups and winner take all (WTA) circuits are provided to each of the groups. The simulated results show that the detecting step-width is reduced to the half of the original one after applying the interpolation scheme.

We propose a sub-mW H.264 baseline-profile motion estimation processor for portable video applications. It features a VLSI-oriented block partitioning strategy and low-power SIMD/systolic-array datapath architecture, where the datapath can be switched between an SIMD and systolic array depending on processing flow. The processor supports all the seven kinds of block modes, and can handle three reference frames for a CIF (352288) 30-fps to QCIF (176144) 15-fps sequences with a quarter-pixel accuracy. It integrates 3.3 million transistors, and occupies 2.83.1 mm2 in a 130-nm CMOS technology. The proposed processor achieves a power of 800 µW in a QCIF 15-fps sequence with one reference picture.

This paper presents a scheme for accurately detecting the number of incident waves arriving at array antennas. The array antenna and MIMO techniques are developing as 4th generation mobile communication systems and wireless LAN technologies, and the accurate estimation of the propagation environment is becoming more important. This paper emphasizes the accurate detection of the number of incident waves; one of the important characteristics in multidirectional communication. There are some recent papers on accurate detection but they have problems of estimation accuracy or computational cost in severe environment like low SNR, small number of snapshots or waves with close angles. Hence, AIC and MDL methods based on statistics and information theory are still often used. In this paper, we propose an accurate estimation method of the number of arrival signals using the orthogonality of subspaces derived from preliminary estimation of signal subspace. The proposed method accurately estimates the number of signals also in severe environments where AIC and MDL methods can hardly estimate. We evaluate the performance of these methods through some computer simulation and experiments in anechoic chamber.

Diversity transmission using space-time block coding (STBC) shows a degraded performance in frequency selective fading (FSF) channel. In this paper, assuming the CSI is unknown at both transmitter and receiver while a pilot signal is available during the training period, we propose a MIMO transmission scheme using STBC by adopting subband adaptive array (SBAA) processing. The receive signal is converted into the frequency-domain and adaptive processing is done at each subband. A novel construction of SBAA is introduced to process received signal based on STBC. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a better performance compare to conventional STBC, and has a better performance and less computational load compare to STBC-TDLAA.

The decorrelating detector is one of the detecting methods in a direct sequence code division multiple access systems. We investigate the blind adaptive decorrelating detector (BADD) using only the signature of the desired user (DU) according to the assumption that the algorithm is used in downlink. When the BADD is constructed with an antenna array, both the spatial and temporal signature must be taken into consideration for signal detection. We propose the BADD incorporated with the blind estimation of spatial signature (SS) of the DU only from the received signals. As the estimation procedure of SS, the orthogonal projection approximation and subspace tracking algorithm is adopted. The proposed BADD presented the BER improvement with using antenna array. The BER performance has a lower limit with increasing the number of antenna array elements.

We propose a novel adaptive linearization technique for a balanced-amplifier array. The technique uses the specific intermodulation distortions (IMDs) at the output ports in the array. The detected IMD power level can be used to optimize the linearizer's characteristics. Because the design does not need as many power detectors and carrier cancel loops as it does amplifiers, we were able to successfully miniaturize the array-antenna system. This paper describes the principles, verified both experimentally and mathematically for a 4-port amplifier array.