This correspondence contributes to some d-form functions and d-form sequences. A property of d-form functions is obtained firstly. Then we present a way to construct d-form sequences and extended d-form sequences with ideal autocorrelation. Based on our result, many sequences with ideal autocorrelation can be constructed by the corresponding difference-balanced d-form functions.

In this letter, a novel adaptive total variation (ATV) model is proposed for image inpainting. The classical TV model is a partial differential equation (PDE)-based technique. While the TV model can preserve the image edges well, it has some drawbacks, such as staircase effect in the inpainted image and slow convergence rate. By analyzing the diffusion mechanism of TV model and introducing a new edge detection operator named difference curvature, we propose a novel ATV inpainting model. The proposed ATV model can diffuse the image information smoothly and quickly, namely, this model not only eliminates the staircase effect but also accelerates the convergence rate. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

This paper proposes a time-to-digital converter (TDC) utilizing the cascaded time difference amplifier (TDA) and shows measurement results with 0.18 µm CMOS. The proposed TDC operates in two modes, a wide input range mode and a fine time resolution mode. We employ a non-linearity calibration technique based on a lookup table. The wide input range mode shows 10.2 ps time resolution over 1.3 ns input range with DNL and INL of +0.8/-0.7LSB and +0.8/-0.4LSB, respectively. The fine time resolution mode shows 1.0 ps time resolution over 60 ps input range with DNL and INL of +0.9/-0.9LSB and +0.8/-1.0LSB, respectively.

A differential BPSK transmitter for ultra-wideband impulse-radio communication has been presented in this paper. The transmitter, developed in a 65 nm CMOS process,is simple in design and occupies a core area of 0.0017 mm2. The differential Gaussian monocycle pulses (GMP) are generated using some logic blocks and delay elements. The generated GMP, having a center frequency above 5 GHz, meets the FCC regulations. Measured results show that the transmitter consumes 1.8 pJ/bit to transmit BPSK modulated GMP at a data rate of 2 Gb/s. The interface circuitries eliminate the need for external networks for chip to antenna matching. Using an off-chip differential bow-tie antenna, data can easily be transmitted up to a distance of 10 cm which made it suitable for low power far field non-coherent applications.

In this paper, a differential input/output linear MOS transconductor using an adaptively biasing technique is proposed. The proposed transconductor based on a differential pair is linearized by employing an adaptively biasing circuit. The linear characteristic of the individual differential output currents are obtained by introducing the adaptively biased currents to terminate the differential output terminals. Using the proposed technique, the common-mode rejection ration (CMRR) becomes high. Simulation results show that the proposed technique is effective for improvement of the linearity and other performances.

In this paper, a 24 GHz frequency source for low phase noise is presented in a 0.18 µm CMOS process. The 24 GHz frequency source chip is composed of a 12 GHz voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and a 24 GHz balanced frequency doubler with class B gate bias. Compared to a conventional complementary VCO, the proposed 12 GHz VCO has phase noise improvement by using resistor current sources and substituting the nMOS cross-coupled pair in the conventional complementary VCO for a gm-boosted nMOS differential Colpitts pair. The measured phase noise and fundamental frequency suppression are -107.17 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset frequency and -20.95 dB at 23.19 GHz frequency, respectively. The measured frequency tuning range is from 23.19 GHz to 24.76 GHz drawing 2.72 mA at a supply voltage of 1.8 V not including an output buffer.

Different from distributed baluns, active baluns have group delay variations in the lower bands related to inherent internal capacitances and resistance in transistors. A negative group delay (NGD) circuit is employed as a compensator of group delay variation for an ultra-wideband (UWB) active balun. First, three-cell NGD circuit is inserted into a simple active balun circuit for realizing both group delay compensation and return loss improvement. The simulated results show a group delay variation of 4.8 ps and an input return loss of above 11.5 dB in the UWB band (3.1-10.6 GHz). Then, a pair of one-cell NGD circuits is added to reduce the remaining group delay variation (3.4 ps in simulation). The circuit with the NGD circuits was fabricated on an InGaP/GaAs HBT MMIC substrate. The measured results achieved a group delay variation of 7.7 ps, a gain variation of 0.5 dB, an input return loss of greater than 10 dB, and an output return loss of larger than 8.1 dB in the UWB band.

We propose a scheduling method called SCQ (Smoothly Changing Queue) which can control service rate by bulk size of video streaming services such as IPTV and VoD. Since SCQ allows queue length to change smoothly, video streaming services can be stably provided with low jitter. Queueing analysis results show that SCQ can more stably deliver video streaming with low jitter and loss than existing AQMs or queue length-based rate control methods.

This paper introduces a practical color filter array (CFA) interpolation technique. Among the many technologies proposed in this field, the inter-color methods that exploit correlation between color planes generally outperform the intra-color approaches. We have found that the filtering direction, e.g., horizontal or vertical, is among the most decisive factors for the performance of the CFA interpolation. However, most of the state-of-the-art technologies are not flexible enough in determining the filtering direction. For example, filtering only in the upper direction is not usually supported. In this context, we propose an inter-color CFA interpolation using a local map called unified geometry map (UGM). In this method, the filtering direction is determined based on the similarity of the local map data. Thus, it provides more choices of the filtering directions, which enhances the probability of finding the most appropriate direction. It is confirmed through simulations that the proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of objective quality measures. In addition, the proposed scheme is as inexpensive as the conventional methods with regard to resource consumption.

We introduce a 16 × cascaded time difference amplifier (TDA) using a differential logic delay cell with 0.18 µm CMOS process. By employing the differential logic delay cell in the delay chain instead of the CMOS logic delay cell, less than 8% TD gain offset with 150 ps input range is achieved. The input referred standard deviation of the output time difference error is 2.7 ps and the input referred is improved by 17% compared with that of the previous TDA using the CMOS logic delay cell.

A method based on covariance differencing for a uniform linear array is proposed to counter the problem of direction finding of narrowband signals under a colored noise environment. By assuming a Hermitian symmetric Toeplitz matrix for the unknown noise, the array covariance matrix is transformed into a centrohermitian matrix in an appropriate way allowing the noise component to be eliminated. The modified covariance differencing algorithm provides accurate direction of arrival (DOA) estimation when the incident signals are uncorrelated or just two of the signals are coherent. If there are more than two coherent signals, the presented method combined with spatial smoothing (SS) scheme can be used. Unlike the original method, the new approach dispenses the need to determine the true angles and the phantom angles. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of presented algorithm.

The increasing demand of low power Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizer (DDFS) leads to the requirement of efficient compression methods to reduce ROM size for storing sine function values. This paper presents a technique to achieve very high compression ratio by using the optimized four-segment linear difference method. The proposed technique results in the ROM compression ratio of about 117.3:1 and the word size reduction of 6 bits for the design of a DDFS with 11-bit sine amplitude output. This high compression ratio result is very promising to meet the requirement of low power consumption and low hardware complexity in digital VLSI technology.

We propose a neutron diffractometer system based on MgB2 thin film detectors and an SFQ signal processor. Small dimensions of MgB2 thin film detectors and high processing capability of the single flux quantum (SFQ) circuits enable us to handle several thousand or more detectors in a cryocooler, leading to a very compact system. In addition, the system can provide many diffraction patterns for different kinetic energies simultaneously. Kinetic energy is determined for individual neutrons by means of the time-of-flight method by using SFQ time-to-digital converters (TDCs). Digital outputs of the TDCs are multiplexed in time domain and sent to room-temperature electronics with reduced number of cables. A dual-input SFQ signal processor including TDCs and a multiplexer has been successfully demonstrated with a time resolution of 20 ns and power consumption of 400 µW. These values show high feasibility of the neutron diffraction system proposed here.

The diffraction by a composite wedge composed of a perfect conductor and a lossy dielectric is investigated using the hidden rays of diffraction (HRD) method. The usual principle of geometrical optics is employed to trace not only ordinary rays incident on the lit boundary but also hidden rays incident on the shadow boundary. The modified propagation constants are adopted to represent the non-uniform plane wave transmission through the lossy dielectric. The HRD diffraction coefficients are constructed routinely by the sum of the cotangent functions, which have one-to-one correspondence with both ordinary and hidden rays. The angular period of the cotangent functions is adjusted to satisfy the edge condition at the tip of the composite wedge. The accuracy of the HRD diffraction coefficients in the physical region is checked by showing how closely the diffraction coefficients in the complementary region satisfy the null-field condition.

Recently enhancing the visual experience of the user has been a new trend for TV displays. This trend comes from the fact that changes of ambient illuminations while viewing a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) significantly affect human impressions. However, psychological effects caused by the combination of displayed video image and ambient illuminations have not been investigated. In the present research, we clarify the relationship between ambient illuminations and psychological effects while viewing video image displayed on the LCD by using a questionnaire based semantic differential (SD) method and a factor analysis method. Six kinds of video images were displayed under different colors and layouts of illumination conditions and rated by 15 observers. According to the analysis, it became clear that the illumination control around the LCD with displayed video image, the feeling of 'activity' and 'evaluating' were rated higher than the feeling of fluorescent ceiling condition. In particular, simultaneous illumination control around the display and the ceiling enhanced the feeling of 'activity,' and 'evaluating' with keeping 'comfort.' Moreover, the feeling of 'activity' under the illumination control around the LCD and the ceiling condition while viewing music video image was rated clearly higher than that with natural scene video image.

We demonstrate a single-channel 1.28 Tbit/s-525 km transmission using OTDM of subpicosecond DQPSK signals. In order to cope with transmission impairments due to time-varying higher-order PMD, which is one of the major limiting factors in such a long-haul ultrahigh-speed transmission, we newly developed an ultrafast time-domain optical Fourier transformation technique in a round-trip configuration. By applying this technique to subpicosecond pulses, transmission impairments were greatly reduced, and BER performance below FEC limit was obtained with increased system margin.

This paper proposes a new approach for the joint processing of signal detection and channel estimation based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) mobile communications. Conventional schemes based on the EM algorithm estimate a channel impulse response using Kalman filter, and employ the random walk model or the first-order autoregressive (AR) model to derive the process equation for the filter. Since these models assume that the time-variation of the impulse response is white noise without considering any autocorrelation property, the accuracy of the channel estimation deteriorates under fast-fading conditions, resulting in an increased packet error rate (PER). To improve the accuracy of the estimation of fast-fading channels, the proposed scheme employs a differential model that allows the correlated time-variation to be considered by introducing the first- and higher-order time differentials of the channel impulse response. In addition, this paper derives a forward recursive form of the channel estimation along both the frequency and time axes in order to reduce the computational complexity. Computer simulations of channels under fast multipath fading conditions demonstrate that the proposed method is superior in PER to the conventional schemes that employ the random walk model.

Locality of high frequency electromagnetic scattering phenomena is embodied and imported to the Method of Moments (MoM) to reduce computational load. The proposed method solves currents on small areas only around inner and edge stationary phase points (SPPs) on the scatterer surfaces. The range of MoM area is explicitly specified in terms of Fresnel zone number as a function of frequency, source and observer positions. Based upon this criterion, scatterer of arbitrary size and shape can be solved with almost frequency independent number of unknowns. In some special cases like focusing systems, locality disappears and the method reduces to the standard MoM. The hybrid method called PO-MoM is complementarily introduced to cope with these cases, where Fresnel zone number with analogous but different definition is used. The selective use of Local-MoM and PO-MoM provides frequency insensitive number of unknowns for general combination of source and observation points. Numerical examples of RCS calculation for two dimensional flat and curved surfaces are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and reduction of unknowns of this method. The Fresnel zone, introduced in the scattering analysis for the first time, is a useful indicator of the locality or the boundary for MoM areas.

When a monochromatic electromagnetic plane wave is incident on an infinitely extending surface with the translation invariance property, a curious phenomenon often takes place at a low grazing angle of incidence, at which the total wave field vanishes and a dark shadow appears. This paper looks for physical and mathematical reasons why such a shadow occurs. Three cases are considered: wave reflection by a flat interface between two media, diffraction by a periodic surface, and scattering from a homogeneous random surface. Then, it is found that, when a translation invariant surface does not support guided waves (eigen functions) propagating with real propagation constants, such the shadow always takes place, because the primary excitation disappears at a low grazing angle of incidence. At the same time, a shadow form of solution is proposed. Further, several open problems are given for future works.

In this paper we first demonstrate that effective selection functions in power analysis attacks change depending on circuit architectures of a block cipher. We then conclude that the most resistant architecture on its own, in the case of the loop architecture, has two data registers have separate roles: one for storing the plaintext and ciphertext, and the other for storing intermediate values. There, the pre-whitening operation is placed at the output of the former register. The architecture allows the narrowest range of selection functions and thereby has resistance against ordinary CPA. Thus, we can easily defend against attacks by ordinary CPA at the architectural level, whereas we cannot against DPA. Secondly, we propose a new technique called "self-templates" in order to raise the accuracy of evaluation of DPA-based attacks. Self-templates enable to differentiate meaningful selection functions for DPA-based attacks without any strong assumption as in the template attack. We also present the results of attacks to an AES co-processor on an ASIC and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.