An improved dual-band design method is presented for the 180coupler. It uses the non-uniform impedance ring structure for the arbitrary power division and a π-shaped branch for the dual-band operation The increased design freedom offered by the proposed structure helps to extend the useful dual-band operation range.

This paper proposes a scan design for delay fault testability of dual circuits. In normal operation mode, each proposed scan flip flop operates as a master-slave flip flop. In test mode, the proposed scan design performs scan operation using two scan paths, namely master scan path and slave scan path. The master scan path consists of master latches and the slave scan path consists of slave latches. In the proposed scan design, arbitrary two-patterns can be set to flip flops of dual circuits. Therefore, it achieves complete fault coverage for robust and non-robust testable delay fault testing. It requires no extra latch unlike enhanced scan design. Thus the area overhead is low. The evaluation shows the test application time of the proposed scan design is 58.0% of that of the enhanced scan design, and the area overhead of the proposed scan design is 13.0% lower than that of the enhanced scan design. In addition, in testing of single circuits, it achieves complete fault coverage of robust and non-robust testable delay fault testing. It requires smaller test data volume than the enhanced scan design in testing of single circuits.

A single chip NFC transceiver with Dual Antenna structure supporting not only NFC active and passive mode but also 13.56 MHz RFID reader and tag mode is designed and fabricated. The proposed NFC transceiver can operate as a RFID tag even without external power supply thanks to a dual antenna structure for initiator and target. The area increment due to additional target antenna is negligible because the target antenna is constructed by using a shielding layer of the initiator antenna.

Since an FFT-based speech encryption system retains a considerable residual intelligibility, such as talk spurts and the original intonation in the encrypted speech, this makes it easy for eavesdroppers to deduce the information contents from the encrypted speech. In this letter, we propose a new technique based on the combination of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme and an appropriate QAM mapping method to remove the residual intelligibility from the encrypted speech by permuting several frequency components. In addition, the proposed OFDM-based speech encryption system needs only two FFT operations instead of the four required by the FFT-based speech encryption system. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of this proposed technique.

This paper describes a novel Wilkinson power divider operating at two arbitrary different frequencies. The proposed divider consists of two-section transmission lines and a series RLC circuit connected between two output ports. The circuit parameters for a dual-band operation are derived by the even/odd mode analysis. Equal power split, complete matching, and good isolation between two output ports are numerically demonstrated. Dual-band and broadband Wilkinson power dividers can be successfully designed. Finally, verification of this design method is also shown by electromagnetic simulations and experiments.

A residual acoustic echo cancellation method that employs the masking property is proposed to enhance the speech quality of hands-free communication devices in an automobile environment. The conventional masking property is employed for speech enhancement using the masking threshold of the desired clean speech signal. In this Letter, either the near-end speech or residual noise is selected as the desired signal according to the double-talk detector. Then, the residual echo signal is masked by the desired signal (masker). Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by deriving the echo return loss enhancement and by examining speech waveforms and spectrograms.

A new dual-band operation scheme is proposed for the Wilkinson power divider. The proposed structure has an open stub at the input and its two output ports are extended through a transmission line section. It offers improved bandwidth performance in the dual-band operation along with some structural advantages.

Luby et al. derived evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs for irregular LDPC code ensembles. Evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs is important characteristic which is used for finite-length analysis of the expected block and bit error probability over the binary erasure channel. In this paper, we derive detailed evolution of degree distributions in residual graphs for irregular LDPC code ensembles with joint degree distributions.

This paper presents a novel asynchronous architecture of Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to reduce the power consumption. In the dynamic power consumption of the conventional FPGAs, the power consumed by the switch blocks and clock distribution is dominant since FPGAs have complex switch blocks and the large number of registers for high programmability. To reduce the power consumption of switch blocks and clock distribution, asynchronous bit-serial architecture is proposed. To ensure the correct operation independent of data-path lengths, we use the level-encoded dual-rail encoding and propose its area-efficient implementation. The proposed field-programmable VLSI is implemented in a 90 nm CMOS technology. The delay and the power consumption of the proposed FPVLSI are respectively 61% and 58% of those of 4-phase dual-rail encoding which is the most common encoding in delay insensitive encoding.

Combining relaying and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission is a generic way to overcome the channel-fading impairments. Best antenna selection is a simple but efficient MIMO method that achieves the full diversity and also serves as a lower bound reference of MIMO performance. For a dual-hop MIMO system with an ideal amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying gain and best antenna selection, we provide a probability density function (PDF) of received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and an analytic BER equation when using M-ary PSK in Rayleigh fading channels. The analytic result is shown to exactly match with simulated one. Furthermore, the effect of link unbalance between the first hop and the second hop, due to differences in the number of antennas deployed in both hops as well as in the average power of channel coefficients, on the BER performance is numerically investigated and the results show that the links with better balance give better performance.

Two novel low complexity dual-mode pulse generator designs suitable for FFs with triggering mode control are presented. The proposed designs successfully integrate XOR/OR (AND/XNOR) functions into a unified pass transistor logic (PTL) module to provide control on single- or double-edge operations. The designs use as few as 8 transistors each and ingeniously avoid the signal degradation problem inherent in most PTL circuits. As the only dual-mode designs so far, the proposed designs also outperform rival single-mode designs in both aspects of circuit complexity and power consumption.

Two dual-band bandpass filters (BPFs) based on the doubly parallel-coupled stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) structures have been proposed in this paper. The coupled-SIRs with/without open-stub-loads are introduced in the filter design. The dual-band filters exhibiting multiple zeros design operate at 2.45/5.2-GHz for the WLAN applications. Two three-staged filters composed of four SIRs have been proposed with the tapped-line adapted in the I/O sections. A five-staged filter is constructed based on the same design principle to achieve a better band-rejection. The proposed filters have the advantages of a much wider bandwidth in both the passbands without sacrificing the passband's insertion loss and passband flatness. The design procedure for a conventional parallel-coupled microstrip lines model is still suitable to design the proposed filters. The proposed filters have achieved almost twice the bandwidth of a conventional parallel-coupled lines configuration under the same design parameters. The experiments have been conducted to verify filter performance. Measured results are in good agreement with the full-wave simulation results.

Due to the demand of dual-band modern wireless communications, this paper presents a dual-band patch antenna for IEEE802.11 a and g wireless local area network (WLAN) system. The antenna has bidirectional patterns that can be switched by an RF switch to select the feeding probe positions. The 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz patches are stacked on a ground plane and are matched to the RF switch by open stubs. Analysis and design are illustrated and throughput improvement is demonstrated in an indoor environment.

As THz wave has the advantages of enough resolution and penetration to materials, it has been examined to be used for the imaging system. The propagation distance of THz wave is limited to be short. That is also the advantage for application to the indoor wireless communication etc. For the achievement of the ultra-high frequency oscillator (and concurrently transmitter) device, the properties of small, electronic excitation, the antenna constructed and being on the wafer are important. For the purpose, the Negative differential resistance Dual channel transistor (NDR-DCT) proposed by AIST is utilized. In this paper, as an initial theoretical analysis, we simulated the oscillation frequency of this device at about 100 GHz-1THz within the Terahertz band on which the above applications was expected. The equivalent circuit model of NDR-DCT was shown based on the analogy with the resonant tunnelling diode (RTDs), and the antenna as the resonance circuit part was designed by the numerical analysis. The possibility of the THz oscillation of this device was confirmed. The slit reflector that we proposed can realize the slot antenna on the device effectively and is suitable for three terminal structure semiconductor. its manufacturing is relatively easy.

This letter presents a simple joint estimation method for residual frequency offset (RFO) and sampling frequency offset (STO) in OFDM-based digital video broadcasting (DVB) systems. The proposed method selects a continual pilot (CP) subset from an unsymmetrically and non-uniformly distributed CP set to obtain an unbiased estimator. Simulation results show that the proposed method using a properly selected CP subset is unbiased and performs robustly.

This paper presents a design of an asynchronous peer-to-peer half-duplex/full-duplex-selectable data-transfer system on-chip interconnected. The data-transfer method between channels is based on a 1-phase signaling scheme realized by using multiple-valued current-mode (MVCM) circuits and encoding, which performs high-speed communication. A data transmission is selectable by adding a mode-detection circuit that observes data-transmission modes; full-duplex, half-duplex and standby modes. Especially, since current sources are completely cut off during the standby mode, the power dissipation can be greatly reduced. Moreover, both half-duplex and full-duplex communication can be realized by sharing a common circuit except a signal-level conversion circuit. The proposed interface is implemented using 0.18-µm CMOS, and its performance improvement is discussed in comparison with those of the other ordinary asynchronous methods.

A design method is proposed for a low-profile dual-shaped reflector antenna for the mobile satellite communications. The antenna is required to be low-profile because of mount restrictions. However, reduction of its height generally causes degradation of antenna performance. Firstly, an initial low-profile reflector antenna with an elliptical aperture is designed by using Geometrical Optics (GO) shaping. Then a Physical Optics (PO) shaping technique is applied to optimize the gain and sidelobes including mitigation of undesired scattering. The developed design method provides highly accurate design procedure for electrically small reflector antennas. Fabrication and measurement of a prototype antenna support the theory.

This paper investigates the fixed-slope lossy coding of individual sequences and nonstationary sources. We clarify that, for a given individual sequence, the optimal cost attainable by the blockwise lossy encoders is equal to the optimal average cost with respect to the empirical distribution of the given sequence. Moreover, we show that, for a given nonstationary source, the optimal cost attainable by the blockwise encoders is equal to the supremum of the optimal average cost over all the stationary sources in the stationary hull of the given source. In addition, we show that the universal lossy coding algorithm based on Lempel-Ziv 78 code attains the optimal cost for any individual sequence and any nonstationary source.

A novel dual mode bandpass filter (BPF) with improved spurious response is presented in this letter. To obtain low insertion loss, the coupling structure using the dual mode resonator and the feeding scheme using coplanar-waveguide (CPW) are constructed on the two sides of a dielectric substrate. A defected ground structure (DGS) is designed on the ground plane of the CPW to achieve the goal of spurious suppression of the filter. The filter has been investigated numerically and experimentally. Measured results show a good agreement with the simulated analysis.

A new structure learning approach for Bayesian networks (BNs) based on dual genetic algorithm (DGA) is proposed in this paper. An individual of the population is represented as a dual chromosome composed of two chromosomes. The first chromosome represents the ordering among the BN nodes and the second represents the conditional dependencies among the ordered BN nodes. It is rigorously shown that there is no BN structure that cannot be encoded by the proposed dual genetic encoding and the proposed encoding explores the entire solution space of the BN structures. In contrast with existing GA-based structure learning methods, the proposed method learns not only the topology of the BN nodes, but also the ordering among the BN nodes, thereby, exploring the wider solution space of a given problem than the existing method. The dual genetic operators are closed in the set of the admissible individuals. The proposed method is applied to real-world and benchmark applications, while its effectiveness is demonstrated through computer simulation.