The periodogram scheme is a versatile method for large frequency offset estimation which requires preambles, in general, and only a few reference signals. However, the drawback of the conventional scheme is its inaccuracy in detecting the integer part of frequency offset which dominates the accuracy of frequency offset estimation. In order to increase the accuracy of the estimation, we directly interpolate a coefficient of the periodogram. The conventional periodogram and proposed schemes are compared in terms of the mean square error performance in the long term evolution system. The performance of the proposed method is compared with the conventional one and the simulation results indicate the better performance of the proposed one.

Reduction of the intensity noise in semiconductor lasers is an important subject for the higher performance of an application. Simultaneous usage of the superposition of high frequency current and the electric negative feedback loop was proposed to suppress the noise for the higher power operation of semiconductor lasers. Effective noise reduction of more than 25 dB with 80 mW operation was experimentally demonstrated.

This letter presents the architecture of multi-gigabit parallel demodulator suitable for demodulating high order QAM modulated signal and easy to implement on FPGA platform. The parallel architecture is based on frequency domain implementation of matched filter and timing phase correction. Parallel FIFO based delete-keep algorithm is proposed for timing synchronization, while a kind of reduced constellation phase-frequency detector based parallel decision feedback PLL is designed for carrier synchronization. A fully pipelined parallel adaptive blind equalization algorithm is also proposed. Their parallel implementation structures suitable for FPGA platform are investigated. Besides, in the demonstration of 2 Gbps demodulator for 16QAM modulation, the architecture is implemented and validated on a Xilinx V6 FPGA platform with performance loss less than 2 dB.

In this paper, we propose low complexity channel parameter tracking methods for adaptive OFDM MMSE channel estimation. Even though the MMSE estimation is one of the most accurate channel estimation methods, it requires several channel information including Doppler frequency, RMS (root mean squared) delay spread, and SNR. To implement the MMSE estimation, tracking of such parameters should be preceded. We propose methods to track the above 3 channel parameters. As for Doppler frequency estimation, we propose an extremum method with a parabolic model, which is a key contribution of this paper. We also analyze the computational complexity of the proposed algorithms. Simulations show that the proposed tracking algorithm tracks the parameters well, and performs better than the conventional fixed-parameter algorithm in terms of BER performance. The BER performance of the adaptive MMSE estimation is better than that of a fixed-parameter (robust) MMSE estimator by about 5 dB.

We propose a methodology of loop design optimization for fourth-order fractional-N phase locked loop (PLL) frequency synthesizers featuring a short settling time of 5 µsec for applications in an active RFID (radio frequency identification) and automobile smart-key systems. To establish the optimized design flow, equations presenting the relationship between the specification and PLL loop parameters in terms of settling time, loop bandwidth, phase margin, and phase noise are summarized. The proposed design flow overcomes the settling time inaccuracy in conventional second-order approximation methods by obtaining the accurate relationship between settling time and loop bandwidth with the MATLAB Control System Toolbox for the fourth-order PLLs. The proposed flow also features the worst-case design by taking account of the process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations in loop filter components, and considers the tradeoff between phase noise and area. The three-step optimization process consists of 1) the derivation of the accurate relationship between the settling time and loop bandwidth for various PVT conditions, 2) the derivation of phase noise and area as functions of area-dominant filter capacitance, and 3) the derivation of all PLL loop components values. The optimized design result is compared with circuit simulations using an actually designed fourth-order fractional-N PLL in a 1.8 V 0.18 µm CMOS technology. The error between the design and simulation for the setting time is reduced from 0.63 µsec in the second-order approximation to 0.23 µsec in the fourth-order optimization that proves the validity of the proposed method for the high-speed settling operations.

The non-reference method is widely useful to estimation picture quality on the decoder side. In this paper, we discuss the estimation method for spatial blur that divides the frequency zones by the absolute value of 64 coefficients with an 8-by-8 DCT and compares them. It is recognized that absolute blur estimation is possible with the decoded picture only.

This paper proposes a comb filter design method which utilizes two linear phase FIR filters for flexibly adjusting the comb filter's frequency response. The first FIR filter is used to individually adjust the notch gains, which denote the local minimum gains of the comb filter's frequency response. The second FIR filter is used to design the elimination bandwidths for individual notch gains. We also derive an efficient comb filter by incorporating these two FIR filters with an all-pass filter which is used in a conventional comb filter to accurately align the nulls with the undesired harmonic frequencies. Several design examples of the derived comb filter show the effectiveness of the proposed comb filter design method.

Recently, dynamic power supply voltage techniques, such as an Envelope Elimination and Restoration power amplifier (EER-PA) or Envelope-Tracking Power amplifier (ET-PA), have been attracting much attention because they can maintain high efficiency in large back-off region [1]-[6]. The dynamic power supply voltage techniques cause strong nonlinearity compared to a conventional power amplifier, hence a memoryless Digital Predistortion (DPD) technique is indispensable for these efficiency enhancement techniques. However, the performance of the memoryless DPD is degraded due to the frequency response of the envelope amplifier in the dynamic power supply voltage techniques [7]-[9]. In this paper, we clarify the degradation mechanisms of the memoryless DPD for the EER-PA due to the frequency response of the envelope amplifier based on the results of two-tone tests, and propose an analytical model for improving the performance of the memoryless DPD developed for the EER-PA. In addition, a prototype EER-PA is developed and we demonstrate that the residual distortion of the developed EER-PA with conventional memoryless DPD algorithm is compensated by the new algorithm based on the proposed analytical model. In the two-tone test, third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) with a tone spacing from 100 kHz to 4 MHz is improvement by up to 25 dB by the memoryless DPD algorithm based on the proposed model. Measured adjacent channel leakage power ratio (ACPR) of the developed EER-PA is improved from -22.5 dBc to -42.5 dBc in the OFDM signal test with 1.08 MHz bandwidth.

This paper investigates a clock frequency generator for ultra-low-voltage sub-picosecond-jitter clock generation in future 0.5-V LSI and power aware LSI. To address the potential possible solution for ultra-low-voltage applications, a 0.5 V clock frequency generator is proposed and implemented. Significant performances, in terms of sub 1-ps jitter, 50 MHz-to-6.4 GHz frequency tuning range with 2 bands and sub 1-mW PDC, demonstrated the viable replacement of ring oscillators in low-voltage and low-jitter clock generator.

A highly stable microwave exciter system has been developed for 87Sr+ ion microwave frequency standards. The controller was built to optimize the transfer function of the phase-locked loop. The upper limit of the frequency tracking error achieved was 7.7 10-15 at τ = 1 s. A phase frequency discriminator using an FPGA was also made and applied to a phase-locked loop. This paper reports on the design of and results obtained from the microwave exciter for Sr+ ion microwave frequency standards.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a popular air interface technology that is adopted as a standard modulation scheme for 4G communication systems owing to its excellent spectral efficiency. For OFDM systems, synchronization problems have received much attention along with peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction. In addition to frequency offset estimation, frame synchronization is a challenging problem that must be solved to achieve optimal system performance. In this paper, we present a maximum likelihood (ML) frame synchronizer for OFDM systems. The synchronizer exploits a synchronization word and cyclic prefixes together to improve the synchronization performance. Numerical results show that the performance of the proposed frame synchronizer is better than that of conventional schemes. The proposed synchronizer can be used as a reference for evaluating the performance of other suboptimal frame synchronizers. We also modify the proposed frame synchronizer to reduce the implementation complexity and propose a near-ML synchronizer for time-varying fading channels.

In this paper, we present an algorithm for reducing the transmit normalization factor by perturbing the transmit signal in a Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) system which uses the channel inverse matrix as its precoding matrix. A base station must normalize unnormalized transmit signals due to the limitation of the constant transmit power. This paper defines the norm of the unnormalized transmit signal as the transmit normalization factor used to normalize the transmit signal. Recalling that the transmit normalization factor consists of a combination of the singular values from the channel inverse matrix, we provide a codebook that successively reduces the coefficients of these singular values. Through computer simulations, the proposed algorithm is compared to sphere encoding in terms of the Bit Error Rate (BER) and the outage probability in a MU-MIMO signal environment. Sphere encoding is known to be an optimal solution amongst the perturbation methods that reduce the transmit normalization factor [1]. This work demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is has very good performance, comparable to that of sphere encoding, while its computational load is nearly 200 times less. Since the codebook in our algorithm depends only on the given channel, the difference in the computational complexity becomes even greater when the channel state is not changed, because the codebook can be reused. Furthermore, the codebook exhibits the characteristic of robustness to the maximum Doppler shift.

In the reverse link of OFDMA, different users (subcarriers) may have different frequency offsets, which causes severe performance degradation. It is also difficult to estimate/compensate these frequency offsets in the reverse link. Even if the frequency offsets are correctly estimated, the compensation of one subcarrier (or user) may worsen the inter-carrier interference from the frequency offsets of other subcarriers (users). One of the key ideas in this letter is to merge frequency offset compensation into the FFT matrix. The new inverse transform matrix is used in lieu of regular FFT. A single MMSE-based transform is used to perform both inverse Fourier transform and frequency offset compensation. Compared to the conventional methods such as circular convolution, this approach has lower computational complexity with comparable performance.

This paper shows a new pulse swallow programmable frequency divider with the division step size of 0.5. To realize the division step size of 0.5 by a conventional pulse swallow method, we propose a parallel dual modulus prescaler with the division ratio of P and P + 0.5. It consists of simple circuit elements and has an advantage over the conventional dual modulus prescaler with the division step size of 0.5 in high frequency operation. The proposed parallel dual modulus prescaler with the division ratio 8 and 8.5 is implemented in the 0.13-µm CMOS technology. The proposed architecture achieves 7 times higher frequency operation than the conventional one theoretically. It is verified the functions over 5 GHz.

This paper proposes applying our inter-cell interference (ICI) cancellation method to fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and evaluates the resulting spectral efficiency improvement. With our ICI cancellation method based on base station cooperation, the control station generates ICI replica signals by simple linear processing. Moreover, FFR effectively utilizes frequency resources by both allowing users in the cell-center region to access all available sub-channels and increasing the transmission power to users in the cell-edge region. FFR provides the conditions under which the ICI cancellation method works effectively. Computer simulations show that the average spectral efficiency of the proposed method is comparable to that of cooperative MU-MIMO, which can completely remove ICI.

In this paper, a low-complexity symbol-spaced turbo frequency domain equalization (FDE) algorithm based on Laurent decomposition is proposed for precoded binary continuous phase modulation (CPM) with modulation index h=1/2. At the transmitter, a precoder is utilized to eliminate the inherent memory of the CPM signal. At the receiver, a matched filter based on Laurent decomposition is utilized to make the detection symbol-spaced. As a result, the symbol-spaced iteration can be taken between the equalizer and the decoder directly without a CPM demodulator, and we derive a symbol-spaced soft interference cancellation frequency domain equalization (SSIC-FDE) algorithm for binary CPM with h=1/2. A new data block structure for FDE of partial response CPM is also presented. The computational complexity analysis and simulations show that this approach provides a complexity reduction and an impressive performance improvement over previously proposed turbo FDE algorithm for binary CPM with h=1/2 in multi-path fading channels.

This paper investigates the non-data-aided (NDA) carrier frequency estimation of amplitude and phase shift keying (APSK) signals. The true Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for NDA frequency estimation of APSK signals are derived and evaluated numerically. Characteristic and jitter variance of NDA Luise and Reggiannini (L&R) frequency estimator are analyzed. Verified by Monte Carlo simulations, the analytical results are shown to be accurate for medium-to-high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. Using the proposed closed-form expression, parameters of the algorithm are optimized efficiently to minimize the jitter variance.

In this letter, we analyze the influence of motion and out-of-focus blur on both frequency spectrum and cepstrum of an iris image. Based on their characteristics, we define two new discriminative blur features represented by Energy Spectral Density Distribution (ESDD) and Singular Cepstrum Histogram (SCH). To merge the two features for blur detection, a merging kernel which is a linear combination of two kernels is proposed when employing Support Vector Machine. Extensive experiments demonstrate the validity of our method by showing the improved blur detection performance on both synthetic and real datasets.

Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are the most popular acoustic features used in automatic speech recognition (ASR), mainly because the coefficients capture the most useful information of the speech and fit well with the assumptions used in hidden Markov models. As is well known, MFCCs already employ several principles which have known counterparts in the peripheral properties of human hearing: decoupling across frequency, mel-warping of the frequency axis, log-compression of energy, etc. It is natural to introduce more mechanisms in the auditory periphery to improve the noise robustness of MFCC. In this paper, a k-nearest neighbors based frequency masking filter is proposed to reduce the audibility of spectra valleys which are sensitive to noise. Besides, Moore and Glasberg's critical band equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) expression is utilized to determine the filter bandwidth. Furthermore, a new bandpass infinite impulse response (IIR) filter is proposed to imitate the temporal masking phenomenon of the human auditory system. These three auditory perceptual mechanisms are combined with the standard MFCC algorithm in order to investigate their effects on ASR performance, and a revised MFCC extraction scheme is presented. Recognition performances with the standard MFCC, RASTA perceptual linear prediction (RASTA-PLP) and the proposed feature extraction scheme are evaluated on a medium-vocabulary isolated-word recognition task and a more complex large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task. Experimental results show that consistent robustness against background noise is achieved on these two tasks, and the proposed method outperforms both the standard MFCC and RASTA-PLP.

The RFID tag system has received a lot of attention for ubiquitous computing. An RFID tag is attached to an object. With the unique ID of the RFID tag, a user identifies the object provided with the RFID tag and derives appropriate information about the object. One important application in the RFID technology is localizing RFID tags, which can be very useful in acquiring the position information concerning the RFID tags. It can be applied to navigation systems and positional detection systems for mobile robots. This paper proposes a new adaptive multi-range-sensing method for 3D localization of passive RFID tags by using a probabilistic approach. In this method, a mobile object (human, robot, etc.) with an RFID reader estimates the positions of RFID tags with multiple communication ranges dynamically. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated in experiments.