This paper investigates the effect of several frequency modulation profiles on conducted-noise reduction in dc-dc converters with programmed switching controller. The converter is operated in variable frequency modulation regime. Twelve switching frequency modulation profiles have been studied. Some of the modulation data are prepared using MATLAB software, and others are generated online. Moreover, all the frequency profiles have been designed and implemented using FPGA and experimentally investigated. The experimental results show that the conducted-noise spreading depends on both the modulation sequence profile and the statistical characteristics of the sequence. A substantial part of the manufacturing cost of power converters for telecommunication applications involves designing filters to comply with the EMI limits. Considering this investigation significantly reduces the filter size.

We describe a user scheduling scheme suitable for zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions in time-division-duplex distributed antenna systems. This user scheduling scheme consists of inter-cell-interference mitigation scheduling by using fractional frequency reuse, proportional fair scheduling in the OFDM frequency domain, and high-capacity ZFBF-MU-MIMO scheduling by using zero-forcing with selection (ZFS). Simulation results demonstrate in a severe user-distribution condition that includes cell-edge users that the proposed user scheduling scheme achieves high average cell throughputs close to that provided by only ZFS and that it also achieves almost the same degree of user fairness as round-robin user scheduling.

This paper proposes cooperative coding using cyclic delay diversity (CDD) for OFDM systems. The cooperative diversity is combined with channel coding while CDD is applied to the cooperative transmission of the multiple relays to improve the beneficial effects of the cooperating relays. Analyses of frame error probability (FEP) and the average channel power of the proposed scheme are shown. Simulation results show the frame error rate (FER) of the proposed scheme. The proposed scheme provides not only a simple code design and low system complexity compared to conventional space-time processing, but better FER and diversity gain compared to direct transmission and conventional cooperative coding without CDD.

In this paper we clarify for the boost and the buck-boost converter that the ripple effect is not ignorable for the frequency response, and reveal that it causes the unexpected characteristics where either the phase lag or the phase lead appears depending on the shape of waveform of the ramp generator in the PWM circuit. Eventually the phase margin for the stability drastically changes depending on the slope direction (normal or reverse) of the sawtooth waveform of the ramp generator even in the same circuit configuration. For the ripple effects we propose the general analysis model and analyze them of the boost and the buck-boost converters. As the result we identify that the ripple effects are caused mainly by the variation of the slope and the average of the ripple, and reveal that the both converters have the asymmetric characteristics for the slope direction of the sawtooth waveform of the ramp generator and there is more advantage for the stability in case of the reverse slope direction than in case of the normal one. It also clarified that the effect of ESR of the output capacitor of the converter on the frequency response is different according to the shape of the sawtooth waveforms. The proposed analysis method is validated by the experiments and simulations.

E-band low-noise amplifier (LNA) monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMICs) were developed using pseudomorphic In0.75Ga0.25As/In0.52Al0.48As high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with a gate length of 50 nm. The nanogate HEMTs demonstrated a maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) of 550 GHz and a current-gain cutoff frequency (fT) of 450 GHz at room temperature, which is first experimental demonstration that fmax as high as 550 GHz are achievable with the improved one-step-recessed gate procedure. Furthermore, using a three-stage LNA-MMIC with 50-nm-gate InGaAs/InAlAs HEMTs, we achieved a minimum noise figure of 2.3 dB with an associated gain of 20.6 dB at 79 GHz.

Digital signal processing requires digital filters with variable frequency characteristics. A variable digital filter (VDF) is a filter whose frequency characteristics can be easily and instantaneously changed. In this paper, we present a design method for variable linear-phase finite impulse response (FIR) filters with multiple variable factors and a reduction method for the number of polynomial coefficients. The obtained filter has a high piecewise attenuation in the stopband. The stopband edge and the position and magnitude of the high piecewise stopband attenuation can be varied by changing some parameters. Variable parameters are normalized in this paper. An optimization methodology known as semidefinite programming (SDP) is used to design the filter. In addition, we present that the proposed VDF can be implemented using the Farrow structure, which suitable for real time signal processing. The usefulness of the proposed filter is demonstrated through examples.

Based on the least square (LS) approximation of sinusoidal signal in frequency domain by sample data, a frequency estimator is derived. Since sinusoidal signals are narrow-banded whereas white noise spreads equally in the whole spectrum, only narrow-band approximation around the actual tone is needed, and thus the influence of noise can be decreased significantly with high computational efficiency. Experimental results show that, without any iterations, the performance of the proposed estimator is close to the Cramer-Rao Bound (CRB), and has a lower SNR threshold compared with other existing estimators.

We theoretically study the performance limits of current-gain cutoff frequency, fT, for the HEMTs with InAs or In0.70Ga0.30As middle layers in the multi-quantum-well (MQW) channels by means of the quantum-corrected Monte Carlo (MC) method. We calculate the distribution of the delay time along the channel, τ(x), and define the effective gate length, Lg,eff, as the corresponding length to τ(x). By extrapolating Lg,eff to Lg = 0 nm, we estimate the lower limit of Lg,eff, Lg(0),eff. Then we estimate the performance limit of fT, fT(0), by extrapolating fT to Lg,eff(0). The estimated fT(0) are about 3.6 and 3.7 THz for the HEMTs with InAs middle layers of 5 and 8 nm in thickness, and about 3.0 THz for the HEMT with In0.70Ga0.30As middle layer of 8 nm in thickness, respectively. The higher fT(0) in the HEMTs with InAs middle layers are attributed to the increased average electron velocity, υd, in the channel. These results indicate the superior potential of the HEMTs using InAs in the channels. The HEMT with InAs middle layer of 8 nm in thickness shows the highest fT on condition of the same Lg because of its highest υd. However, the increased total channel thickness results in the longer Lg,eff(0), which leads to the restriction of fT(0). Therefore, in order to increase fT(0), it is essential to make Lg,eff short in addition to making υd high. Our results strongly encourage in making an effort to develop the HEMTs that operate in the terahertz region.

In order to evaluate the goodness of frequency hopping sequence design, the aperiodic Hamming correlation function is used as an important measure. In this letter, the aperiodic Hamming correlation lower bounds for frequency hopping sequences with low hit zone which have not yet been reported previously are established.

One-tap frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can significantly improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of single-carrier (SC) transmission in a frequency-selective fading channel. However, a big performance gap from the theoretical lower bound still exists due to the presence of residual inter-symbol interference (ISI) after MMSE-FDE. In this paper, we point out that the frequency-domain received SC signal can be expressed using the matrix representation similar to the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing and therefore, signal detection schemes developed for MIMO multiplexing, other than simple one-tap MMSE-FDE, can be applied to SC transmission. Then, for the reception of SC signals, we propose a new signal detection scheme, which combines FDE with MIMO signal detection, such as MMSE detection and Vertical-Bell Laboratories layered space-time architecture (V-BLAST) detection (we call this frequency-domain block signal detection). The achievable average BER performance using the proposed frequency-domain block signal detection is evaluated by computer simulation.

The proposed automated scoring system for English writing tests provides an assessment result including a score and diagnostic feedback to test-takers without human's efforts. The system analyzes an input sentence and detects errors related to spelling, syntax and content similarity. The scoring model has adopted one of the statistical approaches, a regression tree. A scoring model in general calculates a score based on the count and the types of automatically detected errors. Accordingly, a system with higher accuracy in detecting errors raises the accuracy in scoring a test. The accuracy of the system, however, cannot be fully guaranteed for several reasons, such as parsing failure, incompleteness of knowledge bases, and ambiguous nature of natural language. In this paper, we introduce an error-weighting technique, which is similar to term-weighting widely used in information retrieval. The error-weighting technique is applied to judge reliability of the errors detected by the system. The score calculated with the technique is proven to be more accurate than the score without it.

The paper presents a systematic study of in-situ passivated AlN/GaN Metal Insulator Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MISFETs) with submicron gates. DC, high frequency small signal, large signal and low frequency dispersion effects are reported. The DC characteristics are analyzed in conjunction with the power performance of the device at high frequencies. Studies of the low frequency characteristics are presented and the results are compared with those of AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs). Small signal measurements showed a current gain cutoff frequency and maximum oscillation frequency of 49.9 GHz and 102.3 GHz respectively. The overall characteristics of the device include a peak current density of 335 mA/mm, peak extrinsic transconductance of 130 mS/mm, a maximum output power density of 533 mW/mm with peak power added efficiency (P.A.E.) of 41.3% and linear gain of 17 dB. The maximum frequency dispersion of transconductance and output resistance of the fabricated MISFETs is 20% and 21% respectively.

This paper proposes a new multi-band received signal strength (MRSS) fingerprinting based indoor location system, which employs the frequency diversity on the conventional single-band received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting based indoor location system. In the proposed system, the impacts of frequency diversity on the enhancements of positioning accuracy are analyzed. Effectiveness of the proposed system is proved by experimental approach, which was conducted in non line-of-sight (NLOS) environment under the area of 103 m2 at Yagami Campus, Keio University. WLAN access points, which simultaneously transmit dual-band signal of 2.4 and 5.2 GHz, are utilized as transmitters. Likewise, a dual-band WLAN receiver is utilized as a receiver. Signal distances calculated by both Manhattan and Euclidean were classified by K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier to illustrate the performance of the proposed system. The results confirmed that Frequency diversity attributions of multi-band signal provide accuracy improvement over 50% of the conventional single-band.

A scheme that jointly estimates carrier frequency offset and channel is proposed for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system. In the proposed scheme, the carrier frequency offset (CFO) and the channel state information (CSI) are first estimated by an minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimator and an maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, respectively. By exchanging the estimation information between these two estimators, the final estimation of CFO and CSI is then obtained by an iterative method. In the iterative process, the effect of imperfect CSI is considered. It can improve the estimation precision for a shorter preamble and accelerate the iterative convergence rate. To reduce the complexity of the proposed scheme, a procedure is adopted to eliminate the inverse operation of covariance matrix that is recalculated at each iteration. In addition, a sufficient condition for the convergence of the proposed method is deduced. The numerical simulation results show that the BER performance of our scheme is better than that of joint MLE for a shorter preamble and is comparable to that of joint MLE for a longer preamble. Furthermore, the average iterative time of our method is reduced by half as compared to the MLE methods without considering the effect of imperfect CSI.

In this letter, a derivative constraint minimum output energy (MOE) receiver is proposed the offers enhanced robustness against carrier frequency offset (CFO). A theoretical analysis of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is presented to confirm its efficacy. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed receiver basically offers the same performance as an optimal receiver with no CFO present.

Error-propagation is an important issue and should be carefully coped with in the decision-feedback equalizers (DFE). Ignoring the impact of error-propagation often leads to impractical laboratory results. In this paper, we investigate two novel layered space-frequency equalizers (LSFE) for single-carrier multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the recently proposed frequency-domain equalizer with time domain noise-predictor (FDE-NP) is adopted at each stage of the LSFE. We first derive the partially-connected LSFE with noise predictor (PC-LSFE-NP) which has exactly the same mean square error (MSE) as the conventional LSFE under the assumption of perfect feedback. However, if error-propagation is considered, the proposed PC-LSFE-NP can achieve better performance than the conventional LSFE due to the more reliable feedback output by the decoders. To reduce the interference from the not yet detected layers in the feedback section, we then introduce the fully-connected LSFE with noise predictor (FC-LSFE-NP), in which all layers are implicitly equalized within each stage and their decisions fed back internally. The powerful feedback filter of FC-LSFE-NP brings significant performance superiority over the conventional LSFE and PC-LSFE-NP with either perfect or imperfect feedback. Moreover, we propose a simple soft-demapper for the equalizers to avoid information loss during decoding, and thus, further improve the performance. Finally, we compare the performance of (PC/FC)-LSFE-NP with the existing schemes by computer simulations.

The construction of EM absorber and frequency selective shielding has been investigated by using two dimensional metal fiber array (MFA) composites. The MFA composite shows a resonant type frequency dispersion in the complex relative permittivity spectra (εr = εr' - jεr") having a negative εr' region. The frequency characteristics of the conventional ferrite-rubber EM absorber can be improved by combining with the negative permittivity property of the MFA composite. A frequency selective shielding can be achieved by the evanescent EM wave propagation in the layered MFA composite structure.

The present paper focuses on the application of the base station cooperation (BSC) technique in fractional frequency reuse (FFR) networks. Fractional frequency reuse is considered to be a promising scheme for avoiding the inter-cell interference problem in OFDMA cellular systems, such as WiMAX, in which the edge mobile stations (MSs) of adjacent cells use different subchannels for separate transmission. However, the problem of FFR is that the cell edge spectral efficiency (SE) is much lower than that of the cell center. The BSC technique, in which adjacent BSs perform cooperative transmission for one cell edge MS with the same channel, may improve the cell edge SE. However, since more BSs transmit signals for one cell edge MS, the use of BSC can also increase the inter-cell interference, which might degrade the network performance. In this paper, with a focus on this tradeoff, we propose an adaptive BSC scheme in which BSC is only performed for the cell edge MSs that can achieve a significant capacity increase with only a slight increase in inter-cell interference. Moreover, a channel reallocation scheme is proposed in order to further improve the performance of the adaptive BSC scheme. The simulation results reveal that, compared to the conventional FFR scheme, the proposed schemes are effective for improving the performance of FFR networks.

A method to realize the fine frequency-tuning steps using tiny capacitors instead of Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitors is proposed for a digitally controlled oscillator (DCO). The tiny capacitors are realized by the coplanar transmission lines which are arranged unsymmetrical in a 6 metal layers (M6) foundry of 0.18 µm CMOS technology. These transmission line based capacitors are designed by using electro-magnetic field simulator, and co-designed by using SPICE simulator. Finally, these capacitors are employed to design 15 bit DCO and fabricated the proposed DCO in 0.18 µm CMOS technology, and tested. The measured phase noise of DCO was -118.3 dBc/Hz (@1 MHz offset frequency), and the oscillating frequency tuned from 4.86 GHz to 5.36 GHz in the minimum frequency-tuning step of 18 kHz.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals have high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and cause large nonlinear distortions in power amplifiers (PAs). Memory effects in PAs also become no longer ignorable for the wide bandwidth of OFDM signals. Digital baseband predistorter is a highly efficient technique to compensate the nonlinear distortions. But it usually has many parameters and takes long time to converge. This paper presents a novel predistorter design using a set of orthogonal polynomials to increase the convergence speed and the compensation quality. Because OFDM signals are approximately complex Gaussian distributed, the complex Hermite polynomials which have a closed-form expression can be used as a set of orthogonal polynomials for OFDM signals. A differential envelope model is adopted in the predistorter design to compensate nonlinear PAs with memory effects. This model is superior to other predistorter models in parameter number to calculate. We inspect the proposed predistorter performance by using an OFDM signal referred to the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard. Simulation results show that the proposed predistorter is efficient in compensating memory PAs. It is also demonstrated that the proposal acquires a faster convergence speed and a better compensation effect than conventional predistorters.