The measurement accuracy of frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) is usually determinant for emitters location system using rapidly moving receivers. The classic technique of expanding the integration time of the cross ambiguity function (CAF) to achieve better performance of FDOA is likely to incur a significant computational burden especially for wideband signals. In this paper, a nonconsecutive short-time CAF's methods is proposed with expansion of root mean square (RMS) integration time, instead of the integration time, and a factor of estimation precision improvement is given which is relative to the general consecutive method. Furthermore, by analyzing the characteristic of coherent CAF and the influence of FDOA rate, an upper bound of the precision improvement factor is derived. Simulation results are provided to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We propose a CMOS image sensor that realizes wide dynamic range imaging and nonlinear representation of I/O characteristics. The proposed image sensor controls the integration time for each pixel based on the brightness distribution of objects. The histogram at the end of the integration is estimated from the early intermediate photodiode values that are read out to an external circuit. Using the estimated histogram, the imaging parameters, which control the integration time pixel-by-pixel, are optimized in the external circuit. According to the imaging parameters, the intermediate photodiode value is compared with the threshold and reset to the starting value depending on the comparison result. These processes repeat several times. At the end of the integration, the photodiode value is reconstructed by using the imaging parameters. Then, wide dynamic range images with adapted I/O characteristics are obtained. We have fabricated a prototype with a size of 6464 pixels using a 0.35-µm 2-poly 4-metal CMOS process. In this paper, we explain the principle of the proposed sensor and discuss the system architecture and its operation. The experimental results obtained using the prototype are also presented, and we verify its effectiveness.

The frequency hopping (FH) based ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system divides its available frequency spectrum into several sub-bands, which leads to inherent disparities between carrier frequencies of each sub-band. Since the propagation loss is proportional to the square of the transmission frequency, the propagation loss on the sub-band having the highest carrier frequency is much larger than that on the sub-band having the lowest carrier frequency, resulting in disparities between received signal powers on each sub-band, which in turn leads to a bit error rate (BER) degradation in the FH UWB system. In this paper we propose an adaptive receiver for FH based UWB communications, where the integration time is adaptively adjusted relative to the hopping carrier frequency, which reduces the disparity between the received signal energies on each sub-band. Such compensation for lower received powers on sub-bands having higher carrier frequency leads to an improvement on the total average BER of the entire FH UWB communication system. We analyze the performance of the proposed reception scheme in Nakagami fading channels, and it is shown that the performance gain provided by the proposed receiver is more significant as the Nakagami fading index m increases (i.e., better channel conditions).