In this letter we propose an adaptive beamforming algorithm that efficiently suppresses interferences using a structured interference covariance matrix. The proposed algorithm provides high performance by exploiting angle diversity, especially in cellular mobile environments where the angular spread of a received signal is relatively small. We verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm to the well known linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) and reference signal-based algorithms.

Image quality assessment method is a methodology that measures the difference of quality between the reference image and its distorted one. In this paper, we propose a novel reduced-reference (RR) quality assessment method for JPEG-2000 compressed images, which exploits the statistical characteristics of context information extracted through partial entropy decoding or decoding. These statistical features obtained in the process of JPEG-2000 encoding are transmitted to the receiver as side information and used to estimate the quality of images transmitted over various noisy channels at the decompression side. In the framework of JPEG-2000, the context of a current coefficient is determined depending on the pattern of the significance and/or the sign of its neighbors in three bit-plane coding passes and four coding modes. As the context information represents the local property of images, it can efficiently describe textured pattern and edge orientation. The quality of transmitted images is measured by the difference of entropy of context information between received and original images. Moreover, the proposed quality assessment method can directly process the images in the JPEG-2000 compressed domain without full decompression. Therefore, our proposed can accelerate the work of assessing image quality. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our method achieves fairly good performance in terms of the quality measurement accuracy as well as the computational complexity.

We present a method to identify stakeholders and their preferences about non-functional requirements (NFR) by using use case diagrams of existing systems. We focus on the changes about NFR because such changes help stakeholders to identify their preferences. Comparing different use case diagrams of the same domain helps us to find changes to be occurred. We utilize Goal-Question-Metrics (GQM) method for identifying variables that characterize NFR, and we can systematically represent changes about NFR using the variables. Use cases that represent system interactions help us to bridge the gap between goals and metrics (variables), and we can easily construct measurable NFR. For validating and evaluating our method, we applied our method to an application domain of Mail User Agent (MUA) system.

This paper describes a CMOS voltage reference that makes use of weak inversion CMOS transistors and linear resistors, without the need for bipolar transistors. Its operation is analogous to the bandgap reference voltage, but the reference voltage is based on the threshold voltage of an nMOS transistor. The circuit implemented using 0.35 µm n-well CMOS TSMC process generates a reference of 741 mV under just 390 nW for a power supply of only 950 mV. The circuit presented a variation of 39 ppm/ for the -20 to +80 temperature range, and produced a line regulation of 25 mV/V for a power supply of up to 3 V.

A robust 1T1C FeRAM sensing technique is demonstrated that employs both word base access and reference level generation architecture to track the thermal history of the cells by utilizing a Feedback inverter Input Push-down (FIP) method for a Bit line Ground Sensing (BGS) pre-amplifier and a self-timing latch Sense Amplifier (SA) which is immune to increasing non-switching charges due to thermal depolarization or imprint of ferroelectric capacitor. The word base access unit consists of one 2T2C cell that stores 0/1 data and also generates '0' and '1' reference levels by which other 1T1C signals are compared. A 0.18-µm CMOS 3-V 1-Mbit device was qualified by a 250 bake for a short time retention and 150 1000-hour bake which is an accelerated equivalent to 10-years retention. It endured 1012 fatigue cycles with an access time of 81 ns, 3.0 V VDD at 85. Also a Smart Card application chip which is embedded with the 1-Mbit FeRAM macro showed 30% faster download time than one with EEPROM.

A low-power sub-1-V self-biased low-voltage reference is proposed for micropower electronic applications based on body effect. The proposed reference has a very low temperature dependence by using a MOSFET with body effect compared with other reported low-power references. An HSPICE simulation shows that the reference voltage and the total power dissipation are 181 mV and 1.1 µW, respectively. The temperature coefficient of the reference voltage is 33 ppm/ at temperatures from -40 to 100. The supply voltage can be as low as 0.95 V in a standard CMOS 0.35 µm technology with threshold voltages of about 0.5 V and -0.65 V for n-channel and p-channel MOSFETs, respectively. Furthermore, the supply voltage dependence is -0.36 mV/V (Vdd=0.95-3.3 V).

This paper describes a CMOS voltage reference circuit which occupies small die area and has less than 1.25 V of output voltage. The reference voltage is determined by a resistor ratio, and it is possible to set the reference voltage from zero to near the supply voltage with the same temperature independence as those of Widlar's and Brokaw's bandgap voltage references. The temperature-independent reference voltage is formed by adding two voltages: the amplified fractional VBE (base-to-emitter voltage) of a bipolar transistor with a negative TC (temperature coefficient) and the amplified VT (thermal voltage) with a positive TC. When a reference voltage smaller than 1.25 V is required, the voltage gain of the amplifier for VBE becomes less than one, and the voltage gain of the amplifier for VT becomes small. This enables the size of bipolar transistors for VT generation to be small. The proposed voltage reference circuit was implemented in a standard 0.35-µm CMOS technology. A temperature-independent current source was also obtained from the same circuit. The results were a TC (temperature coefficient) of 46 ppm/ over 130 change, a line regulation of 2.2 mV/V for the 0.5 V reference voltage with 8.7 µA of current consumption in the voltage reference part, and a 6% change over 130 change for the 13 µA current source.

A lexicon is an important linguistic resource needed for both shallow and deep language processing. Currently, there are few machine-readable Thai dictionaries available, and most of them do not satisfy the computational requirements. This paper presents the design of a Thai lexicon named the TCL's Computational Lexicon (TCLLEX) and proposes a method to construct a large-scale Thai lexicon by re-using two existing dictionaries and a large number of texts on the Internet. In addition to morphological, syntactic, semantic case role and logical information in the existing dictionaries, a sort of semantic constraint called selectional preference is automatically acquired by analyzing Thai texts on the web and then added into the lexicon. In the acquisition process of the selectional preferences, the so-called Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) is applied as the measure in a tree cut model. The experiments are done to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of obtained selection preferences.

The most of conventional information services are based on the implicit premise that the users has already defined their desired information. This study proposes a mobile information service that allows the users who have not yet defined their desired information or whose desired information varies according to the situation to get appropriate information. When the user can specify their desired information to the system explicitly, the authors develop a "Pull" service. Conversely, when the user cannot verbally specify their desired information to the system, this study provides "Push" service and "Don't disturb" option for the user who does not welcome this service. This study considers the characteristics of the environment of mobile terminal to focus on "Time", "Place" and user's "Preference": long term and short term preference. This study also creates rules, algorithms and filtering to the service. Furthermore, the results of experiments have been discussed to verify the idea that different of user desired requires different information services.

This work describes an 8b 240 MS/s CMOS ADC as one of embedded core circuits for high-performance displays based on low-noise on-chip references and dual-mode inputs with the requirements of limited pins, low power, and small size at high speed. The proposed ADC uses externally connected pins only for analog inputs, digital outputs, and supplies. The ADC employs (1) a two-step pipeline architecture to optimize power and chip size at the target sampling frequency of 240 MHz, (2) advanced bootstrapping techniques to achieve high signal bandwidth in the input SHA, and (3) RC filter-based on-chip current and voltage references to improve noise performance with a power-off function for portable applications. The prototype ADC is implemented in a 0.18 µm CMOS and simultaneously integrated in a DVD system with dual-mode inputs. The prototype ADC shows the measured DNL and INL within 0.49LSB and 0.69LSB, and the SNDR and SFDR exceeding 38 dB and 50 dB for inputs up to the Nyquist frequency at 240 MS/s. The ADC consumes 104 mW at 240 MS/s and an active die area is 1.36 mm2 .

This work proposes a 10b 100 MS/s 1.4 mm2 CMOS ADC for low-power multimedia applications. The proposed two-step pipeline ADC minimizes chip area and power dissipation at the target resolution and sampling rate. The wide-band SHA employs a gate-bootstrapping circuit to handle both single-ended and differential inputs of 1.2 Vp-p at 10b accuracy while the second-stage flash ADC employs open-loop offset sampling techniques to achieve 6b resolution. A 3-D fully symmetrical layout reduces the capacitor and device mismatch of the first-stage MDAC. The low-noise references are integrated on chip with optional off-chip voltage references. The prototype 10b ADC implemented in a 0.18 µm CMOS shows the maximum measured DNL and INL of 0.59LSB and 0.77LSB, respectively. The ADC demonstrates an SNDR of 53.7 dB, an SFDR of 61.5 dB, and the power dissipation of 56 mW at 100 MS/s.

In this paper, two new modulation schemes, Multi-Pulse Modulation (MPM) and Differential Multi-Pulse Modulation (DMPM) have been proposed in order to increase the total data rate and improve the error performance. By these schemes, the modulated pulse that had been used for transmitting only one data bit in each pulse-pair in conventional TR-UWB system, can be used for transmitting more than one bit data depending on the level of modulation. Moreover, the error performance has been improved by these new modulation schemes because for the same Eb/N0, the energy per pulse has increased. In addition, these new modulation schemes are applied to a multiple access system. The simulation results show that the total throughput performance of the proposed system has been improved, nearly 2-4 times when compared to the conventional TR-UWB communication system.

H.264 video coding standard has a significant performance better than the other standards are the adoption of variable block sizes, multiple reference frames, and the consideration of rate distortion optimization within the codec. However, these features incur a considerable complexity in the encoder for motion estimation. As for the multiple reference frames motion estimation, the increased computation is in proportion to the number of searched reference frames. In this paper, a fast multiple frame reference frames selection method is proposed for H.264 video coding. The proposed algorithm can efficiently determine the best reference frame from the allowed five reference frames. As determine the number of reference frames to search the motion using the correlation of the different block between the block of current frame and that of previous frame, this scheme can efficiently reduce the computational cost while keeping the similar quality and bit-rate. Simulation results show that the speed of the proposed method is faster than that of the original scheme adapted in JVT reference software JM95 while keeping the similar video quality and bit-rate.

We address issues for improving hands-free speech enhancement and speech recognition performance in different car environments using a single distant microphone. This paper describes a new single-channel in-car speech enhancement method that estimates the log spectra of speech at a close-talking microphone based on the nonlinear regression of the log spectra of noisy signal captured by a distant microphone and the estimated noise. The proposed method provides significant overall quality improvements in our subjective evaluation on the regression-enhanced speech, and performed best in most objective measures. Based on our isolated word recognition experiments conducted under 15 real car environments, the proposed adaptive nonlinear regression approach shows an advantage in average relative word error rate (WER) reductions of 50.8% and 13.1%, respectively, compared to original noisy speech and ETSI advanced front-end (ETSI ES 202 050).

Cross-document personal name resolution is the process of identifying whether or not a common personal name mentioned in different documents refers to the same individual. Most previous approaches usually rely on lexical matching such as the occurrence of common words surrounding the entity name to measure the similarity between documents, and then clusters the documents according to their referents. In spite of certain successes, measuring similarity based on lexical comparison sometimes ignores important linguistic phenomena at the semantic level such as synonym or paraphrase. This paper presents a semantics-based approach to the resolution of personal name crossover documents that can make the most of both lexical evidences and semantic clues. In our method, the similarity values between documents are determined by estimating the semantic relatedness between words. Further, the semantic labels attached to sentences allow us to highlight the common personal facts that are potentially available among documents. An evaluation on three web datasets demonstrates that our method achieves the better performance than the previous work.

A new sub-1-V CMOS bandgap voltage reference without using low-threshold-voltage device is presented in this paper. The new proposed sub-1-V bandgap reference with startup circuit has been successfully verified in a standard 0.25-µm CMOS process, where the occupied silicon area is only 177 µm106 µm. The experimental results have shown that, with the minimum supply voltage of 0.85 V, the output reference voltage is 238.2 mV at room temperature, and the temperature coefficient is 58.1 ppm/ from -10 to 120 without laser trimming. Under the supply voltage of 0.85 V, the average power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) is -33.2 dB at 10 kHz.

Access selection in future multiple radio access environments is considered in this paper from a new perspective, that of the consumer. A model is proposed for the automatic acquisition of user preferences to assist in access selection decision making. The proposed approach uses a two-level Bayesian C-Metanetwork that models individual user preferences in terms of affordable cost, acceptable level of quality of service and reputation of the access networks. User preferences under different contexts, such as leisure and business, are also considered. The model also adapts to the change of user preferences over time. A simulator has been developed to evaluate the proposed model and the simulation results are promising in terms of the proportion of correct preference predictions after a small number of training samples.

An ultralow power constant reference current circuit with low temperature dependence for micropower electronic applications is proposed in this paper. This circuit consists of a constant-current subcircuit and a bias-voltage subcircuits, and it compensates for the temperature characteristics of mobility µ, thermal voltage VT, and threshold voltage VTH in such a way that the reference current has small temperature dependence. A SPICE simulation demonstrated that reference current and total power dissipation is 97.7 nA, 1.1 µW, respectively, and the variation in the reference current can be kept very small within 4% in a temperature range from -20 to 100.

A pure CMOS threshold-voltage reference (VTR) circuit achieves temperature (T) coefficient of 5 µV/(T = -60+100) and supply voltage (VDD) sensitivity of 0.1 mV/V (VDD = 35 V). A combination of subthreshold current, linear current and saturation current in n-MOSFETs provides a small voltage and temperature dependence. Three different regions in I-V characteristics of MOSFETs generate a constant VTR based on threshold voltage at 0 K. A feedback scheme from the reference output to gates of n-MOSFETs extremely stabilizes the output. The circuit consists of only 17 MOSFETs and its simple scheme saves the die area, which is 0.18 mm2 in the TEG (Test Element Group) chip fabricated by 1.2 µm n-well CMOS process.

This work proposes an 8b 220 MS/s 230 mW 3-stage pipeline CMOS ADC with on-chip filters for temperature- and power supply- insensitive voltage references. The proposed RC low-pass filters reduce reference settling time at heavy R&C loads and improve switching noise performance without conventional off-chip bypass capacitors. The prototype ADC fabricated in a 0.25 µm CMOS occupies the active die area of 2.25 mm2 and shows the measured DNL and INL of maximum 0.43 LSB and 0.82 LSB, respectively. The ADC maintains the SNDR of 43 dB and 41 dB up to the 110 MHz input at 200 MS/s and 220 MS/s, respectively, while the SNDR at the 500 MHz input is degraded as much as only 3 dB than the SNDR at the 110 MHz input.