Signal processing using delta-sigma modulated bit streams is reviewed, along with related topics in stochastic computing (SC). The basic signal processing circuits, adders and multipliers, are covered. In particular, the possibility of preserving the noise-shaping properties inherent in delta-sigma modulation during these operations is discussed. Finally, the root mean square error for addition and multiplication is evaluated, and the performance improvement of signal processing in the delta-sigma domain compared with SC is verified.

This paper proposes an accurate and efficient method to calculate probability distributions of pulse-shaped complex signals. We show that the distribution over the in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) complex plane is obtained by a recursive probability mass function of the accumulator for a pulse-shaping filter. In contrast to existing analytical methods, the proposed method provides complex-plane distributions in addition to instantaneous power distributions. Since digital signal processing generally deals with complex amplitude rather than power, the complex-plane distributions are more useful when considering digital signal processing. In addition, our approach is free from the derivation of signal-dependent functions. This fact results in its easy application to arbitrary constellations and pulse-shaping filters like Monte Carlo simulations. Since the proposed method works without numerical integrals and calculations of transcendental functions, the accuracy degradation caused by floating-point arithmetic is inherently reduced. Even though our method is faster than Monte Carlo simulations, the obtained distributions are more accurate. These features of the proposed method realize a novel framework for evaluating the characteristics of pulse-shaped signals, leading to new modulation, predistortion and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction schemes.

To achieve the extreme high data rate and extreme coverage extension requirements of 6G wireless communication, new spectrum in sub-THz (100-300GHz) and non-terrestrial network (NTN) are two of the macro trends of 6G candidate technologies, respectively. However, non-linearity of power amplifiers (PA) is a critical challenge for both sub-THz and NTN. Therefore, high power efficiency (PE) or low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) waveform design becomes one of the most significant 6G research topics. Meanwhile, high spectral efficiency (SE) and low out-of-band emission (OOBE) are still important key performance indicators (KPIs) for 6G waveform design. Single-carrier waveform discrete Fourier transform spreading orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) has achieved many research interests due to its high PE, and it has been supported in 5G New Radio (NR) when uplink coverage is limited. So DFT-s-OFDM can be regarded as a candidate waveform for 6G. Many enhancement schemes based on DFT-s-OFDM have been proposed, including null cyclic prefix (NCP)/unique word (UW), frequency-domain spectral shaping (FDSS), and time-domain compression and expansion (TD-CE), etc. However, there is no unified framework to be compatible with all the enhancement schemes. This paper firstly provides a general description of the 6G candidate waveforms based on DFT-s-OFDM enhancement. Secondly, the more flexible TD-CE supporting methods for unified non-orthogonal waveform (uNOW) are proposed and discussed. Thirdly, a unified waveform framework based on DFT-s-OFDM structure is proposed. By designing the pre-processing and post-processing modules before and after DFT in the unified waveform framework, the three technical methods (NCP/UW, FDSS, and TD-CE) can be integrated to improve three KPIs of DFT-s-OFDM simultaneously with high flexibility. Then the implementation complexity of the 6G candidate waveforms are analyzed and compared. Performance of different DFT-s-OFDM enhancement schemes is investigated by link level simulation, which reveals that uNOW can achieve the best PAPR performance among all the 6G candidate waveforms. When considering PA back-off, uNOW can achieve 124% throughput gain compared to traditional DFT-s-OFDM.

We discuss the spectral efficiency of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals widely adopted in practical systems from a viewpoint of their power spectral density property. Since the conventional OFDM does not make use of pulse shaping filter, its out-of-band (OOB) spectrum may not be negligible especially when the number of subcarriers is small. Thus, in practice, windowing is applied to mitigate OOB emission by smoothing the transition of consecutive OFDM symbols, but its effectiveness has not been well investigated. Furthermore, OFDM signal suffers from nonlinear distortion associated with its high signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which also leads to OOB radiation. We examine how power amplifier nonlinearity affects the spectral efficiency based on the theoretical results developed in the literature.

The automation of the home through Internet of Things (IoT) devices presents security challenges for protecting the safety and privacy of its inhabitants. In spite of standard wireless communication security protocols, an attacker inside the wireless communication range of the smart home can extract identifier and statistical information, such as the MAC address and packet lengths, from the encrypted wireless traffic of IoT devices to make inferences about the private activities of the user. In this paper, to prevent this breach on privacy in the wireless LAN, we accomplish the following three items. First, we demonstrate that performing traffic shaping simultaneously on the upload and download node is necessary; second, we demonstrate that traffic shaping by random packet generation is impracticable due to the excessive bandwidth requirement; third, we propose traffic shaping by variable padding durations to reduce the bandwidth requirement for injecting dummy traffic during periods of user activity and inactivity to decrease the confidence of the local attacker from identifying genuine user activity traffic. From our performance evaluation, we decreased the data generated on several WiFi and ZigBee-enabled IoT devices by over 15% by our proposal of variable padding durations compared to the conventional method of fixed padding durations at low attacker confidence.

A feedforward (FF) network using ΔΣ modulators is investigated to implement a non-binary analog-to-digital (A/D) converter. Weighting coefficients in the network are determined to suppress the generation of quantization noise. A moving average is adopted to prevent the analog signal amplitude from increasing beyond the allowable input range of the modulators. The noise transfer function is derived and used to estimate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The FF network output is a non-uniformly distributed multi-level signal, which results in a better SNR than a uniformly distributed one. Also, the effect of the characteristic mismatch in analog components on the SNR is analyzed. Our behavioral simulations show that the SNR is improved by more than 30 dB, or equivalently a bit resolution of 5 bits, compared with a conventional first-order ΔΣ modulator.

This paper proposes an opamp-free solution to implement single-phase-clock controlled noise shaping in a SAR ADC. Unlike a conventional noise shaping SAR ADC, the proposal realizes noise shaping by charge redistribution, which is a passive technique. The passive implementation has high power efficiency. Meanwhile, since the proposal maintains the basic architecture and operation method of a traditional SAR ADC, it retains all the advantages of a SAR ADC. Furthermore, noise shaping helps to improve the performance of SAR ADC and relaxes its non-ideal effects. Designed in a 65-nm CMOS technology, the prototype realizes 58-dB SNDR based on an 8-bit C-DAC at 50-MS/s sampling frequency. It consumes 120.7-µW power from a 0.8-V supply and achieves a FoM of 14.8-fJ per conversion step.

This paper analyzes three passive noise shaping techniques in a SAR ADC. These passive noise shaping techniques can realize 1st and 2nd order noise shaping. These proposed opamp-less noise shaping techniques are realized by charge-redistribution. This means that the proposals maintain the basic architecture and operation principle of a charge-redistribution SAR ADC. Since the proposed techniques work in a passive mode, the proposals have high power efficiency. Meanwhile, the proposed noise shaping SAR ADCs are robust to feature size scaling and power supply reduction. Flicker noise is not introduced into the ADC by passive noise shaping techniques. Therefore, no additional calibration techniques for flicker noise are required. The noise shaping effects of the 1st and 2nd order noise shaping are verified by behavioral simulation results. The relationship between resolution improvement and oversampling rate is also explored in this paper.

An artificial transmission line with variable capacitors as its shunt elements, also known as a nonlinear transmission line, can be used to generate pulsed waveforms with short durations. In this work, the variable capacitors are implemented using ferroelectric materials. Analysis and experimental results of such a ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line are presented. The differential equation that describes the nonlinear transmission line is derived and solved. The analytical expression for the solitary waves propagating along the line is found. An artificial transmission line is fabricated using thin-film barium--strontium--titanate capacitors and commercially available chip inductors. The fabrication process of the ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line is described. On-wafer characterization of the line is performed. Measurement results show that, with proper dc bias and substantial input power, a sinusoidal input waveform turns into a bell-shaped pulse train at the output, demonstrating the pulse-shaping capability of the ferroelectric-based artificial transmission line.

Conventional CPM signals employ information sequence with time-unlimited phase shaping pulse (PSP) to achieve power and bandwidth efficient transmission. On the contrary, information sequence using time-limited PSP was believed to produce power-wasting data-independent discrete spectral lines in CPM spectra, and was suggested to be avoided. In this paper, we revisit this problem and adopt the time-limited PSP to replace the one with time-unlimited, it turns out to have an alternative solution to the CPM scheme. We first modify the spectral computing formula for the CPM with time-limited PSP (or CPM-TL) from conventional CPM formula and show that the discrete spectral lines appeared in the power density spectrum of CPM-TL signals can be diminished or become negligible by appropriately choosing PSP. We also show that this class of CPM can use any real number modulation index (h) and the resultant trellis structure of CPM guarantees the maximum constraint length allowed by the number of states in the MLSD receiver. Finally, the energy-bandwidth performance of CPM using time-limited PSP is investigated and compared with conventional CPM with time-unlimited PSP. From numerical results we show that, under the same number of states in the MLSD receiver and bandwidth occupancy, this subclass of CPM could outperform the conventional CPM up to 6dB coding gain, for h<1, in many cases.

This paper describes algorithms for generating low intermodulation-distortion (IMD) two-tone sinewaves, for such as communication application ADC testing, using an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) or a multi-bit ΣΔ DAC inside an SoC. The nonlinearity of the DAC generates distortion components, and we propose here eight methods to precompensate for the IMD using DSP algorithms and produce low-IMD two-tone signals. Theoretical analysis, simulation, and experimental results all demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper presents a fully differential third-order (2-1) switched-current (SI) cascaded delta-sigma modulator (DSM), with an analog error cancellation logic circuit, and a digital decimation filter that is fabricated using 0.18-µm CMOS technology. The 2-1 architecture with only the quantizer input being fed into the second stage is introduced not only to reduce the circuit complexity, but also to be implemented easily using the switched-current approach. Measurements reveal that the dominant error is the quantization error of the second one-bit quantizer (e2). This error can be eliminated using an analog error cancellation logic circuit. In the proposed differential sample-and-hold circuit, low input impedance is presented with feedback and width-length adjustment in SI feedback memory cell (FMC); and that a coupled differential replicate (CDR) common-mode feedforward circuit (CMFF) is used to compensate the error of the current mirror. Also, measurements indicate that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), dynamic range (DR), effective number of bits (ENOB), power consumption and chip size are 67.3 dB, 69 dB, 10.9 bits, 12.3 mW, and 0.200.21 mm2, respectively, with a bandwidth of 40 kHz, a sampling rate of 10.24 MHz, an OSR of 128 and a supply voltage of 1.8 V.

This paper presents a second-order ΔΣ analog-to-digital converter (ADC) operating in a time domain. In the proposed ADC architecture, a voltage-controlled delay unit (VCDU) converts an input analog voltage to a delay time. Then, the clocks outputs from a gated ring oscillator (GRO) are counted during the delay time. No switched capacitor or opamp is used. Therefore, the proposed ADC can be implemented in a small area and with low power. For that reason, it has process scalability: it can keep pace with Moore's law. A time error is propagated to the second GRO by a multi-stage noise-shaping (MASH) topology, which provides second-order noise-shaping. In a standard 40-nm CMOS process, a SNDR of 45 dB is achievable at input bandwidth of 16 kHz and a sampling rate of 8 MHz, where the power is 408.5 µW. Its area is 608 µm2.

One key requirement for achieving network virtualization is resource isolation among slices (virtual networks), that is, to avoid interferences between slices of resources. This paper proposes two methods, per-slice shaping and per-link policing for network-resource isolation (NRI) in terms of bandwidth and delay. These methods use traffic shaping and traffic policing, which are widely-used traffic control methods for guaranteeing QoS. Per-slice shaping utilizes weighted fair queuing (WFQ) usually applied to a fine-grained flow such as a flow from a specific server application to a user. Since the WFQ for fine-grained flows requires many queues, it may not scale to a large number of slices with a large number of virtual nodes. Considering that the purpose of NRI is not thoroughly guaranteeing QoS but avoiding interferences between slices, we believe per-slice (not per virtual link) shaping satisfies our objective. In contrast, per-link policing uses traffic policing per virtual link. It requires less resource and achieves less-strict but more-scalable isolation between hundreds of slices (500 to 700 slices in estimation). Our results show that both methods perform NRI well but the performance of the former is better in terms of delay. Accordingly, per-slice shaping (with/without policing) is effective for delay-sensitive services while per-link policing may be sufficiently used for the other types of services.

To improve simulation precision, the signal model of navigation satellite signal simulators is illustrated, and the generation mechanism and evaluation criteria of an important error source-phase jitter in baseband signal generation, are studied subsequently. An improved baseband signal generator based on dual-ROM look-up table structure is designed with the application of a newly-established concept-virtual sampling rate. Pre-storage of typical baseband signal data and sampling rate conversion adaptive to Doppler frequency shifts are adopted to achieve the high-precision simulation of baseband signals. Performance analysis of the proposed baseband signal generator demonstrates that it can successfully suppress phase jitter and has better spectral performance, generating high-precision baseband signals, which paves the way to improving the overall precision of navigation satellite signal simulators.

A method to construct bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative demapping and decoding (BICM-ID) is developed that approaches the Shannon limit very closely at high spectrum efficiency, where amplitude-phase shift keying (APSK) constellations are designed and chosen. For 1/2-rate 64APSK, the Es/N0 threshold derived through extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts is less than 0.55 dB away from the Shannon limit of the continuous-input additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, and exceeds the theoretical limit constrained by standard 64QAM-input.

We obtained flat optical frequency combs by using the FM laser operation of a fiber ring laser and external intensity modulation. Extremely wide FM spectra can be easily obtained by the moderate internal phase modulation of an FM laser. We used an external intensity modulator to extract a linearly chirped part from the FM light in order to obtain flat spectra. In our experiments, we obtained a flat optical frequency comb with a spectral bandwidth of about 0.5 THz and a power deviation of less than 1.5 dB.

A major drawback with linear precoding in a downlink multi-user MIMO system is the increase in the transmit power when a channel is correlated. On the other hand, nonlinear trellis precoding in downlink multi-user MIMO systems is capable of minimizing the transmit power by adding a shaping sequence to the original transmit sequence. However, conventional trellis precoding cannot be directly applied to existing bit-interleaved coded MIMO-OFDM systems since the trellis precoding and error correcting codes should be designed separately. In this paper, we proposed to embed trellis precoding into the error correcting codes that are used in the original multi-user MIMO-OFDM system employing linear precoding. Major advantage of this approach is that the receiving procedure at user terminals designed for the original system need not be changed up to the error correcting decoder to support our trellis precoding. Computer simulations show that the proposed trellis precoding provides improvements of 2 dB and 2.5 dB in 22 and 33 MIMO configurations, respectively.

A K-exponential filter is derived and utilized for pulse shaping to reduce peak to average power ratio (PAPR) without intersymbol interference (ISI). While keeping the same bandwidth, the frequency responses of the filters vary with different values of the parameter k. The minimum PAPR is associated with a value of the parameter k when the roll-off factor α is specified. Simulations show that the PAPR can be reduced compared with the raised cosine (RC) filter in various systems. The derived pulse shaping filters also provide better performance in PAPR reduction compared with the existing filters.

With the process scaling, the leakage current reduction has been the primary design concerns in a nanometer-era VLSI circuit. In this paper, we propose a new lithography process-aware edge effects correction method to reduce the leakage current in the shallow trench isolation (STI). We construct the various test structures to model Ileakage and Ileakage_fringe which represent the leakage currents at the center and edge of the transistor, respectively. The layout near the active edge is modified using the look-up table generated by the calibrated analytic model. On average, the proposed edge effects correction method reduces the leakage current by 18% with the negligible decrease of the drive current at sub-40nm DRAM device.