Reducing power consumption is a crucial factor making industrial designs, such as mobile SoCs, competitive. Voltage scaling (VS) is the classical yet most effective technique that contributes to quadratic power reduction. A recent design technique called activation-aware slack assignment (ASA) enhances the voltage-scaling by allocating the timing margin of critical paths with a stochastic mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) analysis. Meanwhile, such stochastic treatment of timing errors is accepted in limited application domains, such as image processing. This paper proposes a design optimization methodology that achieves a mode-wise voltage-scalable (MWVS) design guaranteeing no timing errors in each mode operation. This work formulates the MWVS design as an optimization problem that minimizes the overall power consumption considering each mode duration, achievable voltage lowering and accompanied circuit overhead explicitly, and explores the solution space with the downhill simplex algorithm that does not require numerical derivation and frequent objective function evaluations. For obtaining a solution, i.e., a design, in the optimization process, we exploit the multi-corner multi-mode design flow in a commercial tool for performing mode-wise ASA with sets of false paths dedicated to individual modes. We applied the proposed design methodology to RISC-V design. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology saves 13% to 20% more power compared to the conventional VS approach and attains 8% to 15% gain from the conventional single-mode ASA. We also found that cycle-by-cycle fine-grained false path identification reduced leakage power by 31% to 42%.

In this paper, we investigate how to obtain binary locally repairable codes (LRCs) with good locality and availability from binary Simplex codes. We first propose a Combination code having the generator matrix with all the columns of positive weights less than or equal to a given value. Such a code can be also obtained by puncturing all the columns of weights larger than a given value from a binary Simplex Code. We call by block-puncturing such puncturing method. Furthermore, we suggest a heuristic puncturing method, called subblock-puncturing, that punctures a few more columns of the largest weight from the Combination code. We determine the minimum distance, locality, availability, joint information locality, joint information availability of Combination codes in closed-form. We also demonstrate the optimality of the proposed codes with certain choices of parameters in terms of some well-known bounds.

Multiple notch filters are used to suppress narrow-band or sinusoidal interferences in digital signals. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization design technique of an infinite impulse response (IIR) multiple notch filter. It is based on the Nelder-Mead simplex method. Firstly, the system function of the desired notch filter is constructed to form the objective function of the optimization technique. Secondly, the design parameters of the desired notch filter are optimized by Nelder-Mead simplex method. A weight function is also introduced to improve amplitude response of the notch filter. Thirdly, the convergence and amplitude response of the proposed technique are compared with other Nelder-Mead based design methods and the cascade-based design method. Finally, the practicability of the proposed notch filter design technique is demonstrated by some practical applications.

This paper describes how to design matching structures to improve the frequency characteristics of one-dimensional finite periodic structures. In particular, it deals with one-dimensional finite superlattices. A downhill simplex method is used to determine some of the structural parameters of the matching structure. Numerical examples show that this method is effective in improving the frequency characteristics of finite superlattices.

A statistical model based on a partitioned Markov-chains model has previously been developed to represent time domain behavior of the asynchronous impulsive noise over a broadband power line communication (PLC) network. However, the estimation of its model parameters using the Simplex method can easily trap the final solution at a local optimum. This study proposes an estimation scheme based on the genetic algorithm (GA) to overcome this difficulty. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme yields estimates that more closely match the experimental data statistics.

This paper presents a motion-based boundary tracking method for a moving deformable object in an image sequence using a parametric active contour model. Deciding the local converging directions of the contour points is essential for correctly extracting the boundary of a moving deformable object. Thus, a new energy function for a parametric active contour model is proposed based on the addition of a directional energy term using a frame difference map to the greedy snake. The frame difference map is used to obtain motion information on an object with fast and non-rigid motion. Plus, updating rules for the frame difference map are also developed to encourage the stable convergence of the contour points. Experiments on a set of synthetic and real image sequences show that the proposed method could fully track a speedy deformable object while exactly extracting the boundary of the object in every frame.

In this paper, a multiple-pulse signaling format for M-ary equicorrelated modulation (ECM) is proposed to enable the noncoherent detection on a multiple-symbol basis. Several time-limited and band-limited basis waveform sets are designed to embody the multiple-pulse ECM signals and explored to determine the spectral performance characteristics. Based on the maximum-likelihood decision principle, a block receiver is developed for noncoherently demodulating multiple-pulse ECM signals on additive white Gaussian noise channels. Tight upper and approximate bounds are derived and verified by simulation to evaluate the bit and symbol error probability characteristics of the developed ECM block receiver. It is analytically shown that the noncoherent M-ary ECM block receiver with a small-sized blocklength offers comparable performance to the ideal coherent M-ary simplex receiver when the pairwise signal correlation is appropriately chosen. In particular, the proposed noncoherent nonbinary simplex modulation is found to strongly outperform the conventional noncoherent nonbinary orthogonal modulation in terms of both power and spectral efficiencies.

A new beamforming method based on simplex downhill optimaization process has been presented for the reverse link CDMA systems. The proposed system performs code-filtering at each antenna for each user. The new beamforming method gives lower computations and faster convergence properties than existing algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has a better BER performance in the case of the time-varing channel.

To an extremely difficult problem of finding the maximum likelihood estimates in a specific mixture regression model, a combination of several optimization techniques is found to be useful. These algorithms are the continuation method, Newton-Raphson method, and simplex method. The simplex method searches for an approximate solution in a wider range of the parameter space, then a combination of the continuation method and the Newton-Raphson method finds a more accurate solution. In this paper, this combination method is applied to find the maximum likelihood estimates in a Weibull-power-law type regression model.

In this study, a hybrid genetic algorithm/neural network with fuzzy logic controller (NN-flcGA) is proposed to find the global optimum of reliability assignment/redundant allocation problems which should be simultaneously determined two different types of decision variables. Several researchers have obtained acceptable and satisfactory results using genetic algorithms for optimal reliability assignment/redundant allocation problems during the past decade. For large-size problems, however, genetic algorithms have to enumerate numerous feasible solutions due to the broad continuous search space. Recently, a hybridized GA combined with a neural network technique (NN-hGA) has been proposed to overcome this kind of difficulty. Unfortunately, it requires a high computational cost though NN-hGA leads to a robuster and steadier global optimum irrespective of the various initial conditions of the problems. The efficacy and efficiency of the NN-flcGA is demonstrated by comparing its results with those of other traditional methods in numerical experiments. The essential features of NN-flcGA namely, 1) its combination with a neural network (NN) technique to devise initial values for the GA, 2) its application of the concept of a fuzzy logic controller when tuning strategy GA parameters dynamically, and 3) its incorporation of the revised simplex search method, make it possible not only to improve the quality of solutions but also to reduce computational cost.

In a recent paper, Yang proposes an integer labeling algorithm for determining whether an arbitrary simplex P in Rn contains an integer point or not. The problem under consideration is a very difficult one in the sense that it is NP-complete. The algorithm is based on a specific integer labeling rule and a specific triangulation of Rn. In this paper we discuss a practical implementation of the algorithm and present a computer program (ILIN) for solving integer programming using integer labeling algorithm. We also report on the solution of a number of tested examples with up to 500 integer variables. Numerical results indicate that the algorithm is computationally simple, flexible, efficient and stable.

Linear programming techniques are useful in many diverse applications such as: production planning, energy distribution etc. To find an optimal solution of the linear programming problem, we have to repeat computations and it takes a lot of processing time. For high speed computation of linear programming, special purpose hardware has been sought. This paper proposes a systolic array for solving linear programming problems using the revised simplex method which is a typical algorithm of linear programming. This paper also proposes a modified systolic array that can solve linear programming problems whose sizes are very large.