This letter presents performance analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region for matched filter (MF) precoding in single cell Massive MIMO systems. The outage probability function is derived in closed form, and the data rate of each user is also given. We have also presented asymptotic analysis in terms of data rate for MF when the number of users and the number of antennas grow without bounds. The expressions of these analytical results are rather simple and are thus convenient for overall performance evaluation. The simulation results show that the analysis are very accurate.

The present study proposes a method for estimation of subjective image quality, for combinations of display physical factors, based on the Mahalanobis-Taguchi system in the field of quality engineering. The proposed method estimates subjective image quality by the estimated equation based on the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System and subjective evaluation experiments using the method of successive categories for images of which parameters are combinations of gamma, maximum luminance and minimum luminance. The estimated image quality is in good agreement with the experimental subjective image quality.

This paper presents a cell-based all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) with hierarchical gated digitally controlled oscillator (G-DCO) for low voltage operation, wide frequency range as well as low-power consumption. In addition, a new time-domain hierarchical frequency estimation algorithm (HFEA) for frequency acquisition is proposed to estimate the output frequency in 1.5MF (MF = 3 in this paper) cycles and this fast lock-in time is suitable to the dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) systems. A hierarchical G-DCO is proposed to work at low supply voltage to reduce the power consumption and at the same time to achieve wide frequency range and precise frequency resolution. The core area of the proposed ADPLL is 0.02635 mm2. In near-threshold region (VDD = 0.36 V), the proposed ADPLL only dissipates 68.2 µW and has a rms period jitter of 1.25% UI at 60 MHz output clock frequency. Under 0.5 V VDD operation, the proposed ADPLL dissipates 404.2 µW at 400 MHz. The fast lock-in time of 4.489 µs and the low jitter performance below 0.5% UI at 400 MHz output clock frequency in the proposed ADPLL are suitable in event-driven or DVFS applications.

A forward/reverse body bias generator (BBG) which operates under wide supply-range is proposed. Fine-grained body biasing (FGBB) is effective to reduce variability and increase energy efficiency on digital LSIs. Since FGBB requires a number of BBGs to be implemented, simple design is preferred. We propose a BBG with charge pumps for reverse body bias and the BBG operates under wide supply-range from 0.5,V to 1.2,V. Layout of the BBG was designed in a cell-based flow with an AES core and fabricated in a 65~nm CMOS process. Area of the AES core is 0.22 mm$^2$ and area overhead of the BBG is 2.3%. Demonstration of the AES core shows a successful operation with the supply voltage from 0.5,V to 1.2,V which enables the reduction of power dissipation, for example, of 17% at 400,MHz operation.

Multi-hop cooperative communication has been investigated in order to overcome disadvantages such as fading, obstruction and low power. In addition, with the goal of increasing access capacity, the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is being advanced as a solution. In this paper, we propose the approach of relay ordering in a Decode-and-Forward OFDM scheme. Combining techniques such as maximal ratio combining and selection combining are employed at receivers and approximate outage capacity probabilities are derived for evaluating system performance over frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels. Final, the expressions are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations, and are used to compare with the same scheme based relay selection.

This work investigates the physical layer security for three cooperative automatic-repeat-request (CARQ) protocols, including the decode-and-forward (DF) CARQ, opportunistic DF (ODF) CARQ, and the distributed space-time code (DSTC) CARQ. Assuming that there is no instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of legitimate users' channel and eavesdropper's channel at the transmitter, the connection outage performance and secrecy outage performance are derived to evaluate the reliability and security of each CARQ protocol. Then, we redefine the concept of the secrecy throughput to evaluate the overall efficiency of the system in terms of maintaining both reliable and secure transmission. Furthermore, through an asymptotic analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the direct relationship between reliability and security is established via the reliability-security tradeoff (RST). Numerical results verify the analysis and show the efficiency of the CARQ protocols in terms of the improvement on the secrecy throughput. More interestingly, increasing the transmit SNR and the maximum number of transmissions of the ARQ protocols may not achieve a security performance gain. In addition, the RST results underline the importance of determining how to balance the reliability vs. security, and show the superiority of ODF CARQ in terms of RST.

Cell voltage equalizers are necessary to ensure years of operation and maximize the chargeable/dischargeable energy of series-connected supercapacitors (SCs). A two-switch voltage equalizer using a series-resonant voltage multiplier operating in frequency-multiplied discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) is proposed for series-connected SCs in this paper. The frequency-multiplied mode virtually increases the operation frequency and hence mitigates the negative impact of the impedance mismatch of capacitors on equalization performance, allowing multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) to be used instead of bulky and costly tantalum capacitors, the conventional approach when using voltage multipliers in equalizers. Furthermore, the DCM operation inherently provides the constant current characteristic, realizing the excessive current protection that is desirable for SCs, which experience 0V and equivalently become an equivalent short-circuit load. Experimental equalization tests were performed for eight SCs connected in series under two frequency conditions to verify the improved equalization performance at the increased virtual operation frequencies. The standard deviation of cell voltages under the higher-frequency condition was lower than that under the lower-frequency condition, demonstrating superior equalization performance at higher frequencies.

We have demonstrated tunable extit{n}-channel fullerene and extit{p}-channel pentacene OFETs and CMOS inverter circuit based on a bilayer-dielectric structure of CYTOP (poly(perfluoroalkenyl vinyl ether)) electret and SiO$_{2}$. For both OFET types, the $V_{mathrm{th}}$ can be electrically tuned thanks to the charge-trapping at the interface of CYTOP and SiO$_{2}$. The stability of the shifted $V_{mathrm{th}}$ was investigated through monitoring a change in transistor current. The measured transistor current versus time after programming fitted very well with a stretched-exponential distribution with a long time constant up to 10$^{6}$ s. For organic CMOS inverter, after applying the program gate voltages for extit{n}-channel fullerene or extit{p}-channel pentacene elements, the voltage transfer characteristics were shifted toward more positive values, resulting in a modulation of the noise margin. We realized that at a program gate voltage of 60,V for extit{p}-channel OFET, the circuit switched at 4, 8,V, that is close to half supply voltage $V_{mathrm{DD}}$, leading to the maximum electrical noise immunity of the inverter circuit.

Function speculation design with error recovery mechanisms is quite promising due to its high performance and low area overhead. Previous work has focused on two-stage function speculation and thus lacks a systematic way to address the challenge of the multistage function speculation approach. This paper proposes a multistage function speculation with adaptive predictors and applies it in a novel adder. We deduced the analytical performance and area models for the design and validated them in our experiments. Based on those models, a general methodology is presented to guide design optimization. Both analytical proofs and experimental results on the fabricated chips show that the proposed adder's delay and area have a logarithmic and linear relationship with its bit number, respectively. Compared with the DesignWare IP, the proposed adder provides the same performance with 6-17% area reduction under different bit lengths.

In this paper, an energy harvesting architecture in an Underlay Cooperative Cognitive Network (UCCN) is investigated, in which power constrained Decode-and-Forward relays harvest energy from radio-frequency signals received from a source, and then consume the harvested energy by forwarding the recoded signals to their destination. These recoded signals are launched by a transmitting power which is the harvested energy per a time interval. Based on the energy harvesting architectures that have been studied, two operation protocols are proposed: UCCN with Power Splitting architecture (UCCN-PS), and UCCN with Time Switching architecture (UCCN-TS). The best cooperative relay in both protocols is taken to be the one that satisfies the following conditions: maximum harvested energy, and maximum decoding capacity. As a result of the best relay selection, the signal quality of the selected link from the best relay to the destination is enhanced by the maximum harvested energy. The system performance of the secondary network in the UCCN-PS and UCCN-TS protocols is analyzed and evaluated by the exact closed-form outage probabilities and throughput analyses over Rayleigh fading channels. The Monte Carlo simulation method is performed to verify the theoretical expressions. Evaluations based on outage probability and throughput show that the system performance of the secondary network in the UCCN-PS and UCCN-TS protocols improves when the number of cooperative relays and the interference constraint increase as well as when the primary receiver is farther from the transmitting nodes such as the source and relays of the secondary network. In addition, the throughput performance of the UCCN-PS protocol outperforms that of the UCCN-TS protocol. Finally, the effects of the power splitting ratio, energy harvesting time, energy conversion efficiency, target Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and location of cooperative relays on the system performance of the secondary network are presented and discussed.

This paper presents the electrical contact behaviors of Au-plated material at super low making and breaking velocity conditions by introducing our new designed test rig. The fundamental phenomena in the contact voltage and contact force versus piezoactuator displacement curves were investigated under the load current of 1A and velocity of 50,nm/s. From the repetitive experimental results, we found that the adhesion phenomena during the unloading process are closely correlative with the initial contact stage in the loading process. Furthermore, a mathematical model which is relative to the variation of contact force in loading is built, thus the physical mechanism of adhesion and principal factors of gold-plated materials are discussed. Finally, the physical process of molten bridge under the no mechanical contact situation is also analyzed in detail.

Recommender systems, which provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs, have received great attention in today's online business world. However, most recommendation approaches exploit only a single source of input data and suffer from the data sparsity problem and the cold start problem. To improve recommendation accuracy in this situation, additional sources of information, such as friend relationship and user-generated tags, should be incorporated in recommendation systems. In this paper, we revise the user-based collaborative filtering (CF) technique, and propose two recommendation approaches fusing user-generated tags and social relations in a novel way. In order to evaluate the performance of our approaches, we compare experimental results with two baseline methods: user-based CF and user-based CF with weighted friendship similarity using the real datasets (Last.fm and Movielens). Our experimental results show that our methods get higher accuracy. We also verify our methods in cold-start settings, and our methods achieve more precise recommendations than the compared approaches.

To improve the outage performance of a wireless body area network (BAN), exploitation of the diversity in the channel obtained by letting different nodes cooperate and relay signals for each other is an attractive solution. We carry out multi-link channel measurements and modeling for all realistic locations of the on-body sensor nodes and for three different motion scenarios in a typical office environment to develop equivalent channel model for simple and practical cooperative transmission schemes. Using the developed model the performance of the transmission schemes are evaluated and compared. Incremental decode and forward relaying is found to be consistently better than the other schemes with gains of up to 16dB at 10% outage probability, and an average gain of more than 5.9dB for any location of the coordinator node. The best location of the coordinator node based on the performance is also determined. Such insights will be very useful in designing BANs.

A primary-side regulation AC--DC constant voltage control chip is designed, which employs a novel cable compensation technique to improve the precision of the output voltage and pursue a wider load range for regulation. In the proposed controller, constant voltage (CV) is achieved by OSC charging current and current-limiting point adjustment. Meantime, according to different cable lengths, the sampled voltage is regulated by injecting current to pull-down resistance of the system to obtain an accurate output voltage. The proposed chip is implemented in TSMC 0.35,$mu $m 5,V/40,V BCD process, and a 12,V/1,A circuit prototype has been built to verify the proposed control method. Experimental results show that the maximum cable compensation current reaches 43,$mu $A, and the precision of the output voltage is within $pm$ 3% in a wide range of output current from 0 to 1,A.

This paper describes a simple-yet-effective control method for a DC-DC buck converter with voltage mode control (VMC), with a triangular wave generator (TWG) which regulates the slope of triangular wave based on the input and output voltages of the converter. Using the proposed TWG, both the load and line transient responses are improved. Since the TWG provides a line feed-forward control for the line transient response, it increases the open-loop bandwidth, and then better dynamic performance is obtained. Additional required circuit components are only a voltage controlled linear resistor (VCR) and a voltage controlled current source (VCCS). Compared with the conventional voltage control, the proposed method significantly improves the line and load transient responses. Furthermore this triangular wave slope regulation scheme is simple compared to digital feed-forward control scheme that requires non-linear calculation. Simulation results shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Novel deterministic digital calibration of pipelined ADC has been proposed and analyzed theoretically. Each MDAC is dithered exploiting its inherent redundancy during the calibration. The dither enables fast accurate convergence of calibration without requiring any accurate reference signal and hence with minimum area and power overhead. The proposed calibration can be applied to both the 1.5-bit/stage MDAC and the multi-bit/stage MDAC. Due to its simple structure and algorithm, it can be modified to the background calibration easily. The effectiveness of the proposed calibration has been confirmed by both the extensive simulations and the measurement of the prototype 0.13-µm-CMOS 50-MS/s pipelined ADC using the op-amps with only 37-dB gain. As expected, SNDR and SFDR have improved from 35.5dB to 58.1dB and from 37.4dB to 70.4dB, respectively by the proposed calibration.

We propose that the current distribution along a dipole can be divided into a component proportional to the port current, a component proportional to the port voltage, and an antisymmetrical component. In this paper, we perform numerical computations to verify that the component proportional to the port voltage always lags the port voltage by 90°, and the ratio of its amplitude to that of the port voltage is not significantly affected by the arrangement of other dipoles located nearby or by circuits connected to the ports of the dipoles if the dipoles have lengths not exceeding one wavelength.

An all-digital time-domain ADC, abbreviated as TAD, is presented in this paper. All-digital structure is intrinsically compatible with the scaling of CMOS technology, and can satisfy the great demand of miniaturized and low-voltage sensor interface. The proposed TAD uses an inverter-based Ring-Delay-Line (RDL) to transform the input signal from voltage domain to time domain. The voltage-modulated time information is then digitized by a composite architecture namely “4-Clock-Edge-Shift Construction” (4CKES). TAD features superior voltage sensitivity and 1st-order noise shaping, which can significantly simplify the power-hungry pre-conditioning circuits. Reconfigurable resolution can be easily achieved by applying different sampling rates. A TAD prototype is fabricated in 65nm CMOS, and consumes a small area of 0.016mm2. It achieves a voltage resolution of 82.7µV/LSB at 10MS/s and 1.96µV/LSB at 200kS/s in a narrow input range of 0.1Vpp, merely under 0.6V supply. The highest SNR of TAD prototype is 61.36dB in 20kHz bandwidth at 10MS/s. This paper also analyzes the nonideal effects of TAD and discusses the potential solutions. As the principal drawback, nonlinearity of TAD can be compensated by the differential-setup and digital calibration.

In this paper, resource-efficient multiple description coding (MDC) multicast is investigated in cognitive radio networks with the consideration of imperfect spectrum sensing and imperfect channel feedback. Our objective is to maximize the system goodput, which is defined as the total successfully received data rate of all multicast users, while guaranteeing the maximum transmit power budget and the maximum average received interference constraint. Owing to the uncertainty of the spectrum state and the non-closed-form expression of the objective function, it is difficult to solve the problem directly. To circumvent this problem, a pretreatment is performed, in which we first estimate the real spectrum state of primary users and then propose a Gaussian approximation for the probability density functions of transmission channel gains to simplify the computation of the objective function. Thereafter, a two-stage resource allocation algorithm is presented to accomplish the subcarrier assignment, the optimal transmit channel gain to interference plus noise ratio (T-CINR) setting, and the transmit power allocation separately. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to offset more than 80% of the performance loss caused by imperfect channel feedback when the feedback error is not high, while keeping the average interference on primary users below the prescribed threshold.

In this paper, we propose a novel ranking method called VisualTextualRank which ranks media data according to the relevance between the data and specified keywords. We apply our method to the system of video shot ranking which aims to automatically obtain video shots corresponding to given action keywords from Web videos. The keywords can be any type of action such as “surfing wave” (sport action) or “brushing teeth” (daily activity). Top ranked video shots are expected to be relevant to the keywords. While our baseline exploits only visual features of the data, the proposed method employs both textual information (tags) and visual features. Our method is based on random walks over a bipartite graph to integrate visual information of video shots and tag information of Web videos effectively. Note that instead of treating the textual information as an additional feature for shot ranking, we explore the mutual reinforcement between shots and textual information of their corresponding videos to improve shot ranking. We validated our framework on a database which was used by the baseline. Experiments showed that our proposed ranking method, VisualTextualRank, improved significantly the performance of the system of video shot extraction over the baseline.