A third order harmonic oscillator has been proposed based on the resonant tunneling diode pair oscillators. This oscillator has significant advantages, good stability of the oscillation frequency against the load impedance change together with capability to output higher frequencies. Proper circuit operation has been demonstrated using circuit simulations. It has been also shown that the output frequency is stable against the load impedance change.

Concurrent transmission (CT) is a revolutionary multi-hop protocol that significantly improves the MAC- and network-layer efficiency by allowing synchronized packet collisions. Although its superiority has been empirically verified, there is still a lack of studies on how the receiver survives such packet collisions, particularly in the presence of the carrier frequency offsets (CFO) between the transmitters. This work rectifies this omission by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the physical-layer receiver performance under CT, and a theoretical analysis on the fading duration of the beating effect resulting from the CFO. The main findings from our evaluations are the following points. (1) Beating significantly affects the receiver performance, and an error correcting mechanism is needed to combat the beating. (2) In IEEE 802.15.4 systems, the direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) plays such a role in combatting the beating. (3) However, due to the limited length of DSSS, the receiver still suffers from the beating if the fading duration is too long. (4) On the other hand, the basic M-ary FSK mode of IEEE 802.15.4g is vulnerable to CT due to the lack of error correcting mechanism. In view of the importance of the fading duration, we further theoretically derive the closed form of the average fading duration (AFD) of the beating under CT in terms of the transmitter number and the standard deviation of the CFO. Moreover, we prove that the receiver performance can be improved by having higher CFO deviations between the transmitters due to the shorter AFD. Finally, we estimate the AFD in the real system by actually measuring the CFO of a large number of sensor nodes.

Reliable multicast is an interesting application of distributing data to lots of clients at the same time. In heterogeneous environment, it is necessary to adjust the transmitting rate corresponding to the bandwidth of receivers. Placed at a network bottleneck point, an active server can buffer the multicast packets and control the transmitting rate to the downstream multicast receivers independently so as to absorb bandwidth differences. If wireless and wired receivers coexist, the best position for the active server is at the edge of the wired and wireless links because the bandwidth of wireless receivers are lower than that of wired receivers. However, it is not enough that an active server only controls the transmitting rate in such environment because wireless receivers tend to lose packet by the wireless transmission error. This paper proposes a scheme in which the active server independently controls a reliable multicast scheme that is robust against packet loss due to wireless transmission error. Simulation results show that rate-based reliable multicast congestion control is more appropriate than window-based control for wireless links. We also show that FEC applied only to the wireless link improves the throughput of wireless multicast receivers. Finally, we show that combining rate-based reliable multicast congestion control scheme with FEC only for the wireless link makes reliable multicast more practical and friendly with TCP even if packets are lost due to transmission errors.

In this study, the transient characteristics on the super-steep subthreshold slope (SS) of a PN-body tied (PNBT) silicon-on-insulator field-effect transistor (SOI-FET) were investigated using technology computer-aided design and pulse measurements. Carrier charging effects were observed on the super-steep SS PNBT SOI-FET. It was found that the turn-on delay time decreased to nearly zero when the gate overdrive-voltage was set to 0.1-0.15 V. Additionally, optimizing the gate width improved the turn-on delay. This has positive implications for the low speed problems of this device. However, long-term leakage current flows on turn-off. The carrier lifetime affects the leakage current, and the device parameters must be optimized to realize both a high on/off ratio and high-speed operation.

The oscillators based on an active transmission line periodically loaded with RTD pairs are studied using circuit simulation with special attention to the behavior of harmonics. Generation of strong high order harmonic (9th) was observed. This is caused by the frequency locking in the high frequency passband. The harmonic oscillators based on this phenomenon are promising for high performance THz sources.

This paper presents a high quality 4-kbit/s speech coding algorithm based on a CELP algorithm. The coder operates on speech frames of 20 ms. The algorithm has following four main features: multiple sub-codebooks, backward adaptive mode switching, dispersed-pulse structure, and noise post-processing. The multiple sub-codebooks consist of a pulse-codebook and a random-codebook so that they can handle both signals, noise-like (e.g. unvoiced, stationary noise) and pulse-like (e.g. voiced). The backward adaptive mode switching is performed using decoded parameters; therefore, no additional mode bit is transmitted. The random-codebook size is switched with the backward adaptively selected mode. The subjective quality of unvoiced speech or noise-like signal can be improved by this switching operation because the random-codebook size is greatly increased in such signal mode. The dispersed-pulse structure provides better performance of sparse pulse excitation using dispersed pulses instead of simple unit pulses. The noise post-processing employs a stationary background noise generator for producing stationary noise signal. It significantly improves subjective quality of decoded signal under various background noise conditions. Subjective listening tests are conducted in accordance with ACR and DCR tests. The ACR test results indicate that the fundamental performance of the MDP-CELP is equivalent to that of 32-kbit/s adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM). The DCR test results show that the performance of the MDP-CELP is equivalent to or better than that of 8-kbit/s conjugate-structure algebraic code excited linear prediction (CS-ACELP) under several background noise conditions.