An on-chip CMOS preamplifier for direct signal readout from an electret capacitor microphone has been designed with high immunity to common-mode and supply noise. The Gm-Opamp-RC based high impedance preamplifier helps to remove all disadvantages of the conventional JFET based amplifier and can drive a following switched-capacitor sigma-delta modulator in order to realize a compact digital electret microphone. The proposed chip is designed based on 0.18 µm CMOS technology, and the simulation results show 86 dB of dynamic range with 4.5 µVrms of input-referred noise for an audio bandwidth of 20 kHz and a total harmonic distortion (THD) of 1% at 90 mVrms input. Power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) and common-mode rejection ration (CMRR) are more than 95 dB at 1 kHz. The proposed design dissipates 125 µA and can operate over a wide supply voltage range of 1.6 V to 3.3 V.

Electrical modeling for surface-mount passive components is proposed. In order to accurately capture parasitic inductance, the proposed 2-port model accounts for surrounding ground layer configurations of the print circuit board (PCB) on which the component is mounted. Our model retains conventional modeling paradigm in which component suppliers provide their customers with simulation models characterized independently of the customers' PCB. We also present necessary corrections that compensate magnetic coupling between the separated models. Impedance and its anti-resonant frequency of two power distribution networks are experimentally analyzed being non-separated modeling as the reference. The proposed model achieved very good match with the reference result reducing 7-34% error of the conventional model to about 2%.

This letter proposes a mismatch insensitive switched-capacitor multiply-by-four (4X) amplifier using the voltage addition scheme. The proposed circuit provides 2-times faster speed and about half of silicon area when compared with the cascade of conventional 2X amplifiers. Monte-Carlo simulation results show about 15% gain accuracy improvement over the cascaded 2X- amplifiers.

In software design and development, program diagrams are often used for good visualization. Many kinds of program diagrams have been proposed and used. To process such diagrams automatically and efficiently, the program diagram structure needs to be formalized. We aim to construct a diagram processing system with an efficient parser for our program diagram Hichart. In this paper, we give a precedence graph grammar for Hichart that can parse in linear time. We also describe a parsing method and processing system incorporating the Hichart graphical editor that is based on the precedence graph grammar.

Traditional traffic analysis is can be performed online only when detection targets are well specified and are fairly primitive. Local processing at measurement point is discouraged as it would considerably affect major functionality of a network device. When traffic is analyzed at flow level, the notion of flow timeout generates differences in flow lifespan and impedes unbiased monitoring, where only n-top flows ordered by a certain metric are considered. This paper proposes an alternative manner of traffic analysis based on source IP aggregation. The method uses flows as basic building blocks but ignores timeouts, using short monitoring intervals instead. Multidimensional space of metrics obtained through IP aggregation, however, enhances capabilities of traffic analysis by facilitating detection of various anomalous conditions in traffic simultaneously.

In this letter, a two channel frequency domain speech enhancement algorithm is proposed. The algorithm is designed to achieve better overall performance with relatively small array size. An improved version of adaptive null-forming is used, in which noise cancelation is implemented in auditory subbands. And an OM-LSA based postfiltering stage further purifies the output. The algorithm also features interaction between the array processing and the postfilter to make the filter adaptation more robust. This approach achieves considerable improvement on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and subjective quality of the desired speech. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.

We propose multitone-hopping code-division multiple access (MH-CDMA) using a feedback-controlled hopping pattern (FCHP) (FCHP/MH-CDMA). In the FCHP/MH-CDMA, part of the filter coefficients of an adaptive finite-duration impulse response (FIR) filter receiver are fed back to a transmitter, in which they are used as an updated hopping pattern. Each chip of the updated hopping pattern consists of plural tones. As a result, it is shown that the FCHP/MH-CDMA provides us with an excellent asynchronous, decentralized multiple-access performance over time-invariant multipath channels.

Randomly distributed wireless sensors used to monitor and detect a moving object were investigated, and performance measures such as the expected time/space detection ratio were theoretically analyzed. In particular, the insensitivities (robustness) of the performance measures to the conditions of the distributed wireless sensors and the target object were analyzed. Robust explicit equations for these performance measures were derived, and these equations can be used to calculate them without knowing the sensing area shape or the target object trajectory. These equations were applied to the following two applications. (1) They were used to estimate the impact of active/sleeping state schedule algorithms of sensors on the expected ratio of the time that the sensors detect the target object during its movement. The results were used to identify the active state schedule that increases the expected time ratio. (2) They were also applied to a sensor density design method that uses a test object. This method can be used to ensure that the expected time ratio that at least one sensor can detect the target satisfies the target value without knowing the sensing area size or the movement of the target object.

This paper proposes a MAC protocol for presence information discovery in ubiquitous networks. The proposed protocol is designed for proactive discovery in which wireless devices periodically broadcast packets containing presence information. The protocol is based on Framed Aloha. The objective of the protocol is to assure the discovery time of single-hop neighbors considering wireless collisions and also power consumption. In this paper, we show that the proposed protocol is able to assure specified discovery time in distributed networks with random topology.

Wide area ubiquitous wireless networks, which consist of access points (APs) connected to the fixed network and a great many wireless terminals (WTs), can offer a wide range of applications everywhere. In order to enhance network performance, we need to collect different kinds of data from as many WTs as possible; each AP must be capable of accommodating more than 103 WTs. This requirement can be achieved by employing DSA, a typical centralized media access control scheme, since it has high resource utilization efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel DSA scheme that employs three new techniques to enhance throughput performance; (1) considering that most terminals tend to send data periodically, it employs both polling-based schemes, i.e. request-polling and data-polling, and a random access scheme. (2) In order to enhance bandwidth utilization effectiveness by polling, the polling timing is decided according to the data generation timing. (3) The AP decides the polled data size according to the latest distribution of data size and polls the WT for the data directly. If the data-polling size can not be determined with confidence, the AP uses request-polling instead of data-polling. Simulations verify that the proposed scheme offers better transmission performance than the existing schemes.

This paper presents a wireless burst modulation/ demodulation method for narrowband ubiquitous communication systems. This method especially suits those systems, whose traffic is especially dominated by short frame bursts. The proposed modulation method provides a preamble-less frame structure with training symbols, which improves both transmission efficiency and burst synchronization performance. Moreover, the proposed demodulation method achieves superior burst synchronization performance in low carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) environments by applying a synchronization method that includes symbol timing recovery, slot synchronization, carrier frequency correction and channel tracking. In addition, this paper presents the result of experiments on hardware prototypes of the proposed modulator and demodulator. The basic operation and practical performance of the proposed method is confirmed through testbed studies.

This paper presents a new methodology, Beacognition, for real-time discovery of the associations between a signal space and arbitrarily defined regions, termed as Semantically Meaningful Areas (SMAs), in the corresponding physical space. It lets the end users develop semantically meaningful location systems using standard 802.11 network beacons as they roam through their environment. The key idea is to discover the unique associations using a beacon popularity model. The popularity measurements are then used to localize the mobile devices. The beacon popularity is computed using an election' algorithm and a new recognition model is presented to perform the localization task. We have implemented such a location system in a five story campus building. The comparative results show significant improvement in localization by achieving on average 83% SMA and 88% Floor recognition rate in less than one minute per SMA training time.

A new paradigm in the design of optical coatings connected with an outstanding computational efficiency of modern design techniques is discussed. Several other topics including pre-production error analysis, monitoring of coating production, and computational manufacturing of optical coatings are considered.

Tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) thin films were prepared on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foil by bias sputtering. In the absence of a substrate bias, films having a high resistivity of 210-2 Ωcm were formed. On the other hand, by the application of an rf substrate bias, films having a low resistivity of 2.610-4 Ωcm were formed. The energy of ions that bombarded the substrate during bias sputtering was estimated by a simulation of the ion acceleration. The optimum ion-energy required for the reduction of resistivity was found to be approximately 50 eV.

A component framework for building and operating visual interfaces for context-aware services in ubiquitous computing environments is presented. By using a compound-document technology, it provides physical entities, places, stationary or mobile computing devices, and services with visual components as multimedia representations to enable them to be annotated and controlled them. It can automatically assemble visual components into a visual interface for monitoring and managing context-aware services according to the spatial-containment relationships between their targets in the physical world by using underlying location-sensing systems. End-users can manually deploy and customize context-aware services through user-friendly GUI-based manipulations for editing documents. This paper presents the design for this framework and describes its implementation and practical applications in user/location-aware assistant systems in two museums.

The steady approach of advanced nations toward realization of ubiquitous computing societies has given birth to rapidly growing demands for new-generation distributed computing (DC) applications. Consequently, economic and reliable construction of new-generation DC applications is currently a major issue faced by the software technology research community. What is needed is a new-generation DC software engineering technology which is at least multiple times more effective in constructing new-generation DC applications than the currently practiced technologies are. In particular, this author believes that a new-generation building-block (BB), which is much more advanced than the current-generation DC object that is a small extension of the object model embedded in languages C++, Java, and C#, is needed. Such a BB should enable systematic and economic construction of DC applications that are capable of taking critical actions with 100-microsecond-level or even 10-microsecond-level timing accuracy, fault tolerance, and security enforcement while being easily expandable and taking advantage of all sorts of network connectivity. Some directions considered worth pursuing for finding such BBs are discussed.

In this paper, we propose a new mask estimation method for the computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) of speech using two microphones. The proposed method is based on a hidden Markov model (HMM) in order to incorporate an observation that the mask information should be correlated over contiguous analysis frames. In other words, HMM is used to estimate the mask information represented as the interaural time difference (ITD) and the interaural level difference (ILD) of two channel signals, and the estimated mask information is finally employed in the separation of desired speech from noisy speech. To show the effectiveness of the proposed mask estimation, we then compare the performance of the proposed method with that of a Gaussian kernel-based estimation method in terms of the performance of speech recognition. As a result, the proposed HMM-based mask estimation method provided an average word error rate reduction of 61.4% when compared with the Gaussian kernel-based mask estimation method.

This paper proposes a 12-bit 3.7-MS/s pipelined A/D Converter based on the novel capacitor mismatch calibration technique. The conventional stage is improved to an algorithmic circuit involving charge summing, capacitors' exchange and charge redistribution, simply through introducing some extra switches into the analog circuit. This proposed ADC obtains the linearity beyond the accuracy of the capacitor match and verifies the validity of reducing the nonlinear error from the capacitor mismatch to the second order without additional power dissipation through the novel capacitor mismatch calibration technique. It is processed in 0.5 µm CMOS technology. The transistor-level simulation results show that 72.6 dB SNDR, 78.5 dB SFDR are obtained for a 2 V Vpp 159.144 kHz sine input sampled at 3.7 MS/s. The whole power dissipation of this ADC is 33.4 mW at the power supply of 5 V.

Capacitor mismatch is an important device parameter for precision analog applications. In the last ten years, the floating gate measurement technique has been widely used for its characterization. In this paper we describe the impact of leakage current on the technique. The leakage can come from, for example, thin gate oxide MOSFETs or high dielectric constant capacitors in advanced technologies. SPICE simulation, bench measurement, analytical model and numerical analyses are presented to illustrate the problem and key contributing factors. Criteria for accurate capacitor systematic and random mismatch characterization are developed, and practical methods of increasing measurement accuracy are discussed.

The aggregation of Wi-Fi links has been identified as one way of taking advantage of available channels to achieve higher speed data transmission in future cognitive radio networks. However variations in link quality make it difficult to achieve stable performance from aggregated Wi-Fi links. In this paper we present a method for controlling aggregation of Wi-Fi links based on monitoring of link status. We first discuss the requirements for detecting bad-links which degrade the performance of aggregated Wi-Fi links. We then describe the implementation of an enhanced link-status detection algorithm based on monitoring of signal strength and number of retransmissions. In particular, we address the problems of monitoring and recovering links after they have been dropped from use, and adjusting decision thresholds to adapt to changing wireless conditions. Finally, we report the results of tests which demonstrate the effectiveness for attaining efficient aggregation of Wi-Fi links for high throughput under varying wireless conditions.