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Volume 15 No. 3
20 March 2010

2010, 15(3): 251-258.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70058-4
Abstract ( 142 )  ( 25 )   Save
Event extraction is an important research point in information extraction, which includes two important sub-tasks of event type recognition and event argument recognition. This paper describes a method based on automatic expansion of the event triggers for event type recognition. The event triggers are first extended through a thesaurus to enable the extraction of the candidate events and their candidate types. Then, a binary classification method is used to recognize the candidate event types. ...

2010, 15(3): 259-264.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70059-6
Abstract ( 188 )  ( 30 )   Save
Electrostatic discharge (ESD) induced parasitic effects have serious impacts on performance of radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (IC). This paper discusses a comprehensive noise analysis procedure for ESD protection structures and their negative influences on RF ICs. Noise figures (NFs) of commonly used ESD protection structures and their impacts on a single-chip 5.5 GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) circuit were depicted. A design example in 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS was presented. Measurement res...

2010, 15(3): 265-274.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70060-2
Abstract ( 255 )  ( 24 )   Save
As integrated circuits (IC) technologies advance into very-deep-sub-micron (VDSM), electrostatic discharge (ESD) failure becomes one of the most devastating IC reliability problems and on-chip ESD protection design emerges as a major challenge to radio frequency (RF), analog, and mixed-signal (AMS) IC designs. This paper reviews key design aspects and recent advances in whole-chip ESD protection designs for RF/AMS IC applications in CMOS technologies.

2010, 15(3): 275-280.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70061-4
Abstract ( 139 )  ( 27 )   Save
The adaptive local hyperplane (ALH) algorithm is a very recently proposed classifier, which has been shown to perform better than many other benchmarking classifiers including support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and K-local hyperplane distance nearest neighbor (HKNN) algorithms. Although the ALH algorithm is well formulated and despite the fact that it performs well in practice, its scalability over a very large data set i...

2010, 15(3): 281-287.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70062-6
Abstract ( 130 )  ( 28 )   Save
Correlations between magnetic susceptibility and contents of magnetic minerals in rocks are important in interpreting magnetic anomalies in geophysical exploration and understanding magnetic behaviors of rocks in rock magnetism studies. Previous studies were focused on describing such correlations using a sole expression or a set of expressions through statistical analysis. In this paper, we use neural network techniques to approximate the nonlinear relations between susceptibility and magnetite...

2010, 15(3): 288-293.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70063-8
Abstract ( 153 )  ( 46 )   Save
The network-on-chip (NoC) design methodology is an important trend for large system-on-chip designs to reduce the bandwidth and power constraints in traditional synchronous bus architectures. In the design of packet-based NoC, the packet-length plays an important role in the NoC throughput, latency, and energy consumption. The appropriate NoC packet-length was selected based on simulation and analysis of the packet-length effect on NoC for variable average data block length (ADBL) configuration ...

2010, 15(3): 294-298.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70064-X
Abstract ( 133 )  ( 33 )   Save
Reconfigurable antenna arrays increase the flexibility of adaptive MIMO systems. At present, most designs have adopted antenna arrays with reconfigurable elements. However, antenna selection is also an effective method, which has not been fully investigated. In this paper, the potential benefits of a four-element antenna array with selection circuits in the UMTS band (1920–2170 MHz) are explored. The array has eight pin-diodes embedded in the feeding network to select any sub-set of elemen...

2010, 15(3): 299-306.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70065-1
Abstract ( 153 )  ( 28 )   Save
This paper presents an instruction scheduling and cluster assignment approach for clustered very long instruction words (VLIW) processors. The technique produces high performance code by simultaneously balancing instructions among clusters and minimizing the amount of inter-cluster data communications. The scheme is evaluated based on benchmarks extracted from UTDSP. Results show a significant speedup compared with previously used techniques with speed-ups of up to 44%, with average speed-ups ra...

2010, 15(3): 307-311.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70066-3
Abstract ( 182 )  ( 65 )   Save
Accurate simulations of ultra-wideband (UWB) electromagnetic radiation from an antenna were developed based on a time-domain finite element method (TDFEM) based on p-step Lagrange interpolation for the temporal expansion. The motivation was to utilize the good interpolation features and straightforward computations for UWB antenna simulations. Numerical results were obtained from the cases of the cavity resonance problem, a bowtie and a Sierpinski bowtie antenna. Comparisons with an exi...

2010, 15(3): 312-318.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70067-5
Abstract ( 167 )  ( 23 )   Save
Powerline communications (PLC) have drawn great interest in recent years. However, most PLC standards such as HomePlug AV use the cyclic-prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM) technology. This paper presents a broadband PLC system using low density parity check (LDPC) coded time domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM), whose spectrum efficiency is about 10% higher than that of CP-OFDM. With the same bandwidth and the ability to combat the time delay spread as HomePlug AV, this system can provide a maximum throughput ...

2010, 15(3): 319-324.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70068-7
Abstract ( 143 )  ( 49 )   Save
A two-stage identification method was developed for attitude-control models of on-orbit satellites for accurate attitude control. The attitude-control models are based on a generalized attitude model (GAM) and its corresponding noise model (NM). These are both low order models which are able to characterize the main satellite dynamics and the corresponding noise. These low-order attitude-control models facilitate improved controller design and state estimation. This identification approach uses ...

2010, 15(3): 325-328.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70069-9
Abstract ( 164 )  ( 56 )   Save
The amplitude of switching overvoltages is a key factor for designing the insulation of UHV equipment. The effect of different arresters needs to be studied, since installing arresters is an important way to suppress switching overvoltages in UHV transmission lines. Switching overvoltages on the 1000 kV Huainan-Huxi double-circuit transmission line were simulated for different operating modes and different arrester designs using the electromagnetic transient program PSCAD/EMTDC. With parallel re...

2010, 15(3): 329-334.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70070-5
Abstract ( 258 )  ( 67 )   Save
One of the major issues with multi-carrier systems is their vulnerability to timing synchronization errors resulting in the loss of time synchronization which causes loss of orientation of incoming data at the receiver. This paper presents an acquisition algorithm to timing recovery using the decision-aided extended Kalman filtering (EKF) technique for nonlinear disturbance channels in a wavelet packet transform-based multicarrier modulation communication system. This timing recovery algorithm g...

2010, 15(3): 335-346.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70071-7
Abstract ( 124 )  ( 21 )   Save
Data streaming applications, usually composed of sequential/parallel data processing tasks organized as a workflow, bring new challenges to workflow scheduling and resource allocation in grid environments. Due to the high volumes of data and relatively limited storage capability, resource allocation and data streaming have to be storage aware. Also to improve system performance, the data streaming and processing have to be concurrent. This study used a genetic algorithm (GA) for workflow schedul...

2010, 15(3): 347-351.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70072-9
Abstract ( 177 )  ( 30 )   Save
A testing structure was developed to more effectively detect the poly stringer defects in contemporary CMOS ICs. This structure is much more sensitive to poly stringer defects and is closer to the real product layout than the currently widely used structure using an active dummy underneath a poly comb. Many testing structure pieces manufactured in a 0.11 μm copper process line were used to compare the current design with the conventional testing structure. The data shows that the new structure m...

2010, 15(3): 352-356.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70073-0
Abstract ( 148 )  ( 20 )   Save
A modern teaching support platform was designed based on application integration and the Nolan model. The system design used top-level design, information-sharing, management modeling, and user experience. The system emphasized openness, compatibility, security, extensibility, and practicability. Multi-department management is realized by dividing function domains. Intercommunications and interconnections use a level-division modular design, so the system can be easily extended. The teaching sup...

2010, 15(3): 357-362.   doi:10.1016/S1007-0214(10)70074-2
Abstract ( 213 )  ( 31 )   Save
The scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) feature descriptor is invariant to image scale and location, and is robust to affine transformations and changes in illumination, so it is a powerful descriptor used in many applications, such as object recognition, video tracking, and gesture recognition. However, in noisy and non-rigid object recognition applications, especially for infrared human face recognition, SIFT-based algorithms may mismatch many feature points. This paper presents a star-st...