A new low-cost RF built-in self-test measurement for system-on-chip transceivers

This paper presents a new RF built-in self-test (BIST) measurement and a new automatic-performance-compensation network for a system-on-chip (SoC) transceiver. We built a 5-GHz low noise amplifier (LNA) with an on-chip BIST circuit using 0.18-/spl mu/m SiGe technology. The BIST-measurement circuit contains a test amplifier and RF peak detectors. The complete measurement setup contains an LNA with a BIST circuit, an external RF source, RF relays, 50-/spl Omega/ load impedance, and a dc voltmeter. The proposed BIST circuit measures input impedance, gain, noise figure, input return loss, and output signal-to-noise ratio of the LNA. The test technique utilizes the output dc-voltage measurements, and these measured values are translated to the LNA specifications such as the gain through the developed equations. The performance of the LNA was improved by using the new automatic compensation network (ACN) that adjusts the performance of the LNA with the processor in the SoC transceiver.     

Time-domain optical mammography: initial clinical results on detection and characterization of breast tumors

Mammograms of 35 patients suspected of breast cancer were taken along craniocaudal and mediolateral projections with a dual-wavelength scanning laser pulse mammograph measuring time-resolved transmittance. Among 26 tumors known from routine clinical diagnostics, 17 tumors were detected retrospectively in optical mammograms. Effective tumor optical properties derived from a homogeneous model were used to deduce physiological information. All tumors exhibited increased total hemoglobin concentration and decreased or unchanged blood oxygen saturation compared with surrounding healthy tissue. Scatter plots based on a pixelwise analysis of individual mammograms were introduced and applied to represent corelations between characteristic quantities derived from measured distributions of times of flight of photons.     

Performance analysis of decision-feedback equalisation for cellular mobile radio with cochannel interference and fading

The error probability of minimum-mean-square-error decision-feedback equalisation (MMSE-DFE) is evaluated for digital cellular mobile radio systems in the presence of cochannel interference (CCI) and is compared with linear equalisation (LE). The main contribution of the paper is that this analysis accounts for pulse waveform, modulation and fading of the signal of interest, as well as the CCI. Quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) signalling in frequency-selective and quasi-static channels is considered. The CCI is treated as a stationary process, when caused by random phase and symbol-timing offsets relative to the signal of interest. Analysis includes techniques combining antenna diversity. The performance improvement as a function of taps in both feedforward and feedback filters is quantified. Owing to residual intersymbol interference (ISI) and CCI, the evaluation of the error probability is extremely complicated and time consuming in simulation. To overcome this issue, an efficient method based upon Gauss quadrature rules (GQR) is presented to compute the error probability. The method is not limited due to interference statistics and it yields remarkable advantages compared with other methods. The convergence of finite-length results to their infinite-length counterparts is also provided. Unlike the case of white noise, the simulations reveal that with the same finite length the DFE is unable to outperform the linear equaliser in a CCI-dominated channel if the feedback filter is of insufficient length.     

An error estimator for adaptive mesh refinement analysis based on strain energy equalisation

The two most widely used error estimators for adaptive mesh refinement are discussed and developed in the context of non-linear elliptic problems. The first is based on the work of Babuska and Rheinboldt (1978) where the error norm is a function of the residual and the inter-element discontinuity of the stress field. The discontinuous stress field arises in the Finite Element formulation where C ₀ continuity of the velocity field is assumed. The second error estimator is based on the work of Zienkiewicz and Zhu (1987). This method also uses the discontinuous stress field to measure the error, but results in a more simplified expression for the error norm. In fact, the equivalence between the two error norms has been shown by Zienkiewicz. Finally, an error estimator which is based on the approximation velocity space only is proposed. This estimator has the advantage in that it does not require the a posteriori calculation of the pressure (or stress) field. The method is applied to non-Newtonian Stokes flow which has a similar formulation to non-linear elasticity problems.     

Modelling maintenance effects on manufacturing equipment performance: results from simulation analysis

Equipment maintenance and system reliability are important factors affecting the organisation’s ability to provide quality and timely services to customer. While maintenance remains an important function to manufacturing, it is only recently that attempts have been made to quantify its impact on equipment performance. In this research, an approach of linking maintenance with equipment performance is developed using simulation modelling. The modelling approach involves defining probabilistic models and assumptions affecting system performance, such as: the probabilistic model for the initial failure rate/intensity of the equipment; the probabilistic model for the system deterioration and corresponding effect; the probabilistic model for the random times of corrective maintenance (CM) and preventive maintenance (PM) that takes into the account the types of maintenance plans/policies and the potential dependency between CM and PM times; and the probabilistic model for the random effects of CM and PM on the reliability of the equipment. Using a continuous manufacturing equipment, the model is used to analyse the impact of deterioration, failures and maintenance (policies, timing and efficiency) on equipment performance. It is shown that modelling the effect maintenance provides a basis of evaluating maintenance efforts with the potential application in performance evaluation and decision support while investigating opportunities for manufacturing equipment performance improvement.     

A new profile design method for conjugate pump and its performance analysis

In this paper, we propose a new design theory and method for the profile design of conjugate pump rotor. This method combines the generating method and the theory of envelope curves to get the conjugate analytic expression. The solution process of this method is complicated, but the results have high accuracy. And the design profile can ensure that the two rotors always have a conjugate contact point when rotating, thus preventing the pump’s leakage. The volumetric efficiency of the pump is used to evaluate the excellent of profile design. The design variables are the number of lobes and the shape of single lobe. Then the performance analysis of the pump is done to understand the effects of design parameters on its volumetric efficiency. And the results show that the increase in the number of lobes can reduce the volumetric efficiency. For the two-lobe rotor, the raise of the center height of the top circle can enhance the volumetric efficiency. The pump designed by this method can gain a large adjustment range for performance by changing these design variables.     

Composite plate analysis using a new discrete shear triangular finite element

This paper deals with the static and dynamic (free vibrations) analysis of plates built up with a symmetric series of orthotropic layers. The formulation of a new simple triangular finite element having three nodes and three degrees of freedom per node is presented. The element called DST (Discrete Shear Triangle) is free of shear locking and has a proper rank. It coincides with DKT (Discrete Kirchhoff Triangle) when the transverse shear effects are negligible. A large number of classical problems is considered to evaluate the performance of the element for the analysis of composite plates. Very satisfactory results are obtained for displacements, stresses and frequencies.     

Further discrete variable results for a panel flutter optimization problem

Numerical solutions are presented for the problem of minimum weight design of a thin one-dimensiona simply-supported, solid panel in compression with one side exposed to a parallel high supersonic air flow. The flutter speed is held fixed, and a minimum thickness constraint is imposed. In addition, a multiplier technique is incorporated into the discrete variable minimization process to improve the convergence speed.     

Turbo channel estimation and equalisation for a superposition-based cooperative system

This study investigates the superposition-based cooperative transmission system. In this system, a key point is for the relay node to detect data transmitted from the source node. This issued was less considered in the existing literature as the channel is usually assumed to be flat fading and a priori known. In practice, however, the channel is not only a priori unknown but subject to frequency selective fading. Channel estimation is thus necessary. Of particular interest is the channel estimation at the relay node which imposes extra requirement for the system resources. The authors propose a novel turbo least-square channel estimator by exploring the superposition structure of the transmission data. The proposed channel estimator not only requires no pilot symbols but also has significantly better performance than the classic approach. The soft-in-soft-out minimum mean square error (MMSE) equaliser is also re-derived to match the superimposed data structure. Finally computer simulation results are shown to verify the proposed algorithm.     

Time-domain boundary element analysis of dynamic near-tip fields for impact-loaded collinear cracks

A time-domain boundary integral equation method has been developed to calculate elastodynamic fields generated by the incidence of stress (or displacement) pulses on single cracks and systems of two collinear cracks. The system of boundary integral equations has been cast in a form which is amenable to solution by the boundary element method in conjunction with a time-stepping technique. Particular attention has been devoted to dynamic overshoots of the stress intensity factors. Elastodynamic stress intensity factors for pulse incidence on a single crack have been computed as function of time, and they have been compared with results of other authors. For collinear macrocrack-microcrack configurations the stress intensity factors at both tips of the macrocrack have been computed as functions of time for various values of the crack spacing and the relative size of the microcrack.     

Classifier-guided sampling for discrete variable,discontinuous design space exploration: Convergence and computational performance

A classifier-guided sampling (CGS) method is introduced for solving engineering design optimization problems with discrete and/or continuous variables and continuous and/or discontinuous responses. The method merges concepts from metamodel-guided sampling and population-based optimization algorithms. The CGS method uses a Bayesian network classifier for predicting the performance of new designs based on a set of known observations or training points. Unlike most metamodelling techniques, however, the classifier assigns a categorical class label to a new design, rather than predicting the resulting response in continuous space, and thereby accommodates non-differentiable and discontinuous functions of discrete or categorical variables. The CGS method uses these classifiers to guide a population-based sampling process towards combinations of discrete and/or continuous variable values with a high probability of yielding preferred performance. Accordingly, the CGS method is appropriate for discrete/discontinuous design problems that are ill suited for conventional metamodelling techniques and too computationally expensive to be solved by population-based algorithms alone. The rates of convergence and computational properties of the CGS method are investigated when applied to a set of discrete variable optimization problems. Results show that the CGS method significantly improves the rate of convergence towards known global optima, on average, compared with genetic algorithms.     

An integrated force method for discrete analysis

An integrated force method is developed for the analysis of discrete structures in which all the element forces are taken as the independent variables instead of the conventional way of treating the redundants as the prime unknowns. Computationally the integrated force method is superior to the standard force method. The analogy between Beltrami–Michell formulation for continuous problems and the present formulation for discrete structures is presented. Illustrative examples for the determination of forces and displacements are presented for pin-connected and rigid-connected frame structures for various load conditions.     

Adaptive two-stage equalisation and FEXT cancellation architecture for 10GBASE-T system

For 10GBASE-T systems, variation in a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channel degrades the decision-point signal-to-noise ratio (DP-SNR) owing to imperfect pre-equalisation in the Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) at the transmitter sides and catastrophic error propagation in far-end crosstalk (FEXT) cancellation at the receiver sides. Moreover, by using fixed THP coefficients during data transmission, as specified in the 10GBASE-T standard, and the non-linearity of THP pose challenges in the design of adaptive receivers. The authors propose an adaptive two-stage equalisation and FEXT cancellation (TS-EFC) architecture without updating the THP coefficients to combat channel variation at both the transmitter and receiver sides. In the first stage, we propose a new non-decision-directed FEXT canceller at the transmitter side using a joint training architecture to avoid error propagation. In the second stage, we devise an adaptive MIMO equaliser together with a novel pre-processing unit at the receiver side to combat channel variation. The pre-processing unit can eliminate the non-linearity issue by estimating both effective data sequences and precoded channel inputs. In addition, we develop a block least mean square algorithm that exploits the properties of two-dimensional modulated symbols for updating coefficients of the adaptive MIMO equaliser. Simulation results show that our TS-EFC architecture is robust against channel variation and significantly improves the DP-SNR. It eliminates the error propagation and also achieves faster convergence rates during the adaptation process.     

乘积合并接收的差分跳频通信系统在瑞利衰落信道上抗多音干扰的性能分析

在瑞利衰落信道上,在多音干扰和加性高斯白噪声共存的条件下,对采用乘积合并接收(PCR)方法的差分跳频(DFH)通信系统的误符号性能进行了理论分析.为验证理论分析的正确性,进行了相应的计算机仿真,将采用 PCR 方法的误符号性能与采用线性合并接收(LCR)方法的误符号性能作了比较.结果证实,在瑞利衰落信道上,DFH 通信系统采用乘积合并接收的方法要比采用 LCR 方法具有更好的抗多音干扰的性能.     

Scheduling with agreements: new results

In this paper, the problem of scheduling with agreements (SWA) is considered. In scheduling, this consists of a set of jobs non-preemptively on identical machines subject to constraints that only some specific jobs can be scheduled concurrently on different machines. These constraints are given by an agreement graph and the aim is to minimise the makespan. In the case of two machines we extend two NP-hardness results of SWA with processing times at most three that hold for bipartite agreement graphs to more general agreement graphs. Complexity results of SWA are established in the case of split and complement of bipartite graphs. We also present some approximation results for SWA.     

Bit error performance of diffuse indoor optical wireless channel pulse position modulation system employing artificial neural networks for channel equalisation

The bit-error rate (BER) performance of a pulse position modulation (PPM) scheme for non-line-of-sight indoor optical links employing channel equalisation based on the artificial neural network (ANN) is reported. Channel equalisation is achieved by training a multilayer perceptrons ANN. A comparative study of the unequalised dasiasoftdasia decision decoding and the dasiaharddasia decision decoding along with the neural equalised dasiasoftdasia decision decoding is presented for different bit resolutions for optical channels with different delay spread. We show that the unequalised dasiaharddasia decision decoding performs the worst for all values of normalised delayed spread, becoming impractical beyond a normalised delayed spread of 0.6. However, dasiasoftdasia decision decoding with/without equalisation displays relatively improved performance for all values of the delay spread. The study shows that for a highly diffuse channel, the signal-to-noise ratio requirement to achieve a BER of 10^-5 for the ANN-based equaliser is ~10~dB lower compared with the unequalised-soft-decoding for 16-PPM at a data rate of 155 Mbps. Our results indicate that for all range of delay spread, neural network equalisation is an effective tool of mitigating the inter-symbol interference.     

Value network modelling and simulation for strategic analysis: a discrete event simulation approach

The survival of a company nowadays depends on answering to a customer-driven economy, and therefore relies on the performance of its entire network of partners. Competition is no longer among companies nor among supply chains, but rather between networks of companies which form a value network. Thus, the need has arisen to analyse the performance of a network of companies, and include the customer-perceived value in the strategic decision-making process. This paper proposes a framework and a tool to model, simulate and analyse a value network as a decision support system. The method extends the SimulValor approach and language. The discrete event simulation tool relies on a developed value network simulation library. This paper presents a case study in the shoemaking industry to validate the proposed approach.     

Performance analysis of multiple-input multipleoutput singular value decomposition transceivers during fading and other cell interference

A generalised method is derived to compute the error probabilities of singular value decomposition (SVD)-based receivers for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with uncoded transmission. The method can be used for a wide class of flat fading environments, including independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and semi-correlated Rayleigh and i.i.d. Ricean channels. Although the method is applied to equal-power binary phase shift keying, it can easily be extended to higher-order M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) signal constellations and adaptive 'water-filling' schemes. The error probability curves derived from closed-form formulas and simulations demonstrate very close agreement. The error performances of channel inversion, minimum mean square error and zero forcing receivers are compared with the SVD receiver for a single-user system. The impact of multiple users is considered by studying the performance of an adaptive MIMO SVD transmission scheme operating in a cellular environment. In particular, the effect of inter-cell interference on the performance of the scheme is quantified, modelling the interference as increased Gaussian noise. A number of cellular layouts are examined and the impact of the resulting singal-to-interference and noise ratio on the constellation sizes that can be supported, the BER and so on is considered. The primary metric used for our performance analysis is the error-free transmission rate, which is derived for our adaptive system. For the cellular scenarios considered, it can be found that the effect of interference is considerable and the performance of the adaptive MIMO SVD scheme is only marginally better than that provided by conventional diversity methods.     

Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis results obtained in the 1992 performance assessment for the waste isolation pilot plant

Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis results obtained in the 1992 performance assessment (PA) for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) are presented. The primary performance measure under study is the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) used in assessing compliance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) standard for the geologic disposal of radioactive waste (40 CFR 191, Subpart B). The analysis considers releases to the accessible environment initiated by exploratory drilling for natural resources and models cuttings removal to the surface due to drilling intrusions, brine and gas flow in the vicinity of the repository and through drilling intrusions away from the repository, radionuclide transport by the flow of brine through intruding boreholes, and brine flow and radionuclide transport in permeable formations overlying the repository (i.e., the Culebra Dolomite). The effects of 49 imprecisely known variables are assessed with techniques based on Latin hypercube sampling and regression analysis. In addition, the effects of several alternative conceptual models for radionuclide transport in the Culebra Dolomite are investigated. Important issues identified in the analysis include (1) the importance of characterizing retardations and solubilities for individual elements, (2) the impact of assumptions involving human activities, including the rate and properties of drilling intrusions, and (3) the need to resolve the question of whether a single-porosity or dual-porosity transport model is appropriate for use in the Culebra Dolomite.