Switched‐Capacitor Variable Gain Amplifier with Operational Amplifier Preset Technique

We present a novel operational amplifier preset technique for a switched‐capacitor circuit to reduce the acquisition time by improving the slewing. The acquisition time of a variable gain amplifier (VGA) using the proposed technique is reduced by 30% compared with a conventional one; therefore, the power consumption of the VGA is decreased. For additional power reduction, a programmable capacitor array scheme is used in the VGA. In the 0.13 μm CMOS process, the VGA, which consists of three‐stages, occupies 0.33 mm² and dissipates 19.2 mW at 60 MHz with a supply voltage of 1.2 V. The gain range is 36.03 dB, which is controlled by a 10‐bit control word with a gain error of ±0.68 LSB.     

Improved device performances in polymer light-emitting diodes using a stamp transfer printing process

The device performances of spin-coated and stamp transfer printed devices were compared. There was little difference of morphology between the spin-coated and stamp transfer printed devices. However, the stamp transfer printing process was better than the spin-coating process in terms of current density, light-emitting efficiency and lifetime. In particular, the lifetime of the stamp transfer printed device was doubled compared with that of the spin-coated device.     

Double-Layer antireflection coating design for semi-infinite one-dimensional photonic Crystals

A theoretical formalism is established for double-layer (DL) antireflection coating (ARC) on a one-dimensional (1-D) photonic crystal (PC). Conventional DL-ARC for a bulk is equally applicable for a 1-D PC when the bulk substrate index is replaced with the optical admittance, which can be obtained from the electromagnetic Bloch waves of the infinite 1-D PC. Numerical calculations are performed for a model structure composed of GaAs and AlAs-oxide layers to confirm the validity of the theory. In terms of realization and practicality, this DL-ARC is expected to be superior to the single-layer version.     

Thermal buffer materials for enhancement of device performance of organic light emitting diodes fabricated by laser imaging process

Laser Induced Thermal Imaging (LITI) is a laser addressed thermal patterning technology with unique advantages such as an excellent uniformity of transfer film thickness, a capability of multilayer stack transfer and a possibility to fabricate high resolution as well as large-area display. Nevertheless, it has been an obstacle to use such a laser imaging process as a commercial technology so far because of serious deterioration of the device performances plausibly due to a re-orientation of the molecular stacking especially in the emitting layer during thermal transfer process. To improve device performances, we devised a new concept to suppress the thermal degradation during such kind of thermal imaging process by using a high molecular weight small molecular species with large steric hindrance as well as high thermostability as a thermal buffer layer to realize highly efficient LITI devices. As a result, we obtained very high relative efficiency (by EQE) up to 91.5% at 1000 cd/m² from the LITI devices when we utilize 10-(naphthalene-2-yl)-3-(phenanthren-9-yl)spiro[benzo[ij]tetraphene-7,9′-fluorene] as a thermal buffer material.     

Variable length signal detection framework for cognitive radio systems

The cognitive radio (CR) system opportunistically utilizes the frequency bands temporally unoccupied by the primary user. In the CR system, the energy or cyclostationary detector is used to detect the primary user signal. For protecting the primary user tightly, the signal detection time can be very long, which leads to inefficiency in the CR system. Thus, we propose a novel signal detector that greatly reduces the average detection time. The proposed detector periodically decides whether it terminates the detection process or receives more input signal for more information. Therefore, the proposed detector has variable detection time. We will call the proposed detector the variable length signal detector (VLSD). The VLSD is designed by using a partially observable Markov decision process framework for optimal performance. We present the numerical results showing that the VLSD requires much smaller average detection time compared with the traditional fixed length signal detector to achieve a given detection error probability. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

High current conduction with high mobility by non-radiative charge recombination interfaces in organic semiconductor devices

We report a unique non-radiative p-n-p junction structure to provide high current conduction with high mobility in organic semiconductor devices. The current conduction was improved by increasing p-n junctions made with intrinsic p-type hole transport layer and n-type electron transport layer. The excellent hole mobility of 5.3 × 10^?1 cm²/V s in this p-n-p device configuration is measured by the space charge limited current method with an electric field of 0.3 MV/cm. Enhanced current conduction of 248% at 4.0 V was observed in fluorescent blue organic light-emitting diodes with introduction of non-radiative p-n-p-n-p junction interfaces. Thereupon, the power efficiency at 1000 cd/m² was improved by 22% and the driving voltage also was reduced by 17%, compared to that of no interface device. Such high current conduction with high mobility is attributed to the carrier recombination at p-n-p interfaces through coulombic interaction. This non-radiative p-n-p junction structure suggested in this report can be very useful for many practical organic semiconductor device applications.     

High-Efficiency Power Amplifier Using Novel Dynamic Bias Switching

A novel bias-switching scheme for a high-efficiency power amplifier is proposed. Two voltage levels for the drain bias of the RF power amplifier are generated using a combination of a class E dc/ac inverter and a class E rectifier with offset voltage. When signal peaks occur, the output of the class E dc/ac inverter is rectified and the rectified dc is added to the offset voltage by the class E rectifier, which boosts the drain bias of the RF power amplifier. Except during peaks, the drain bias of the RF power amplifier is connected to the offset voltage directly. Since the efficiency when there are no peaks is very high due to the direct connection between the offset voltage and drain bias, the overall efficiency of the RF power amplifier can be improved dramatically in high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) systems. The measured results show that the drain bias of the RF power amplifier is boosted up to approximately 1.8 times the offset voltage when the RF peaks generate. The overall efficiency of the proposed bias-switching amplifier is improved by 62% compared to that of the fixed bias amplifier in high PAPR systems     

20% External Quantum Efficiency in Solution‐Processed Blue Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescent Devices

Highly efficient solution‐processed blue thermally activated delayed fluorescent (TADF) devices are developed by designing soluble blue TADF emitters. The solubility and emission color could be managed by introducing F as an electron withdrawing unit instead of CN. Two soluble blue TADF emitters are synthesized and show a high external quantum efficiency of 20.0% with a color coordinate of (0.16,0.26), and it is the best quantum efficiency reported in solution‐processed TADF devices. The device performances of the solution‐processed blue TADF devices are comparable to those of vacuum‐processed blue TADF devices.     

Speech Enhancement Using Phase‐Dependent A Priori SNR Estimator in Log‐Mel Spectral Domain

We propose a novel phase‐based method for single‐channel speech enhancement to extract and enhance the desired signals in noisy environments by utilizing the phase information. In the method, a phase‐dependent a priori signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) is estimated in the log‐mel spectral domain to utilize both the magnitude and phase information of input speech signals. The phase‐dependent estimator is incorporated into the conventional magnitude‐based decision‐directed approach that recursively computes the a priori SNR from noisy speech. Additionally, we reduce the performance degradation owing to the one‐frame delay of the estimated phase‐dependent a priori SNR by using a minimum mean square error (MMSE)‐based and maximum a posteriori (MAP)‐based estimator. In our speech enhancement experiments, the proposed phase‐dependent a priori SNR estimator is shown to improve the output SNR by 2.6 dB for both the MMSE‐based and MAP‐based estimator cases as compared to a conventional magnitude‐based estimator.     

Walsh coded training signal aided time domain channel estimation for MIMO-OFDM systems

This letter proposes a novel Walsh coded training signal design and decoding method to estimate the channel response in MIMO-OFDM systems. The Walsh coded training signals, designed to be orthogonal in the time domain, facilitate the separation of the desired training signal from the received mixed signal and the estimation of the channel response. The proposed channel estimation method is directly applicable to practical MIMO-OFDM systems with null subcarriers and exhibits nearly the same performance as Li?s original channel estimator [5] at a much reduced computational complexity.