Search

These instructions give guidelines for preparing papers for this publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent Special Section published in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics we introduced smart electronics. We presented a set of papers which were selected after rigorous review with a scope of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) approaches used for various levels of system abstractions, from device-level to system-level. In one school of thought energy-smart, security-smart, and response-smart are 3 dimensions of smart electronic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High precision register controls are indispensable in roll-to-roll (R2R) printing systems for mass manufacturing. In R2R printing systems, each gravure cylinder is driven by an individual motor and guiding rolls distributed between two adjacent gravure cylinders are driven by the tension of their wrapped web. In the speed-up phase, tension fluctuations caused by torque balance of guiding rolls generate register errors in each printing unit. Therefore, it is a challenging issue to design a control method to reduce the register errors. In this paper, a mechanical model of R2R printing systems in the speed-up phase is developed based on the principle of mass conservation and torque balance. A model-based feed-forward proportion-derivative controller is designed to reduce the register errors caused by the tension fluctuations. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation and experiments carried out on an industrial rotogravure printing press. A comparison with other control methods especially a well-tuned proportion differential control which is widely adopted by printing presses shows that the absolute maximum register error is drastically reduced and the average register error is greatly decreased by the proposed method. The results verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control method. Note to Practitioners—This paper presents control strategy for the speed-up phase in R2R printing system, particularly for printing systems with electronic line shafts. Few existing systematic research is relevant with the speed-up phase in the R2R printing system. This paper analyses the relationship of the register error and the web tension fluctuations between two adjacent gravure cylinders which are driven by the guiding rolls, then proposes the control strategy based on the identification of the acceleration of guiding rolls. The proposed method can be extended to other similar R2R systems. Simulation and industrial experiments suggest that the control method is feasible and has superior performance compared with the existing methods. In the future research, we will study the adaptive model representing the acceleration of guiding rolls in different R2R web systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a joint typicality framework for encoding and decoding nested linear codes in multi-user networks. This framework provides a new perspective on compute–forward within the context of discrete memoryless networks. In particular, it establishes an achievable rate region for computing a linear combination over a discrete memoryless multiple-access channel (MAC). When specialized to the Gaussian MAC, this rate region recovers and improves upon the lattice-based compute–forward rate region of Nazer and Gastpar, thus providing a unified approach for discrete memoryless and Gaussian networks. Furthermore, our framework provides some valuable insights on establishing the optimal decoding rate region for compute–forward by considering joint decoders, progressing beyond most previous works that consider successive cancellation decoding. Specifically, this paper establishes an achievable rate region for simultaneously decoding two linear combinations of nested linear codewords from $K$ senders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a two-stage approach to handle fixed-outline floorplanning for mixed size modules, named F-FM. F-FM combines the advantages of the analytical approach and the slicing tree representation. Thus, it is not only suitable for handling fixed-outline floorplanning but also can be extended to handle other important issues in floorplanning such as routability or thermal effect in addition to wirelength. Recently, low power has become big challenges in very large-scale integration designs, which makes voltage-island driven floorplanning more important than ever. Although the problem has been discussed by previous works, no paper considers signal wirelength, powerplanning, and voltage drop at the same time under the fixed-outline constraint. Thus, this paper extends F-FM to handle this problem and consider these issues by properly dividing modules in a voltage domain into several islands. The experimental results show our approach obtains the best results in these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an on-going need for faster, more accurate, and easier to implement threat identification systems for concealed electronics, to thwart terrorism and espionage attempts. Common electronics are used in the design of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), targeting military, and civilian populations, while concealed recording devices steal proprietary/confidential data, compromising both government and industrial resources. This paper discusses a novel, nonintrusive, repeatable, reliable, expandable, and simple-to-implement detection and identification (D&I) system for identifying threats by using unintended radiated emissions (URE). This paper differs from current URE proposals, by avoiding energy radiation. The proposed process also addresses big data problems involved in capturing and building databases of URE characteristics. Issue interpretation is utilized with URE data to distinguish between threat/nonthreat devices using multiple criteria decision analysis and other decision-making techniques to determine model and mode of hidden devices. System optimization, verified by testing, is used to improve the speed and accuracy of the identification algorithm. The system is developed with data from 130 devices and validated with 33 separate devices, which are representative of IED and espionage threats. Due to slow progress in the URE D&I field, the properties and potential of a more effective D&I system, compared to current methods, will be of interest to the explosive ordnance disposal, security services, electronic systems manufacturing, automated inventory, mobile application development communities, and potentially others as well. For a field that is not well documented, this paper provides a clear, concise, and detailed model for future research and applications of URE D&I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new methodology for automated design of power electronic systems realized through the use of artificial intelligence. Existing approaches do not consider the system's reliability as a performance metric or are limited to reliability evaluation for a certain fixed set of design parameters. The method proposed in this paper establishes a functional relationship between design parameters and reliability metrics, and uses them as the basis for optimal design. The first step in this new framework is to create a nonparametric surrogate model of the power converter that can quickly map the variables characterizing the operating conditions (e.g., ambient temperature and irradiation) and design parameters (e.g., switching frequency and dc link voltage) into variables characterizing the thermal stress of a converter (e.g., mean temperature and temperature variation of its devices). This step can be carried out by training a dedicated artificial neural network (ANN) either on experimental or simulation data. The resulting network is named as $\text{ANN}_{1}$ and can be deployed as an accurate surrogate converter model. This model can then be used to quickly map the yearly mission profile into a thermal stress profile of any selected device for a large set of design parameter values. The resulting data is then used to train $\text{ANN}_{2}$ , which becomes an overall system representation that explicitly maps the design parameters into a yearly lifetime consumption. To verify the proposed methodology, $\text{ANN}_{2}$ is deployed in conjunction with the standard converter design tools on an exemplary grid-connected PV converter case study. This study showed how to find the optimal balance between the reliability and output filter size in the system with respect to several design constraints. This paper is also accompanied by a comprehensive dataset that was used for training the ANNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a distributed storage system, where multiple storage nodes can be reconstructed simultaneously at a centralized location. This centralized multi-node repair (CMR) model is a generalization of regenerating codes that allow for bandwidth efficient repair of a single-failed node. This paper focuses on the tradeoff between the amount of data stored and repair bandwidth in the CMR model. In particular, repair bandwidth bounds are derived for the minimum storage multi-node repair (MSMR) and the minimum bandwidth multi-node repair (MBMR) operating points. The tightness of these bounds is analyzed via code constructions. The MSMR point is characterized by codes achieving this point under functional repair for the general set of CMR parameters, as well as with codes enabling exact repair for certain CMR parameters. The MBMR point, on the other hand, is characterized with exact repair codes for all CMR parameters for systems that satisfy a certain entropy accumulation property. Finally, the model proposed here is utilized for the secret sharing problem, where the codes for the multi-node repair problem are used to construct communication efficient secret sharing schemes with the property of bandwidth efficient share repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel system that allows elevating large structures by using a set of lifting towers that, adequately controlled with a synchronized operation, succeed in pulling the spatial mesh up to the height where it should stay. By doing so, the mounting of the spatial mesh can be carried out on the ground in an easier and, most important of all, safer way; it also gives rise to a shorter final time and, thereby, a cost reduction. This paper deals with the elevation system designed to pull the mesh up and specifically focuses on the electronic system that allows controlling their movement. Comments about the overall control that coordinates the operation of all of the mechanical structures involved are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern electronic systems are performing more and more safety-critical tasks, whereby a robust communication is crucial. To protect those communication channels, error detection and correction codes (EDCCs) are widely used. The very construction of an EDCC has an impact on the resiliency against electromagnetic interference. Within this paper, the effectiveness of several EDCCs is assessed and compared. It is found that the effectiveness depends on the ratio between the channel's bit rate and the frequency of the incoming disturbance. Specific focus is being given to incorrect data perceived as correct: false negatives. Each of the considered EDCCs has an increased vulnerability for false negatives at bit rates that have a specific ratio to the disturbance frequency. The main cause behind this is the repetitive or alternating bit patterns within the codes themselves. Finally, foundations are laid to develop codes that are as robust as possible against harsh electromagnetic disturbances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety and reliability of inverters play a significant role in stable power electronic system operations. Considering a railway vehicle air-conditioning inverter as a case study, this paper presents a generic open-circuit fault diagnosis method that can be applied to various inverter and control schemes. First, a detailed model of three-phase output currents under both normal and fault status is derived, and then the concept of space trajectory is introduced based on the three-phase output currents. The open-circuit faults of the inverter lead to output phase current distortion. Therefore, different types of faults have different space trajectories, and the corresponding shape of the space trajectory is considered to be a fault feature. Then, the fault is located by the direction vector and center-of-mass coordinate. The effectiveness and reliability of the diagnosis method are verified and analyzed using a hardware-in-the-loop test platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern power systems face several problems at frequencies above the range of traditional stability studies due to the increasing penetration of power electronic devices. This phenomenon has been recently referred to as electromagnetic transient stability and is a growing issue in systems with power electronic converters at any power and voltage level, such as FACTS, high-voltage DC, interfaces for grid connection of renewable energies, custom power devices for power quality enhancement, among others. The study of power systems stability is usually carried out by simulation tools that represent the power system through phasor models. However, due to the faster dynamics of modern systems, the harmonic interaction among the controllers, converters, and electric power components, recent research results suggest that some stability analyses should be conducted with models suitable for wider frequency ranges, e.g., electromagnetic transient models. This paper reviews the use of frequency domain methods to analyze the influence of the modeling approach of passive power components on the results of electromagnetic transient stability studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During routine commissioning of a steam turbine load-sharing system, serious low-load frequency instabilities were discovered. These instabilities were causing undamped oscillations in power and frequency to escalate until protective relays tripped a generator offline. Root-cause investigation led to a robust solution and some rather startling revelations about the implications of electronic governor controls and small (micro) grids. There are basically two ways to form an electronic governor control loop with droop: 1) speed control with a MW droop; or 2) MW control with a speed droop. The analysis in this paper shows one method to be superior under low-load conditions. The results of this analysis have implications for the frequency stability of the power grid today. Microgrids, green energy, distributed generation, and isolated industrial plants can all be susceptible to this instability. The authors estimate that approximately 60% of today's generation is prone to destabilize the power system frequency under low-load conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the extension of framework for automatic design space exploration (FADSE) tool using a meta-optimization approach, which is used to improve the performance of design space exploration algorithms, by driving two different multiobjective meta-heuristics concurrently. More precisely, we selected two genetic multiobjective algorithms: 1) non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II and 2) strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm 2, that work together in order to improve both the solutions’ quality and the convergence speed. With the proposed improvements, we ran FADSE in order to optimize the hardware parameters’ values of the grid ALU processor (GAP) micro-architecture from a bi-objective point of view (performance and hardware complexity). Using our developed approach we obtained better GAP instances (a configuration has for almost the same cycles per instruction – 1.00, the hardware complexity 38% smaller/better – 35.81 versus 58.61) in half of the time compared to a classical sequential optimization approach (5 days versus 10 days). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a 1.1-μm-pitch 33-Mpixel 240-fps backside-illuminated 3-D-stacked CMOS image sensor with three-stage cyclic-cyclic-successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is developed. The narrow-pitch interconnection technology that connects the pixels and arrayed ADCs inside the pixel area is described. The 3-D-stacked architecture, constructed using the interconnection technology, makes it possible to place a 1932 (H) × 4 (V) correlated-double-sampling/ADC array underneath the pixel area. Furthermore, the pipelined and parallel operation of the three-stage cyclic-cyclic-SAR ADC architecture effectively reduces the conversion time period and power consumption and achieves 12-b precision within one horizontal scan time of 0.92 μs. As a result, the interconnection technology and ADC architecture achieved a high frame rate of 240 fps in 33 Mpixels. Random noise of 3.6 e- and low power consumption of 3.0 W were attained at an extremely high pixel rate of 7.96 Gpixel/s. A good figure of merit is achieved compared with recently developed image sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional ultrasound probes have inherent limitations in some application scenarios. Because of their fixed shapes and sizes, they can hardly pass through small orifices to examine the target closely. With the recent development of microelectromechanical systems and flexible electronic technologies, collapsible and self-assembling devices are being considered as a potential approach to address this problem. This article presents an innovative transformable ultrasonic transducer (TUT), which can transform between a one-dimensional (1-D) linear array and a 2-D planar array with the ability of switching between different functions including 2-D/3-D imaging and high-intensity focused ultrasound beamforming. The transforming process is accomplished with a specially designed flexible printed circuit board inspired by a paper-folding mechanism. The electrical and acoustic properties of the developed transducer along with the acoustic field distribution in its different forms have been characterized. The 2-D/3-D imaging performances of the TUT have been also evaluated under 1-D and 2-D configurations, respectively. In addition, the performance of a focused concave transforming mode has been also discussed. The evaluation results suggest that TUT can maintain its performance under different structures with precise transforming control. The TUT device has the potential to considerably expand the applications of industrial and clinical ultrasound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To improve the comfort and user acceptance of the intelligent vehicle braking system, this paper proposes a control strategy for the electronic brake booster (Ebooster) that considers differences in driving behaviors. First, a real-vehicle driving data collection platform is built to collect the driving behavior data of 84 drivers under typical vehicle-following braking conditions. Subsequently, the k-means clustering algorithm optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to realize the cluster analysis of driving behaviors, and the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm optimized by the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to complete the identification of driving behaviors. Next, through the analysis of the boost characteristics of the self-designed Ebooster, driving behaviors are matched with boost characteristics, and a personalized basic boosting control strategy based on the driver behavior is designed. Finally, a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) bench and a real-vehicle test platform are designed and built to verify the effectiveness of the personalized control strategy of the Ebooster. The results show that this method can effectively identify the type of driver and make personalized adjustments to the basic boosting strategy of the Ebooster, which effectively improves the personalization of the braking system, resulting in a higher pedal response and user acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the throughput of spectrum sharing networks utilizing rate adaptation. We use some recent results on the achievable rates of finite block-length codes to analyze the secondary user (SU) throughput with a constraint on the primary user (PU) codeword drop probability. With codewords of finite length, we derive closed-form expressions for the SU activation probability and throughput. The results are obtained in different scenarios with perfect or no channel state information at the SU transmitter. As demonstrated numerically and analytically, using finite-length codewords and rate adaptation, there is considerable potential for the data transmission of unlicensed secondary users under different quality-of-service requirements of the licensed primary users. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an average dwell-time method for fault-tolerant control of a class of uncertain switched linear time-delay systems and also designs an algorithm to determine the parameters pertaining to the dwell-time condition. Compared to the literature results, this paper features the following: 1) the proposed method is independent of switching polices if switchings are slow enough in the average sense; 2) the proposed control design guarantees exponential stabilization of this class of time-delay linear systems with actuator faults; and 3) this method treats all actuators in a unified manner without a need to identify which are faulty or healthy actuators. The proposed method is applied to the water pollution control problem, for the first time, to deal with different ratios of stream flow rates to effluent flow rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to network tomography is the problem of identifiability, the ability to identify internal network characteristics uniquely from end-to-end measurements. This problem is often underconstrained even when internal network characteristics such as link delays are modeled as additive constants. While it is known that the network topology can play a role in determining the extent of identifiability, there is a lack in the fundamental understanding of being able to quantify it for a given network. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying additive link metrics in an arbitrary undirected network using measurement nodes and establishing paths/cycles between them. For a given placement of measurement nodes, we define and derive the “link rank” of the network—the maximum number of linearly independent cycles/paths that may be established between the measurement nodes. We achieve this in linear time. The link rank helps quantify the exact extent of identifiability in a network. We also develop a quadratic time algorithm to compute a set of cycles/paths that achieves the maximum rank. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a technique, GALAXY, to speed up multicircuit simulation, where each circuit under simulation is identical in schematic but different in some parameters. GALAXY is based on the successive chord method, where the inverse Jacobian matrix ( J ^-1 ) is reused to simulate many circuits whose solutions are similar. GALAXY also speeds up single-circuit simulation by reusing J ^-1 between consecutive time steps. Compared with a traditional Newton–Raphson (NR) simulator, on average, GALAXY reduces runtime of single-circuit and multicircuit simulation by 44% and 71%, without loss of accuracy. The number of NR iterations is reduced by 78%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a new network-on-chip (NoC)-reused test access mechanism (TAM) for testing multiple identical cores. It can test multiple cores concurrently and identify faulty cores to derate the chip by excluding the core. In order to minimize the test time, the TAM utilizes the majority value of test response data. All of the cores can thereby be tested in parallel and test costs (in both test pins and test time) are exactly the same as those for a single core. The hardware overhead is minimized by reusing the NoC infrastructures and transfer-counters are designed as a majority analyzer. The experimental results in this paper show that the proposed TAM can test multiple cores in the same time as a single core and with negligible hardware overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we propose a novel iron-tunnel recognition method to overcome the deterioration of the target or vehicle detection performance due to iron-tunnel clutters. Although a few studies on the reflection and diffraction on road surfaces have been conducted for automotive radar sensors, most of these studies did not consider the situation in which structures with larger reflection, such as an iron tunnel, are densely distributed. The proposed method measures the degree of spectral spreading through the analysis of the spectrum characteristics of the received radar signal under different road conditions. The proposed method can successfully detect iron tunnels. In addition, experimental results show that early detection and missing problem of a forward target vehicle in an iron tunnel under adaptive cruise control (ACC) is improved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we develop optimal energy-bandwidth allocation algorithms in fading channels for multiple energy harvesting transmitters. We first assume that the side information of both the channel states and the energy harvesting states is known for $K$ time slots a priori, and the battery capacity and the maximum transmission power in each time slot are bounded. The network consists of N$ transmitter-receiver pairs and the objective is to maximize the sum-rate of all communication links over the K$ time slots by assigning the transmission power and bandwidth for each transmitter in each slot. The problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem with constraints, where N$ is the number of the receivers, making it hard to solve with a generic convex solver. An iterative algorithm is proposed based on efficiently solving two subproblems in each iteration, that has an overall complexity of {\cal O}(NK^2). The convergence and the optimality of this algorithm are also shown. Moreover, a heuristic algorithm is also proposed for energy-bandwidth allocation based on causal information of channel and energy harvesting states. Simulation results show that the proposed causal and noncausal algorithms can make efficient use of the harvested energy and the available bandwidth. And they achieve significantly higher rates than some heuristic policies for energy and bandwidth allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A passive compressive device (PCD), which works at millimeter waves, is proposed in this paper. In a passive manner, the device allows to compress the signals from multiple separate channels into a single or a reduced number of channels. This permits a simplification of the transmitter or receiver chains for radar imaging applications. The PCD is a 3-D cavity that ensures each channel to be decorrelated with each other. If the transfer functions are known, the compressed signals are decompressed in postprocessing. This paper proposes a suitable method to estimate simultaneously the transfer functions of the PCD. This is validated by measurements in a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) configuration to produce a complex synthetic aperture radar image. Measurements revealed that the point spread function generated by the MIMO configuration with the use of the PCD leads to almost similar results, in terms of spatial resolution and sidelobe level ratio, as those of a single-input-multiple-output configuration (uniform amplitude), with a fewer receiving elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several industrial applications require specific electronic systems installed in harsh environments to perform measurements, monitoring, and control tasks such as in space exploration, aerospace missions, automotive industries, down-hole oil and gas industry, and geothermal power plants. The extreme environment could be surrounding high-, low-, and wide-range temperature, intense radiation, or even a combination of above conditions. We review, in this paper, the main leading applications that demand advanced technologies to fit the unconventional requirements of extreme operating conditions, discussing their main merits and limits compared to established and emerging technologies in this field, including silicon (Si), silicon on insulator (SOI), silicon germanium (SiGe), silicon carbide (SiC) as well as III–V semiconductors particularly the gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor. In spite of successfully exceeding extreme conditions borders by developing advanced semiconductor devices dedicated for harsh environments, especially in high-temperature applications, the packaging challenges are still limiting the reliability of the developed technologies. Those challenges are examined in this review in terms of limitations and proposed solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amount of electronic systems in agriculture machinery grows, becoming more complex and multifunctional. Due to the increasing number of devices connected to the network and the complexity of their functions, the current controller area network (CAN) becomes overloaded and CAN with flexible data rate (CAN FD) emerges as an alternative. This paper presents the simulation of an agriculture machine vehicular network using the higher layer protocols J1939 and ISO11783 (ISOBUS) and the performance comparison of the network using CAN, CAN FD 8 B and CAN FD 64 B. The presented contribution is mainly twofold: the proposal of an SAE J1939/ISOBUS compliant CAN FD 64 B model for a highly demanding vehicular network, and a detailed analysis of the real-time properties of this model compared to CAN and CAN FD 8 B. In the performed experiments, on the network permanent regime, periodic messages of machine control functions and network management data were sent by the devices connected to the network. The bus load usage, the response time, and jitter of these messages were analyzed to evaluate the real-time characteristics of the network. Compared to CAN, CAN FD had faster object pool transference, lower bus load usage, shorter worst case response time, and lower jitter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Packaging radio-frequency microelectromechanical systems (RF-MEMS) is mandatory for their integration in electronic systems. This paper discusses the integration of a Au−Ru/AlCu contact in a MEMS fabrication process with a wafer-level packaging (WLP) step through Al−Ge eutectic bonding. The Au contact is embedded in a movable fixed−fixed beam made of $30 ~ \mu \text{m}$ thick Si while Ru is used as a coating metal on top of the AlCu static electrode. The measured return loss and isolation of the contact, up to 40 GHz, are $\geq -1.7$ and $\leq -12$ dB respectively. The WLP Au−Ru/AlCu contact has an electrical resistance $\leq 1.2 ~ \Omega $ up to 3 million cycles in hot switching at 0.1 W before failing due to high electrical resistance. Au hillocking is identified as the only intrinsic limiting mechanism that can be mitigated by an appropriate design rule. It is demonstrated that Au−Ru/AlCu is a promising contact configuration, compatible with Al−Ge eutectic bonding, and can be integrated in a standard MEMS fabrication process flow for the development of a robust generation of WLP RF-MEMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amorphous oxide semiconductor thin film transistors and sensors constitute fundamental building blocks for a new generation of applications ranging from interactive displays and imaging to future electronic systems that are unconstrained by form factor. This makes the quest for high mobility materials processed at low temperatures even more compelling, to enable the layering of circuits and systems on plastic and possibly even paper substrates. Transparency is also an attractive feature that enables seamless embedding of electronics for the immersive ambient. This paper reviews the current status of the ubiquitous oxide semiconductor technology for flexible and transparent interactive displays, along with demonstrated examples of continuous thin film and nanowire systems for the transistor and sensor. Issues related to photo-sensing and active matrix operation are discussed along with solutions addressing the problem of threshold voltage instability and its compensation for fast recovery, particularly after light stress. Physics-based compact models for expedient design and simulation of analog and digital circuits are reviewed along with examples of key system building blocks. Finally we attempt to conceptualize a thin film transistor (TFT)-based fully heterogeneously integrated and autonomous system that can be realized using a combination of oxide and other technological routes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This issue's column is devoted to the M. Barry Carlton Award. The M. Barry Carlton Award acknowledges what is judged to be the best paper in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS (TAES). To help identify and assess what TAES paper is best, the Carlton Award considers papers published four years earlier in TAES. As such, this year's Carlton Award is the 2017 M. Barry Carlton Award. The award was established in 1958 after the early death of M. Barry Carlton in an air accident in 1957. The award is a means to honor a man who had dedicated much of his life to promoting the reliability of communications equipment, especially that relating to air transportation. It is one of the IEEE's oldest awards and supports a wonderful tradition of excellence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a sensitivity-enhanced thermoreflectance microscopy (TRM) system employing an electronic auto-balancing photoreceiver for effective thermal fault localization through a Si substrate. The proposed system in the auto-balanced detection not only improves the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by approximately five times compared to that achievable via normal detection but also mitigates the inherent system noise, such as pseudothermoreflectance signals, by using the optical zooming. Moreover, temperature variations as small as ~47 mK were detectable under the measurement conditions employed in this paper. Finally, we experimentally demonstrated clear localization of a thermal fault, which was dimly visible in the normal backside detection results, in an optical zoomed thermal image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real-time simulation based on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) is receiving more and more attention. However, up to now, the simulation scale for the power electronic system is not so satisfactory due to the real-time requirement and the FPGA resource limitation. This paper proposes a sub-microsecond level real-time simulation method for microgrids. The power converters are modeled with fixed-admittance models and simulated with a compact electromagnetic transients program (EMTP) algorithm. In the meanwhile, the distribution lines/cables are modeled with π-circuit models and simulated with a distributed circuit solution method, called the latency insertion method (LIM). As a result, the distribution generation (DG) systems are decoupled with each other and can be simulated in parallel. The case study shows that the proposed simulation method consumes much fewer FPGA resources compared with the traditional one. Besides, the time step can be much smaller and doesn't need to increase with the simulation scale. With these advantages, the real-time simulation of a microgrid consisting of three three-phase converters, three boost circuits and 21 three-phase lines can be achieved on the Xilinx Kintex-7 410T FPGA with a minmum time-step of 380 ns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FlexRay offers high-speed reliable transmission in the vehicle domain. Thus, it is one of the most popular in-vehicle communication protocols for the applications that are safety-critical or applications with very low transmission time requirement. Due to the real-time constraint, the worst case end-to-end delay (EED) for such applications transmitting over a shared bus must be known. This paper addresses the problem of computation of EED for a given set of tasks with precedence constraint and corresponding messages, which are scheduled with slot multiplexing for event-triggered communication over the dynamic segment of FlexRay. First, computing precise delay has been shown to be an intractable problem. Subsequently, motivated by the intractability, an efficient estimation technique has been proposed to compute approximate EED. Unlike the common practice of considering the network in isolation, we present a comprehensive timing analysis, which considers the effects of task execution as well. Moreover, EED is allowed to be greater than interactivation time of task graph. The extensive simulation has been performed on the test cases generated with uniform as well as normal distribution. Note to Practitioners—In the past few decades, due to the large-scale use and sophistication of automotive electronic systems, various in-vehicle communication networks and protocols are also evolving. FlexRay is one such in-vehicle communication protocol, which provides the mechanism for the fault-tolerant high-speed communication over FlexRay bus. FlexRay is widely being employed for safety-critical applications in the automotive domain. For such applications, often the timing constraint is imposed with a bound on the worst case EED. Thus, timing properties of the designed network must be verified before applying it on the real domain such that the worst case EED for the propagation of an event at sensor end to actuator end is known. The proposed estimation technique can be used to compute approximate EED for an application scheduled with other applications over the dynamic segment of FlexRay. In addition, various guidelines for designing the network in order to reduce overestimation have also been presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counterfeiting has unfortunately become a worldwide epidemic affecting electronic systems from consumer goods to military equipment, which seriously jeopardizes system security, reliability, and electronic vendors’ reputation. The counterfeit parts, e.g., integrated circuits (ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs), have shown a significant increase in type and number over the recent years. However, the existing counterfeit detection techniques deal with IC or PCB separately, and hence, they cannot verify the authenticity of an electronic system as a whole. In this paper, we propose concurrent IC and PCB authentication (CIPA), a novel methodology that concurrently verifies the authenticity of both IC and PCB through extracting the signature pairs generated by a ring oscillator (RO) array without/with PCB cavity resonance. With CIPA, remote authentication is allowable by transmitting the signatures between the verifier and the system vendor. The CIPA structure has shown insignificant area overhead (0.945% on average) when implemented on a number of benchmarks. Both CIPA and the benchmarks have been implemented on the authentic and counterfeit FPGA systems, and the results give 100% confidence in detecting counterfeit ones. Furthermore, the authenticity of PCB and IC (i.e., authentic or counterfeit) of the system under test can also be mined from CIPA signatures. According to the experimental results, systems composed of different authenticity states of PCB and IC are differentiated from each other with the confidence of 97.62%. The overall authentication time is $40.2~\mu \text{s}$ considering 50-MHz system clock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamic range of frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar sensors is often limited by the phase noise of the ramp signal. Especially at millimeter wave (mm-wave) frequencies, a low phase noise signal is very difficult to obtain. In this paper, a new system architecture, which is implemented in a low-cost, ultracompact FMCW radar monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) at 160 GHz, is proposed to address this topic. The approach is based on a frequency offset synthesizer, whose upconverting mixer is driven by a stabilized low phase noise local oscillator (LO) signal. This LO is generated by a fixed-frequency phase locked loop with a 2^N divider. The upconversion of the ramp signal with the stabilized LO signal leads to an excellent mm-wave phase noise of −89 dBc/Hz at a frequency offset of 1 MHz. By integrating the antennas on the MMIC, interconnects at mm-wave frequencies to package or printed circuit board are avoided and a simple assembly and interconnection technology is feasible. The ultracompact MMIC is realized on an area of only 2 mm2, including the integrated antennas. A precision below 5 \mu \textm for range measurements is demonstrated with the radar sensor. Additionally, the radar performance is evaluated with two different voltage-controlled oscillators for the generation of the ramp signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the optimization of a 36 V complimentary bipolar design by using a new depletion mode field-effect architecture for the collector of the bipolar that greatly expands the boundary of the familiar tradeoffs. This achieves an n-p-n with a measured \vert \beta at 1 V \times V_{a} at 18 \text{V}\vert = \vert 270\times1100\,\,\text{V}\vert , a JfT at 1 V = 28.7\,\,\mu \textA\mu \textm^\mathrm \mathbf -2 , and \vert fT at 1 V \times BV \vert = \vert 2.6 GHz \times58\,\,\textV\vert , with a p-n-p having a \vert \beta at 1 V \times V_{a} at 18 \text{V}\vert = \vert 250\times800\,\,\text{V}\vert , a JfT at 1 V = 27.0\,\,\mu \,\,\textA\mu \textm^\mathrm \mathbf -2 , and \vert fT at 1 V \times BV \vert = \vert 1.9 GHz \times69\,\,\textV\vert . While these performance enhancements appear to offer a lot with little expense, they do serve to reveal an additional tradeoff between \beta \times Va \times fT \times BV \times JfT and Linearity. This is where the curvature of the forward output characteristic curves quantified by the extrapolated Early voltage significantly changes over the voltage range \vert 0 –10 . Through the use of measured silicon results with calibrated TCAD simulations, the physics behind this depletion mode collector design is explained, and using this understanding, it ultimately shows how it is possible to limit the range of the associated nonlinear performance for low collector biases. Then, keeping linearity as a key performance target together with the field-effect architecture, the 36 V bipolar is rebalanced to achieve an n-p-n with a \vert \beta at 1 V \times Va at 18 V \times fT at 1 V $\times $ JfT at 1 V \times $ BV \times $ Linearity \vert = \vert 270 \times 220$ V \times2.6 V \times $ (0.2–30 V) Linearity \vert $ , and a p-n-p with a \vert \beta \times $ fT at 1 V \times $ JfT at 1 V \times $ BV \times $ Linearity \vert = \vert 185\times180$ V V $\times $ (0.2–30 V) Linearity $\vert $ . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first time, we present the electrostatic discharge (ESD) behavior of grounded gate tunnel FET (ggTFET) with detailed physical insight into the device operation, 3-D filamentation and failure under ESD stress conditions. Current as well as time evolution of the junction breakdown, device turn-ON, voltage snapback, and finally the unique failure mechanism is studied using both 2-D and 3-D technology computer aided design simulations. The interaction between the band-to-band tunneling, avalanche multiplication, and thermal carrier generation leading to voltage snapback and failure is presented in detail. In addition, electro-thermal instability initiated filamentation and snapback discovered in the ggTFET is explained. The impact of various technology and device design parameters on the ESD behavior and robustness of TFETs is discussed. This has helped developing guidelines to design ESD robust TFETs for efficient protection concepts. Finally, the charge device model behavior of ggTFET device is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A simple multiplier for the estimation of the maximum power yield of a solar panel may be realized with a pulsewidth modulator working as analog multiplier circuit. Though the output of the pulsewidth modulator multiplication is not proportional to the actual output power of the solar panel, it may be shown that its maximum follows the maximum of the power curve of the panel. The multiplier allows a complete analog implementation of the maximum power point tracker of the panel thus keeping the simplicity needed in robust electronic systems. This paper presents the working principle of the maximum power point regulator, its design procedure, and a practical implementation for a low power solar panel, 7.1 V and 487 mA, used in small satellite platform applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impulse Radiating Antenna (IRA) is a highly efficient antenna that has a number of applications in both civilian and military sectors. These antennae produce fast rising pulses in a narrow beam that can give rise to high intensity electromagnetic fields having a wide impact on electrical and electronic systems. One such area where the impact becomes prominent is the present day telecommunication network. This system consists of buried coaxial cables connected to sensitive equipments at their terminations. Henceforth, there could be situations where the incident IRA field can interfere with the cables laid in the area. As the cables pass over different regions with varied soil texture and characteristics, the proportion of the IRA field incident on it will vary, that is dependent upon the nature of the soil in which the cable is buried. This paper reports the response of different types of soils to incident IRA fields and the induced voltage in a cable buried in such soils. A case study of different types of soils is also included in the paper. It is found that the soils in industrial areas are more prone to electromagnetic interference from IRA rather than in a highly moist ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a size-compact and monolithically integrated millimeter-wave 16-way high-power combiner for advanced radio-frequency (RF) electronics applications is developed featuring a wide operational bandwidth and high isolations between the combiner's adjacent ports. The proposed combiner is operating at the X band and is composed of fifteen 3-dB directional coupler units that are properly configured to achieve the overall structural compactness. The combiner is fast-prototyped as a single part by employing a metallic three-dimensional (3-D) printing technique, which successfully overcomes the difficulty in its monolithic implementation by using conventional subtractive manufacturing techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that the 16-way power combiner achieves an approximately 21% operational bandwidth (8.5–10.5 GHz) at the X band with port isolations of more than 20 dB, an amplitude imbalance of about ±1 dB, a phase deviation of around ±1°, and good return and insertion losses. The excellent RF performance of the combiner makes it a good candidate for applications in multiport high-power electronics systems where highly efficient power transmission and conversion among different ports are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electromagnetic interference filters are broadly used in power electronic systems in order to respect electromagnetic compatibility normative constraints, which considerably increase overall cost and volume mainly because of the common-mode (CM) inductor. In this paper, a new method to calculate the optimal volume of the CM inductor is proposed. It takes into account core saturation issues that may greatly impact inductor volume and filter performances. Consequently, it is shown that in some cases, increasing the inductance value up to the best value can significantly reduce the filter volume in addition to further enhancing the filter attenuation. It is also shown that different nearly-best inductor geometrical parameters with different shape factors can be obtained, which provides an important degree of freedom to designers while introducing the filter in the energy conversion system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An error-erasure channel is a simple noise model that introduces both errors and erasures. While the two types of errors can be corrected simultaneously with error-correcting codes, it is also known that any linear code allows for first correcting errors and then erasures in two-step decoding. In particular, a carefully designed parity-check matrix not only allows for separating erasures from errors but also makes it possible to efficiently correct erasures. The separating redundancy of a linear code is the number of parity-check equations in a smallest parity-check matrix that has the required property for this error-erasure separation. In a sense, it is a parameter of a linear code that represents the minimum overhead for efficiently separating erasures from errors. While several bounds on separating redundancy are known, there still remains a wide gap between upper and lower bounds except for a few limited cases. In this paper, using probabilistic combinatorics and design theory, we improve both upper and lower bounds on separating redundancy. We also show a relation between parity-check matrices for error-erasure separation and special matrices, called X-codes, for data compaction circuits in VLSI testing. This leads to an exponentially improved bound on the size of an optimal X-code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper obtains the first degrees of freedom (DoFs) bound that is provably sensitive tonetworkcoherence time, i.e., coherence time in an interference network, where all channels experience the same coherence patterns. This is accomplished by a novel adaptation of the aligned image sets bound and settles various open problems noted previously by Naderi and Avestimehr and by Gouet al.For example, a necessary and sufficient condition is obtained for the optimality of 1/2 DoF per user in a partially connected interference network, where the channel state information at the receivers (CSIRs) is perfect, the channel state information at the transmitters (CSITs) is instantaneous but limited to finite precision, and the network coherence time is $T_{c}=1$. The surprising insight that emerges is that even with perfect CSIR and instantaneous finite precision CSIT, the network coherence time matters, i.e., it has a DoF impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting equivalence classes of injected faults for functional verification of electronic systems is an important task because it helps reducing the number of faults to qualify a verification environment, and hence, improves the performance of qualification process and the validation time required for large-scale electronic systems. This paper describes an efficient way of detecting equivalent injected faults in a mapped netlist in order to speedup the qualification process of a verification environment for functional safety. The presented fault models include general faults resulting in arbitrary functional changes, in addition to conventional stuck-at faults. The solution is based on structural pruning and functional analysis performed by a synergistic combination of iterative Boolean satisfiability and guided simulation. It should be noted that traditional brute-force-like methods would take many hours or even days to identify thousands of equivalent functional faults injected to a small circuit with only hundred of cells. The proposed approach can achieve excellent fault reduction ratios within few seconds for such small circuits. The implementation also scales well for the largest ISCAS’89 and OpenCores benchmarks containing over 35K gates and 490K general functional faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of designing sequence set with good correlation properties has received considerable attention due to its numerous applications in many active sensing and communication systems. For example, a multiple-input multiple-output radar system transmits orthogonal waveforms or zero correlation zone sequences to achieve a long virtual aperture, which results in enhanced parameter identifiability and improved resolution. However, it is difficult to design sequence set with accurately controlled correlation properties due to numerous nonconvex and highly nonlinear inequality constraints. In this paper, new sequence set design methods, based on the local integrated sidelobe level and the local peak sidelobe level metrics, are proposed to tackle the optimization problems under the nonconvex and nonlinear inequality constraints to meet the correlation requirements. Numerical examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radar radio source (RRS) recognition plays an important role in the fields of military electronic support systems (ESM) and civilian autonomous driving. The rapid development of machine learning technology, especially deep learning, has effectively and efficiently improved RRS intelligent recognition performances when operating in the increasingly complex electromagnetic environment. However, the data sampling limitation and computation cost are still severe challenges in real RRS recognition scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel network based on meta-transfer learning, called RRSARNet, to achieve effective adaptive RRS recognition in the context of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). First, by using the short-time Fourier transform, a six-type small samples RRS simulation dataset with different SNR levels is constructed. Then, a novel RRSARNet, based on metric learning, is proposed, which consists of a four-layer embedding module and a four-layer relational module. Finally, the RRS dataset is divided into training, supporting and testing subsets, which are used to train and test the RRSARNet in a meta-transfer learning method. Experiments on the RRS dataset show that the proposed RRSARNet can achieve an overall accuracy (OA) above 96% and 99% when the SNR is above −15 dB and −10 dB, respectively. Even when the SNR is -30 dB, OA can reach more than 70%. For 5-way 1-shot and 5-way 5-shot experiments, the inference time of an image is about 0.043 and 0.140 milliseconds, respectively. Besides, experiments on the RRS simulation dataset and the two benchmark datasets, the RRSARNet performs better or more competitive than many existing state-of-the-art technologies in terms of recognition accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nested loops represent a significant portion of application runtime in multimedia and DSP applications, an important domain of applications for coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs). While conventional approaches to mapping nested loops utilize only a single-dimensional pipelining, which is either along the innermost loop or along an outer loop, in this paper, we explore an orthogonal approach of pipelining along multiple loop dimensions by first flattening the loop nest. To remedy the inevitable problem of repetitive outer-loop computation in flattened loops, we present a small set of special operations that can effectively reduce the number and frequency of micro-operations in the pipelined loop. We also present a loop transformation technique that can make our special operations applicable to a broader range of loops, including those with triangular iteration spaces. Our experimental results using imperfect loops from StreamIt benchmarks demonstrate that our special operations can cover a large portion of operations in flattened loops, improve performance of nested loops by nearly 30% over using loop flattening only, and achieve near-ideal executions on CGRAs for imperfect loops. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea of proxying network connectivity has been proposed as an efficient mechanism to maintain network presence on behalf of idle devices, so that they can “sleep.” The concept has been around for many years; alternative architectural solutions have been proposed to implement it, which lead to different considerations about capability, effectiveness and energy efficiency. However, there is neither a clear understanding of the potential for energy saving nor a detailed performance comparison among the different proxy architectures. In this paper, we estimate the potential energy saving achievable by different architectural solutions for proxying network connectivity. Our work considers the tradeoff between the saving achievable by putting idle devices to sleep and the additional power consumption to run the proxy. Our analysis encompasses a broad range of alternatives, taking into consideration both implementations already available in the market and prototypes built for research purposes. We remark that the main value of our work is the estimation under realistic conditions, taking into consideration power measurements, usage profiles, and proxying capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Miniature electronic systems are needed in a rapidly expanding array of applications ranging from wearable devices to robotics. This paper describes a production technique that utilizes environmentally friendly processes and relatively simple equipment to fabricate miniature system modules from leadless packaged components. Fine-feature nanoparticle silver conductors are used to interconnect leadless components that are grouped together in a monolithic block. The silver conductors are fabricated by filling laser-ablated channels with nanosilver paste followed by curing at modest temperatures. Scale sizes lie at the commercially available state of the art, and as an added benefit, the fabricated modules are fully encapsulated and mechanically rugged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]