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Human factor causes most of the road accidents; for improving traffic safety, advanced driver assistance system and autonomous driving have become active research. The most significant challenge of these systems is the development of a reliable obstacle detection which can recognize pedestrians and pedestrian-like objects on the road from color images and thermal images. Consequently, the object detection based on neural networks, such as YOLO [1] , is emerging as a solution for identifying obstacles with various appearance. Although the convolutional neural network provides a robust and reliable result, it still involves substantial computational costs and hard to port to an embedded device. This work intends to improve the performance of YOLO and aims at presenting a real-time obstacle detection system on an integrated device.

In this paper, the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing signal without inserting guard subintervals (NG-OFDM) is considered and combined with spectral precoding to achieve high spectrum compactness. In order to reject interblock interference among received NG-OFDM blocks over dispersive channels, a guard subinterval in each received block is removed at the receiver and this turns the resultant receiver to be nonorthogonal over subcarrier subchannels and thus subject to artificial intercarrier interference. It is shown that the proposed spectrally precoded NG-OFDM system can provide channel capacity very close to nonprecoded and spectrally precoded OFDM using cyclic prefix (CP-OFDM) when the removal guard ratio is small, and much higher channel capacity per unit bandwidth than spectrally precoded CP- OFDM conveying the same data rate provided that a small out-of-band power proportion is required.

For advance node such as 14nm technology and beyond, back end of line interconnect has implemented self-aligned via (SAV) schemes for better via-metal short process window [1]. A TiN metal hard mask (MHM) is used for the trench pattern definition, after which via lithography and partial via (PV) etch is performed where the TiN was opened. The via etch condition has very good selectivity so that via is formed in a self-aligned fashion by TiN HM [2]. It is indeed to have significant benefit of via to metal short [3]. However, one of the trade off in SAV scheme is the via under etch that whether or not via can well land on an opened oxide area during PV etch. To define the contact area between via resist hole and opened HM oxide as an effective area for via to open successfully. “Fig. 1” shows the effective area change during process variation due to Via alignment, Via photo resist CD variation (Via ADICD) and post hard mask etch CD variation (AMICD). “Fig. 2” shows the mechanism of this under etch failure mode and typical TEM image from 64nm metal pitch test vehicle. In this work, we try to enlarge the process window by an aggressive AMICD targeting in combining with a higher density TiN material to maintain profile.