Query: Modified Wilkinson Power Dividers for Millimeter-Wave Integrated Circuits

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Characterization of liquid crystal polymer (LCP) material and transmission lines on LCP substrates from 30 to 110 GHz <=SEP=> Liquid crystal polymer (LCP) is a material that has gained attention as a potential high-performance microwave substrate and packaging material. This investigation uses several methods to determine the electrical properties of LCP for millimeter-wave frequencies. Microstrip ring resonators and cavity resonators are measured in order to characterize the dielectric constant (/spl epsi//sub r/) and loss tangent (tan/spl delta/) of LCP above 30 GHz. The measured dielectric constant is shown to be steady near 3.16, and the loss tangent stays below 0.0049. In addition, various transmission lines are fabricated on different LCP substrate thicknesses and the loss characteristics are given in decibels per centimeter from 2 to 110 GHz. Peak transmission-line losses at 110 GHz vary between 0.88-2.55 dB/cm, depending on the line type and geometry. These results show, for the first time, that LCP has excellent dielectric properties for applications extending through millimeter-wave frequencies.

Monolithic Low Cost Ka-Band Wilkinson Power Dividers on Flexible Organic Substrates <=SEP=> A millimeter wave Wilkinson power divider is presented on a thin and durable organic substrate, along with an analysis of bend topologies to reduce coupling between the output paths. The divider provides excellent performance across the entire Ka-band from 27 to 40 GHz. Insertion loss is approximately 0.3 dB and isolation between the output ports is around 30 dB at the design frequency.

Liquid crystal polymer (LCP) for microwave/millimeter wave multilayer packaging <=SEP=> This paper presents characterization and analysis of liquid crystal polymer materials for microwave and millimeter multi-layer packaging. Processing techniques have been developed to fabricate interconnects on this new LCP material. The experimental results demonstrate that an interconnect on LCP achieves a measured insertion loss of less than 0.1 dB/mm up to 50 GHz. This material is highly suitable for microwave and millimeter wave packaging.

Wideband coplanar waveguide RF probe pad to microstrip transitions without via holes <=SEP=> A novel via-less coplanar waveguide (CPW) to microstrip transition is discussed and design rules based on simulations and experimental results are presented. This transition demonstrates a maximum insertion loss of 1 dB over the frequency range from 10 GHz to 40 GHz with a value of 0.4 dB at 20 GHz. This transition could find a variety of applications due to its compatibility with RF systems-on-a chip, low loss performance, low cost and its ease of fabrication.

A broadband Wilkinson balun using microstrip metamaterial lines <=SEP=> A metamaterial balun that converts a single-ended input to a differential output over a large bandwidth is presented. The device also exhibits excellent return loss, isolation, and through characteristics over the same frequency band. The balun comprises a Wilkinson divider, followed by a +90/spl deg/ negative-refractive-index (NRI) metamaterial (MM) phase-shifting line along the top branch, and a -90/spl deg/ MM phase-shifting line along the bottom branch. Utilizing MM lines for both the +90/spl deg/ and -90/spl deg/ branches allows the slopes of their phase responses to be matched, resulting in a broadband differential output signal. The theoretical performance of the balun is verified through circuit simulations and measurements of a fabricated prototype at 1.5 GHz. The MM balun exhibits a measured differential output phase bandwidth (180/spl deg//spl plusmn/10/spl deg/) of 1.16 GHz (77%), from 1.17 to 2.33 GHz. The measured isolation and return loss for all three ports remain below -10 dB over a bandwidth in excess of 2 GHz, while the output quantities |S/sub 21/| and |S/sub 31/| remain above -4 dB from 0.5 to 2.5 GHz.

Mop: an efficient and generic runtime verification framework <=SEP=> Monitoring-Oriented Programming (MOP1) [21, 18, 22, 19] is a formal framework for software development and analysis, in which the developer specifies desired properties using definable specification formalisms, along with code to execute when properties are violated or validated. The MOP framework automatically generates monitors from the specified properties and then integrates them together with the user-defined code into the original system.
 The previous design of MOP only allowed specifications without parameters, so it could not be used to state and monitor safety properties referring to two or more related objects. In this paper we propose a parametric specification formalism-independent extension of MOP, together with an implementation of JavaMOP that supports parameters. In our current implementation, parametric specifications are translated into AspectJ code and then weaved into the application using off-the-shelf AspectJ compilers; hence, MOP specifications can be seen as formal or logical aspects.
 Our JavaMOP implementation was extensively evaluated on two benchmarks, Dacapo [14] and Tracematches [8], showing that runtime verification in general and MOP in particular are feasible. In some of the examples, millions of monitor instances are generated, each observing a set of related objects. To keep the runtime overhead of monitoring and event observation low, we devised and implemented a decentralized indexing optimization. Less than 8% of the experiments showed more than 10% runtime overhead; in most cases our tool generates monitoring code as efficient as the hand-optimized code. Despite its genericity, JavaMOP is empirically shown to be more efficient than runtime verification systems specialized and optimized for particular specification formalisms. Many property violations were detected during our experiments; some of them are benign, others indicate defects in programs. Many of these are subtle and hard to find by ordinary testing.

A Low Voltage Delta-Sigma Fractional Frequency Divider for Multi-band WSN Frequency Synthesizers <=SEP=> A 1 V low voltage delta-sigma fractional-N frequency divider for multi-band (780/868/915 MHz and 2.4 GHz) WSN frequency synthesizers is presented. The frequency divider consists of a dual-modulus prescaler, a pulse-swallow counter and a delta-sigma modulator. The high-speed and low-voltage phase-switching dualmodulus prescaler is used in the frequency divider. Low threshold voltage transistors are applied to overcome low voltage supply and forward phase-switching technique is adopted to prevent glitches. The modified deltasigma modulator with long output sequence length and less spurs is adopted to minimize the fractional spurs. The frequency divider is designed in 0.18 μm TSMC RF CMOS technology under 1 V supply instead of the standard 1.8 V supply. The total chip area is 1190 μm × 485 μm including I/O pads. The post simulation results show the frequency divider operates normally over a wide range of 1.3-5.0 GHz and the core circuit (without test buffers) consumes 2.3 mW. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.

A high-accuracy method for fine registration of overlapping point clouds <=SEP=> This paper presents a high-accuracy method for fine registration of two partially overlapping point clouds that have been coarsely registered. The proposed algorithm, which is named dual interpolating point-tosurface method, is principally a modified variant of point-to-surface Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. The original correspondences are established by adopting a dual surface fitting approach using B-spline interpolation. A novel auxiliary pair constraint based on the surface fitting approach, together with surface curvature information, is employed to remove unreliable point matches. The combined constraint directly utilizes global rigid motion consistency in conjunction with local geometric invariant to reject false correspondences precisely and efficiently. The experimental results involving a number of realistic point clouds demonstrate that the new method can obtain accurate and robust fine registration for pairwise 3D point clouds. This method addresses highest accuracy alignment with less focus on recovery from poor coarse registrations. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Rethink energy accounting with cooperative game theory <=SEP=> Energy accounting determines how much a software principal contributes to the total system energy consumption. It is the foundation for evaluating software and for operating system based energy management. While various energy accounting policies have been tried, there is no known way to evaluate them directly simply because it is hard to track all hardware usage by software in a heterogeneous multicore system like modern smartphones and tablets.
 In this work, we argue that energy accounting should be formulated as a cooperative game and that the Shapley value provides the ultimate ground truth for energy accounting policies. We reveal the important flaws of existing energy accounting policies based on the Shapley value theory and provide Shapley value-based energy accounting, a practical approximation of the Shapley value, for battery-powered mobile systems. We evaluate this approximation against existing energy accounting policies in two ways: (i) how well they identify the top energy consuming applications, and (ii) how effective they are in system energy management. Using a prototype based on Texas Instruments Pandaboard and smartphone workload, we experimentally demonstrate existing energy accounting policies can deviate by 400% in attributing energy consumption to running applications and can be up to 25% less effective in system energy management when compared to Shapley value-based energy accounting.

Challenges in developing opinion mining tools for social media <=SEP=> While much work has recently focused on the analysis of social media in order to get a feel for what people think about current topics of interest, there are, however, still many challenges to be faced. Text mining systems originally designed for more regular kinds of texts such as news articles may need to be adapted to deal with facebook posts, tweets etc. In this paper, we discuss a variety of issues related to opinion mining from social media, and the challenges they impose on a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, along with two example applications we have developed in very different domains. In contrast with the majority of opinion mining work which uses machine learning techniques, we have developed a modular rule-based approach which performs shallow linguistic analysis and builds on a number of linguistic subcomponents to generate the final opinion polarity and score.

A Controlled Pilot-Outcome Study of Sensory Integration ( SI ) in the Treatment of Complex Adaptation to Traumatic Stress <=SEP=> This study tested whether sensory integration (SI) treatment combined with psychotherapy would improve symptom outcome over psychotherapy alone in the treatment of complex posttraumatic stress, as measured by the Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) clinical construct in a group of 10 adult patients with histories of childhood abuse. DESNOS symptoms were assessed at three time periods (T1, baseline; T2, after experimental group SI treatment; and T3, after wait-list control group SI treatment) using the Structured Interview for Disorders of Extreme Stress (SIDES). The Sensory Learning Program (SLP), developed by the Sensory Learning Institute of Boulder, Colorado, was used as the SI treatment modality. Results indicated significant differential improvement for the group treated with SLP in SIDES Total Score (T1/T2 and T2/T3), Self Perception (T1/T2 and T2/T3), Affect Regulation (T2/T3), and Alterations in Meaning (T1/T2).

B2C web site quality and emotions during online shopping episodes: An empirical study <=SEP=> This paper explores the impact of the quality of a web site on the cognitive process leading to consumers’ emotions—considered as direct antecedents to shopping behaviors and operationalized as mental states of readiness arising from the appraisal of events. A parsimonious theoretical model was defined and tested with data collected from 215 web-shopping episodes during which consumers were shopping for low-touch products. Analysis of the results showed that web site quality had a positive impact on the cognitive appraisal of situational state, which in turn influenced five of the six emotions of the proposed model: liking, joy, pride, dislike, and frustration. Results also showed that a substantial number of shoppers experienced intensively the emotions of liking and joy. Moreover, this paper highlights several implications that could help managers and webmasters improve the quality of their web sites. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

An Efficient Character-Level Neural Machine Translation <=SEP=> Neural machine translation aims at building a single large neural network that can be trained to maximize translation performance. The encoder-decoder architecture with an attention mechanism achieves a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based systems on the task of English-to-French translation. However, the use of large vocabulary becomes the bottleneck in both training and improving the performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture to train a deep character-level neural machine translation by introducing a decimator and an interpolator. The decimator is used to sample the source sequence before encoding while the interpolator is used to resample after decoding. Such a deep model has two major advantages. It avoids the large vocabulary issue radically; at the same time, it is much faster and more memory-efficient in training than conventional character-based models. More interestingly, our model is able to translate the misspelled word like human beings.

Naturalizing consciousness: a theoretical framework. <=SEP=> Consciousness has a number of apparently disparate properties, some of which seem to be highly complex and even inaccessible to outside observation. To place these properties within a biological framework requires a theory based on a set of evolutionary and developmental principles. This paper describes such a theory, which aims to provide a unifying account of conscious phenomena.

Image-based Calorie Content Estimation for Dietary Assessment <=SEP=> In this paper, we present an image-analysis based approach to calorie content estimation for dietary assessment. We make use of daily food images captured and stored by multiple users in a public Web service called Food Log. The images are taken without any control or markers. We build a dictionary dataset of 6512 images contained in Food Log the calorie content of which have been estimated by experts in nutrition. An image is compared to the ground truth data from the point of views of multiple image features such as color histograms, color correlograms and SURF fetures, and the ground truth images are ranked by similarities. Finally, calorie content of the input food image is computed by linear estimation using the top n ranked calories in multiple features. The distribution of the estimation shows that 79% of the estimations are correct within ±40% error and 35% correct within ±20% error.

A religious upbringing reduces the influence of genetic factors on disinhibition: evidence for interaction between genotype and environment on personality. <=SEP=> Information on personality, on anxiety and depression and on several aspects of religion was collected in 1974 Dutch families consisting of adolescent and young adult twins and their parents. Analyses of these data showed that differences between individuals in religious upbringing, in religious affiliation and in participation in church activities are not influenced by genetic factors. The familial resemblance for different aspects of religion is high, but can be explained entirely by environmental influences common to family members. Shared genes do not contribute to familial resemblances in religion. The absence of genetic influences on variation in several dimensions of religion is in contrast to findings of genetic influences on a large number of other traits that were studied in these twin families. Differences in religious background are associated with differences in personality, especially in Sensation Seeking. Subjects with a religious upbringing, who are currently religious and who engage in church activities score lower on the scales of the Sensation Seeking Questionnaire. The most pronounced effect is on the Disinhibition scale. The resemblances between twins for the Disinhibition scale differ according to their religious upbringing. Receiving a religious upbringing seems to reduce the influence of genetic factors on Disinhibition, especially in males.

Interactive cloth rendering of microcylinder appearance model under environment lighting <=SEP=> This paper proposes an interactive rendering method of cloth fabrics under environment lighting. The outgoing radiance from cloth fabrics in the microcylinder model is calculated by integrating the product of the distant environment lighting, the visibility function, the weighting function that includes shadowing/masking effects of threads, and the light scattering function of threads. The radiance calculation at each shading point of the cloth fabrics is simplified to a linear combination of triple product integrals of two circular Gaussians and the visibility function, multiplied by precomputed spherical Gaussian convolutions of the weighting function. We propose an efficient calculation method of the triple product of two circular Gaussians and the visibility function by using the gradient of signed distance function to the visibility boundary where the binary visibility changes in the angular domain of the hemisphere. Our GPU implementation enables interactive rendering of static cloth fabrics with dynamic viewpoints and lighting. In addition, interactive editing of parameters for the scattering function (e.g. thread’s albedo) that controls the visual appearances of cloth fabrics can be achieved.

A shape and image merging technique to solve jigsaw puzzles <=SEP=> This paper proposes an algorithm for solving subsets of typical (canonical) jigsaw puzzles. This algorithm combines shape and image matching with a cyclic ‘‘growth’’ process that tries to place pieces in their correct positions. First, the jigsaw pieces are extracted from the input image. Then, the corner points of the jigsaw pieces are detected. Next, piece classification and recognition are performed based on jigsaw piece models. Connection relationships between pieces are calculated and finally recovered by using boundary shape matching and image merging. We tested this algorithm by employing real-world images containing dozens of jigsaw pieces. The experiment s results show this algorithm is efficient and effective. 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Adaptive Droop Control Applied to Voltage-Source Inverters Operating in Grid-Connected and Islanded Modes <=SEP=> This paper proposes a novel control for voltage-source inverters with the capability to flexibly operate in grid-connected and islanded modes. The control scheme is based on the droop method, which uses some estimated grid parameters such as the voltage and frequency and the magnitude and angle of the grid impedance. Hence, the inverter is able to inject independently active and reactive power to the grid. The controller provides a proper dynamics decoupled from the grid-impedance magnitude and phase. The system is also able to control active and reactive power flows independently for a large range of impedance grid values. Simulation and experimental results are provided in order to show the feasibility of the control proposed.

Manipulating Attributes of Natural Scenes via Hallucination <=SEP=> Fig. 1. Given a natural image, the proposed approach can hallucinate different versions of the same scene in a wide range of conditions, e.g.night, sunset, winter, spring, rain, fog or even a combination of those. First, our method utilizes a single generator network to imagine the scene with respect to its semantic layout and the desired set of attributes. Then, it directly transfers the look from the hallucinated output to the input image, without a need to have access to a reference style image.

Reflection Removal Using Low-Rank Matrix Completion <=SEP=> The images taken through glass often capture a target transmitted scene as well as undesired reflected scenes. In this paper, we propose a low-rank matrix completion algorithm to remove reflection artifacts automatically from multiple glass images taken at slightly different camera locations. We assume that the transmitted scenes are more dominant than the reflected scenes in typical glass images. We first warp the multiple glass images to a reference image, where the gradients are consistent in the transmission images while the gradients are varying across the reflection images. Based on this observation, we compute a gradient reliability such that the pixels belonging to the salient edges of the transmission image are assigned high reliability. Then we suppress the gradients of the reflection images and recover the gradients of the transmission images only, by solving a low-rank matrix completion problem in gradient domain. We reconstruct an original transmission image using the resulting optimal gradient map. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm removes the reflection artifacts from glass images faithfully and outperforms the existing algorithms on typical glass images.

Unveiling clusters of events for alert and incident management in large-scale enterprise it <=SEP=> Large enterprise IT (Information Technology) infrastructure components generate large volumes of alerts and incident tickets. These are manually screened, but it is otherwise difficult to extract information automatically from them to gain insights in order to improve operational efficiency. We propose a framework to cluster alerts and incident tickets based on the text in them, using unsupervised machine learning. This would be a step towards eliminating manual classification of the alerts and incidents, which is very labor intense and costly. Our framework can handle the semi-structured text in alerts generated by IT infrastructure components such as storage devices, network devices, servers etc., as well as the unstructured text in incident tickets created manually by operations support personnel. After text pre-processing and application of appropriate distance metrics, we apply different graph-theoretic approaches to cluster the alerts and incident tickets, based on their semi-structured and unstructured text respectively. For automated interpretation and read-ability on semi-structured text clusters, we propose a method to visualize clusters that preserves the structure and human-readability of the text data as compared to traditional word clouds where the text structure is not preserved; for unstructured text clusters, we find a simple way to define prototypes of clusters for easy interpretation. This framework for clustering and visualization will enable enterprises to prioritize the issues in their IT infrastructure and improve the reliability and availability of their services.

Deep Unsupervised Learning of Visual Similarities <=SEP=> Exemplar learning of visual similarities in an unsupervised manner is a problem of paramount importance to Computer Vision. In this context, however, the recent breakthrough in deep learning could not yet unfold its full potential. With only a single positive sample, a great imbalance between one positive and many negatives, and unreliable relationships between most samples, training of Convolutional Neural networks is impaired. In this paper we use weak estimates of local similarities and propose a single optimization problem to extract batches of samples with mutually consistent relations. Conflicting relations are distributed over different batches and similar samples are grouped into compact groups. Learning visual similarities is then framed as a sequence of categorization tasks. The CNN then consolidates transitivity relations within and between groups and learns a single representation for all samples without the need for labels. The proposed unsupervised approach has shown competitive performance on detailed posture analysis and object classification.

Overuse lower extremity injuries in sports. <=SEP=> When athletes train harder the risk of injury increases, and there are several common overuse injuries to the lower extremity. Three of the most common lower extremity overuse injuries in sports are discussed including the diagnosis and treatments: medial tibal stress syndrome, iliotibial band syndrome, and stress fractures. The charge of sports medicine professionals is to identify and treat the cause of the injuries and not just treat the symptoms. Symptomatology is an excellent guide to healing and often the patient leads the physician to the proper diagnosis through an investigation of the athlete's training program, past injury history, dietary habits, choice of footwear, and training surface.

Tree Adjoining Grammar Based Parser for a Hindi Text-to-Scene Conversion System <=SEP=> We have developed Preksha: a Hindi text visualizer. Preksha generates a 3D scene by understanding a given Hindi text. We propose the Earley's parsing algorithm using Tree adjoining grammar (TAG) for Hindi language understanding. A brief overview of the TAG formalism and the Earley's parsing algorithm is presented. Preksha's Hindi language parsing is explainedwith the Lisp notation. The maincontribution of this paper is to apply TAG parsing for morphologically-richfree-order language Hindi for automatic text visualization (ATV).

Autonomous Battery Exchange of UAVs with a Mobile Ground Base <=SEP=> This paper presents the autonomous battery exchange operation for small scale UAVs, using a mobile ground base that carries a robotic arm and a service station containing the battery exchange mechanism. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the means to increase the autonomy and persistence of robotic systems without requiring human intervention. The design and control of the system and its components are presented in detail, as well as the collaborative software framework used to plan and execute complex missions. Finally, the results of autonomous outdoor experiments are presented, in which the ground rover successfully localizes, retrieves, services, and deploys the landed UAV, proving its capacity to extend and enhance autonomous operations.

A Survey Paper on PID Control System <=SEP=> This paper concentrates on the work done on the PID control system specially on time delaying systems like network control systems. The different works which have already been done are summarised here like gain margin, phase margin methods. The absolute focal point on time delayed systemare the delays induced by network and the packet losses. This survey paper covers the study on such methods that compensates these

Flying Swarm of Drones Over Circulant Digraph <=SEP=> Drones are critical to military collaborative engagement, surveillance, and monitoring of areas of interest. They also play an increasingly influential role in commercial applications. We describe a new innovative method for collisionless, survivable, and persistent flying of given <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> </inline-formula> drones over <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2n$</tex-math></inline-formula> waypoints that results in dispersed coverage of a given area of interest, where <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n > k \geq 3$</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math> </inline-formula> divides <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula>. Our method is fundamentally different than any known to date since it does not need sensors to avoid collisions between drones. In addition, the flight of drones does not have to be coordinated.

High Power Outphasing Modulation <=SEP=> 

High-voltage pulse waveform modulator based on solid-state Marx generator <=SEP=> Many research fields need special high-voltage pulses in pulsed power applications, which are different from typical rectangular pulses. In this paper, a high-voltage waveform modulator of two methods using a solid-state Marx generator has been developed and tested. Instead of manufacturing a generator with a specialized structure, the modulator can control a general Marx generator by low-voltage programmable logic devices to produce an irregular but controllable high-voltage triangular pulse with pulse length of ~4.5 μs and peak voltage of ~123 kV.