• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.10-21
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• 2006

The aim in this study is to develop the combined EGR system with a non-thermal plasma reactor for reducing exhaust emissions and improving fuel economy in turbo intercooler ECU common-rail diesel engines. At the first step, in this paper, the characteristics of performance and $NO_x{\cdot}THC$ emissions under four kinds of engine loads are experimentally investigated by using a four-cycle, four-cylinder, direct injection type, water-cooled turbo intercooler ECU common-rail diesel engine with a combined plasma exhaust gas recirculation(EGR) system operating at three kinds of engine speeds. The EGR system is used to reduce $NO_x$ emissions, and the non-thermal plasma reactor and turbo intercooler system are used to reduce THC emissions. The plasma system is a flat-to-flat type reactor operated by a plasma power supply. The fuel is sprayed by pilot and main injections at the variable injection timing between BTDC $15^{\circ}$ and ATDC $1^{\circ}$ according to experimental conditions. It is found that the specific fuel consumption rate with EGR is increased, but the fuel economy is better than that of mechanical injection type diesel engine as compared with the same output. Results show that $NO_x$ emissions are decreased, but THC emissions are increased, as the EGR rate is elevated. $NO_x$ and THC emissions are also slightly decreased as the applied electrical voltage of the non-thermal plasma reactor is elevated. Thus one can conclude that the influence of EGR in $NO_x$ and THC emissions is larger than that of the non-thermal plasma reactor, but THC emissions are greatly influenced by the non-thermal plasma reactor as the EGR rate is elevated.

• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.49-53
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• 2007

The direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is a promising power source for portable applications due to many advantages such as simple construction, compact design, high energy density, and relatively high energy-conversion efficiency. In this work, an electrochemical methanol sensor for monitoring the methanol concentration in direct methanol fuel cells was fabricated using a thin composite nafion membrane as the electrolyte. We have analyzed the I-V characteristic of the fabricated methanol sensor as a function of methanol concentration, catalyst electrode and platinum(Pt) thickness. The fabricated sensor was analyzed by I-V measurement with various methanol concentration. When we measured the sensor characteristics with 10nm Pt and at 1V, the current value was $1.30{\times}10^{-6}A,\;1.96{\times}10^{-6}A\;and\;2.80{\times}10^{-6} A$ for three methanol concentration of 1M, 2M and 3M, respectively. When the methanol concentration was fixed at 2M, the current value of the fabricated device with Pt layers of 5, 10 and 15 nm thickness was $3.06{\times}10^{-6}A,\;1.96{\times}10^{-6}A\;and\;1.00{\times}10^{-6}A$, respectively. These results lead us to the conclusion that when the methanol concentration increases, the output current increases and when the catalyst electrode become thinner, the current increase more. It showed that, the thinner the catalyst electrode, the more electrochemistry become activation.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.67-76
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• 2005

This paper proposes a compact-sized surface myoelectric sensor for the myoelectric hand prosthesis. To fit the surface myoelectric sensor in the socket for the myoelectric hand prosthesis, the sensor should be a compact size. The surface myoelectric sensor is. composed of a skin interface and a single processing circuit that are mounted on a single package. The skin interface has one reference and two input electrodes, and the reference electrode is located in the center of two input electrodes. In this paper we propose two types of sensors with the circle- and bar-shaped reference electrode, but all input electrodes are the bar-shaped. The metal material of the electrodes is the stainless steel (SUS440) that endures sweat and wet conditions. Considering the conduction velocity and the median frequency of the myoelectric signal, we select the inter-electrode distance (IED) between two input electrodes as 18mm, 20mm, and 22 mm. The signal processing circuit consists of a differential amplifier with a band pass filter, a band rejection filter for rejecting 60Hz power-line noise, amplifiers, and a mean absolute value circuit. We evaluate the proposed sensor from the output characteristics according to the IED and the shape of the reference electrode. From the experimental results we show the surface myoelectric sensor with the 18mm IED and the bar-shaped reference electrode is suitable for the myoelectric hand prosthesis.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.59-67
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• 2016

A novel instrumentation amplifier (IA) using fully-differential linear operational transconductance amplifier (FLOTA) for electronic measurement systems with low cost, wideband, and gain control with wide range is designed. The IA consists of a FLOTA, two resistor, and an operational amplifier(op-amp). The principal of the operating is that the difference of two input voltages applied into FLOTA converts into two same difference currents, and then these current drive resistor of (+) terminal and feedback resistor of op-amp to obtain output voltage. To verify operating principal of the IA, we designed the FLOTA and realized the IA used commercial op-amp LF356. Simulation results show that the FLOTA has linearity error of 0.1% and offset current of 2.1uA at input dynamic range ${\pm}3.0V$. The IA had wide gain range from -20dB to 60dB by variation of only one resistor and -3dB frequency for the 60dB was 10MHz. The proposed IA also has merits without matching of external resistor and controllable offset voltage using the other resistor. The power dissipation of the IA is 105mW at supply voltage of ${\pm}5V$.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.71-79
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• 2011

The objective of the imaging pipeline is to transform the original scene into a display image that appear similar, Generally, gamma adjustment or histogram-based method is modified to improve the contrast and detail. However, this is insufficient as the intensity and the chromaticity of illumination vary with geometric position. Thus, MSR (Multi-Scale Retinex) has been proposed. the MSR is based on a channel-independent logarithm, and it is dependent on the scale of the Gaussian filter, which varies according to input image. Therefore, after correcting the color, image quality degradations, such as halo, graying-out, and dominated color, may occur. Accordingly, this paper presents a novel color correction method using a modified image formation model in which the image is divided into three components such as global illumination, local illumination, and reflectance. The global illumination is obtained through Gaussian filtering of the original image, and the local illumination is estimated by using JND-based adaptive filter. Thereafter, the reflectance is estimated by dividing the original image by the estimated global and the local illumination to remove the influence of the illumination effects. The output image is obtained based on sRGB color representation. The experiment results show that the proposed method yields better performance of color correction over the conventional methods.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.50-55
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• 2008

In this paper, New LC VCO with $8{\sim}10.9$ GHz Band has been designed using commercial $0.35-{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. This proposed circuit is consisted of the parallel construction of the typical NMOS and PMOS cross-coupled pair which is based on the LC tank, MOS cross-coupled pair which has same tail current of complementary NMOS and PMOS, and output buffer. The designed LC VCO, which is according to proposed structure in this paper, takes a 29% improvement of the wide tuning range as 8 GHz to 10.9 GHz, and a 6.48mW of low power dissipation. Its core size is $270{\mu}m{\times}340{\mu}m$ and its phase noise is as -117dBc Hz and -137dBc Hz at 1-MHz and 10-MHz offset, respectively. FOM of the new proposed LC VCO gets -189dBc/Hz at a 1-MHz offset from a 10GHz center frequency. This design is very useful for the 10Gb/s clock generator and data recovery integrated circuit(IC) and SONET communication applications.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.70-77
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• 2013

We suggest a low area and high efficiency switched-mode power supply (SMPS) with a pulse width modulation (PWM) generator based on a pseudo relaxation-oscillating technique. In the proposed circuit, the PWM duty ratio is determined by the voltage slope control of an internal capacitor according to amount of charging current in a PWM generator. Compared to conventional SMPSs, the proposed control method consists of a simple structure without the filter circuits needed for an analog-controlled SMPS or the digital compensator used by a digitally-controlled SMPS. The proposed circuit is able to operate at switching frequency of 1MHz~10MHz, as this frequency can be controlled from the selection of one of the internal capacitors in a PWM generator. The maximum current of the core circuit is 2.7 mA, and the total current of the entire circuit including output buffer driver is 15 mA at 10 MHz switching frequency. The proposed SMPS has a simulated maximum ripple voltage of 7mV. In this paper, to verify the operation of the proposed circuit, we performed simulation using Dongbu Hitek BCD $0.35{\mu}m$ technology and measured the proposed circuit.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.13-21
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• 1997

In this paper, the oscillator type active antenna used as an element of active phased array antenna is designed and fabricated using slot coupling. The radiating element and active circuit are fabricated on each layer respectively and coupled electromagnetically through slot on the ground plane. This structure can solve the problems such as narrow bandwidth of microstrip antenna, spurious radiation by active circuits, and spaces for integration of the feeding circuits which are caused by integrating antennas with oscillator circuits in the same layer. The active antenna in this paper, the oscillation frequency can be tuned linearly by controlling the drain bias voltage of FET. The frequency tuning range is between 12.37 GHz to 12.65 GHz when bias voltage is varied from 3V to 9V, thus frequency tuning bandwidth is 280 MHz (2.24%). The output power of antenna is uniform within 5dB over frequency tuning range. Therefore this active antenna can be used as an element of linear or planar active phased array antennas.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.43 no.4 s.310
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• pp.9-18
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• 2006

In the digital camera system, CMOS image sensor (CIS) is widely used because its size and weight become smaller and power consumption becomes lower. However, there are common problems that colors of the recorded image do not match those of the photographed object and that spectral sensitivity of the CIS used in different cameras varies largely in each case. Therefore, color correction is needed because the spectral sensitivity of the CIS in each color is neither the same color component for most standard colors nor the appropriate color representation for any output devices. In the conventional method, a color correction is empirically obtained by a large number of iterative experiments, but the result is not so satisfied. In this paper, a new method to obtain the efficient color correction matrix for digital camera using CIS is proposed. We obtain camera transfer matrix under the certain white-balance point, and color correction matrix that makes the transfer characteristic of digital camera close to the transfer characteristic of ideal camera is obtained. The experimental results show that the transfer characteristic of digital camera by the proposed method is close to that of the ideal camera. In addition, the image quality of pictures of digital camera using the proposed method is dramatically improved.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.5 no.1 s.8
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• pp.100-110
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• 2001

In this paper, we investigated several buffer management schemes for the design of shared-memory type ATM switches, which can enhance the utilization of switch resources and can support quality-of-service (QoS) functionalities. Our results show that dynamic threshold (DT) scheme demonstrate a moderate degree of robustness close to pushout(PO) scheme, which is known to be impractical in the perspective of hardware implementation, under various traffic conditions such as traffic loads, burstyness of incoming traffic, and load non-uniformity across output ports. Next, we considered buffer management strategies to support QoS functions, which utilize parameter values obtained via connection admission control (CAC) procedures to set tile threshold values. Through simulations, we showed that the buffer management schemes adopted behave well in the sense that they can protect regulated traffic from unregulated cell traffic in allocating buffer space. In particular, it was observed that dynamic partitioning is superior in terms of QoS support than virtual partitioning.