This work is focused on the synthesis of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) circuits usingc specific hardware architectures. Due to its complexity, the design process has been subdivided into separate tasks, thus hindering the global optimization of the resulting systems. The author proposes the study of the combination of two major design tasks, Word-Length Allocation (WLA) and High-Level Synthesis (HLS), aiming at the optimization of DSP implementations using modern Field Programmable Gate Array devices (FPGAs). A multiple word-length approach (MWL) is adopted since it leads to highly optimized implementations. MWL implies the customization of the word-lengths of the signals of an algorithm. This complicates the design, since the number possible assignations between algorithm operations and hardware resources becomes very high. Moreover, this work also considers the use of heterogeneous FPGAs where there are several types of resources: configurable logic-based blocks (LUT-based) ...

Nowadays, the design of embedded systems is confronted with the combination of complex signal processing algorithms on the one hand and a variety of computational intensive multimedia applications on the other hand, while time to product launch has been extremely reduced. Especially in the wireless domain those challenges are stacked with tough requirements on power consumption and chip size. Unfortunately, design productivity did not undergo a similar progression and therefore fails to cope with the heterogeneity of modern hardware architectures. Until now, electronic design automation do not provide for complete coverage of the design ow. In particular crucial design tasks as high level characterisation of algorithms, oating-point to xed-point conversion, automated hardware/software partitioning, and automated virtual prototyping are not suciently supported or completely absent. In recent years a consistent design framework named Open Tool Integration Environment (OTIE) has been established ...

The goal of this Ph.D. dissertation is to address a number of challenges encountered in the digital baseband design of modern and future wireless communication systems. The fast and continuous evolution of wireless communications has been driven by the ambitious goal of providing ubiquitous services that could guarantee high throughput, reliability of the communication link and satisfy the increasing demand for efficient re-utilization of the heavily populated wireless spectrum. To cope with these ever-growing performance requirements, researchers around the world have introduced sophisticated broadband physical (PHY)-layer communication schemes able to accommodate higher bandwidth, which indicatively include multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver and are capable of delivering improved spectral efficiency by applying interference management policies. The merging of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) schemes with the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) offers a flexible signal processing substrate to implement ...

In this thesis, smoothness of sampled real-world signals is exploited through the application of polynomial predictive filters. The principal reason for employing the polynomial signal model is principally twofold: firstly, assuming that the sampling rate is adequate, all real-world signals exhibit piecewise polynomial-like behavior, and secondly, polynomial-based signal processing is computationally efficient. By definition, polynomial predictive filters provide estimates of future values of polynomial-like signals. Thus, the potential applications of this research include a vast number of different delay sensitive operations on measurements like temperature, position, velocity, or power, especially in control engineering field. The polynomial-based predictive signal processing is a well-known technique, but polynomial-predictive filters have had severe drawbacks, which have hindered their application; their white noise attenuation is generally low, or they exhibit considerable passband gain peaks, rendering them unattractive for most applications. It has been possible to ...

With the advent of spectrally efficient wireless communication systems employing modulation schemes with varying amplitude of the communication signal, linearisation techniques for nonlinear microwave power amplifiers have gained significant interest. The availability of fast and cheap digital processing technology makes digital pre-distortion an attractive candidate as a means for power amplifier linearisation since it promises high power efficiency and fleexibility. Digital pre-distortion is further in line with the current efforts towards software defined radio systems, where a principal aim is to substitute costly and inflexible analogue circuitry with cheap and reprogrammable digital circuitry. Microwave power amplifiers are most efficient in terms of delivered microwave output power vs. supplied power if driven near the saturation point. In this operational mode, the amplifier behaves as a nonlinear device, which introduces undesired distortions in the information bear- ing microwave signal. These nonlinear distortions ...

This dissertation deals with the design of satellite-based navigation receivers. The term Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) refers to those navigation systems based on a constellation of satellites, which emit ranging signals useful for positioning. Although the american GPS is probably the most popular, the european contribution (Galileo) will be operative soon. Other global and regional systems exist, all with the same objective: aid user's positioning. Initially, the thesis provides the state-of-the-art in GNSS: navigation signals structure and receiver architecture. The design of a GNSS receiver consists of a number of functional blocks. From the antenna to the fi nal position calculation, the design poses challenges in many research areas. Although the Radio Frequency chain of the receiver is commented in the thesis, the main objective of the dissertation is on the signal processing algorithms applied after signal digitation. These ...

The key defining feature of a software defined radio is the flexibility to reconfigure itself to different modes, frequency bands, or wireless standards. This is achieved by, for example, running software modules on a general purpose digital signal processor. The complexity of a common hardware platform shared by Bluetooth and a relatively costly wireless standard like Wi-Fi, must have the capacity to handle the more demanding system. In such scenarios, there will be extra resources available when Bluetooth is running and Wi-Fi is in an idle state. This thesis contains suggestions on the most effective way to use this surplus capability to improve the reception of Bluetooth signals. Our approach involves selecting the most appropriate receiver capable of very low bit error ratio, but ensuring that it is realised in a very efficient manner; and providing algorithms to compensate for ...

Data acquisition is a necessary first step in digital signal processing applications such as radar, wireless communications and array processing. Traditionally, this process is performed by uniformly sampling signals at a frequency above the Nyquist rate and converting the resulting samples into digital numeric values through high-resolution amplitude quantization. While the traditional approach to data acquisition is straightforward and extremely well-proven, it may be either impractical or impossible in many modern applications due to the existing fundamental trade-off between sampling rate, amplitude quantization precision, implementation costs, and usage of physical resources, e.g. bandwidth and power consumption. Motivated by this fact, system designers have recently proposed exploiting sparse and few-bit quantized sampling instead of the traditional way of data acquisition in order to reduce implementation costs and usage of physical resources in such applications. However, before transition from the tradition data ...

This Dissertation addresses the synchronization problem using an array of antennas in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. Positioning systems are based on time delay and frequency-shift estimation of the incoming signals in the receiver side, in order to compute the user's location. Sources of accuracy degradation in satellite-based navigation systems are well-known, and their mitigation has deserved the attention of a number of researchers in latter times. While atmospheric-dependant sources (delays that depend on the ionosphere and troposphere conditions) can be greatly mitigated by differential systems external to the receiver's operation, the multipath effect is location-dependant and remains as the most important cause of accuracy degradation in time delay estimation, and consequently in position estimation, becoming a signal processing challenge. Traditional approaches to time delay estimation are often embodied in a communication systems framework. Indeed, ...

Modern society is undergoing a fundamental change in the way we interact with technology. More and more devices are becoming "smart" by gaining advanced computation capabilities and communication interfaces, from household appliances over transportation systems to large-scale networks like the power grid. Recording, processing, and exchanging digital information is thus becoming increasingly important. As a growing share of devices is nowadays mobile and hence battery-powered, a particular interest in efficient digital signal processing techniques emerges. This thesis contributes to this goal by demonstrating methods for finding efficient algebraic solutions to various applications of multi-channel digital signal processing. These may not always result in the best possible system performance. However, they often come close while being significantly simpler to describe and to implement. The simpler description facilitates a thorough analysis of their performance which is crucial to design robust and reliable ...

Currently, the telecommunications market has brought changes to the design of the old model of the telecommunications network. The emergence of new technologies for higher speed access was inevitable in order to meet the requirements of the appearance of the multimedia services (VoD, online gaming etc.). The latest technologies for broadband access over telephone pairs are Digital Subscriber Lines or DSL. This set of xDSL technologies allow the transfer of binary high speed over telephone twisted pair by using a suitable type of line codes. They allow a flow of high-speed information both asymmetrical and symmetrical over the telephone loop. This thesis presents the state of the art of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) technologies suggested to improve the performance of DSL systems and proposes a new approach to this issue. The main contributions of this thesis includes extended bandwidth channel ...

This thesis investigates the design and evaluation of an embedded optimization framework for the perceptual enhancement of audio signals which are degraded by linear and/or nonlinear distortion. In general, audio signal enhancement has the goal to improve the perceived audio quality, speech intelligibility, or another desired perceptual attribute of the distorted audio signal by applying a real-time digital signal processing algorithm. In the designed embedded optimization framework, the audio signal enhancement problem under consideration is formulated and solved as a per-frame numerical optimization problem, allowing to compute the enhanced audio signal frame that is optimal according to a desired perceptual attribute. The first stage of the embedded optimization framework consists in the formulation of the per-frame optimization problem aimed at maximally enhancing the desired perceptual attribute, by explicitly incorporating a suitable model of human sound perception. The second stage of ...

Cellular Neural Networks are characterized by simplicity of operation. The network consists of a large number of nonlinear processing units; called cells; that are equally spread in the space. Each cell has a simple function (sequence of multiply-add followed by a single discrimination) that takes an element of a topographic map and then interacts with all cells within a specified sphere of interest through direct connections. Due to their intrinsic parallel computing power, CNNs have attracted the attention of a wide variety of scientists in, e.g., the fields of image and video processing, robotics and higher brain functions. Simplicity of operation together with the local connectivity gives CNNs first-hand advantages for tiled VLSI implementations with very high speed and complexity. The first VLSI implementation has been based on analogue technology but was small and suffered from parasitic capacitances and resistances ...

This thesis puts a focus on the analysis of key aspects of low-complexity Ultra Wideband (UWB) localizations systems. It is well known that UWB allows for highly robust and accurate ranging even in multipath intensive environments. On the other hand, the huge bandwidth leads to very challenging receiver designs and so low complexity and low power consumption are not achieveable for common receiver structures. The energy detector is a promising alternative. But in contrast to high-complexity coherent receivers, their performance is strongly dependent on the system parameters of the air interface protocol. IEEE 802.15.4a is a UWB standard with high-precision localization capability (better than 1m). The standard defines many system parameters, whose impact on the ranging and localization performance is studied in the thesis. These parameters have also a significant impact on the maximum allowed transmit energy, which limits the ...

In the world of Information and communications technology (ICT), strategies for innovation and development are increasingly focusing on applications that require spatial representation and real-time interaction with and within 3D-media environments. One of the major challenges that such applications have to address is user-centricity, reflecting e.g. on developing complexity-hiding services so that people can personalize their own delivery of services. In these terms, multimodal interfaces represent a key factor for enabling an inclusive use of new technologies by everyone. In order to achieve this, multimodal realistic models that describe our environment are needed, and in particular models that accurately describe the acoustics of the environment and communication through the auditory modality are required. Examples of currently active research directions and application areas include 3DTV and future internet, 3D visual-sound scene coding, transmission and reconstruction and teleconferencing systems, to name but ...