The Analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) is the most pervasive block in electronic systems. With the advent of powerful digital signal processing and digital communication techniques, ADCs are fast becoming critical components for system s performance and flexibility. Knowing accurately all the parameters that characterise their dynamic behaviour is crucial, on one hand to select the most adequate ADC architecture and characteristics for each end application, and on the other hand, to understand how they affect performance bottlenecks in the signal processing chain.

Dynamic...

Integrating Graphics and Vision for Object Recognition serves as a reference for electrical engineers and computer scientists researching computer vision or computer graphics.
Computer graphics and computer vision can be viewed as different sides of the same coin. In graphics, algorithms are given knowledge about the world in the form of models, cameras, lighting, etc., and infer (or render) an image of a scene. In vision, the process is the exact opposite: algorithms are presented with an image, and infer (or interpret) the configuration of the world. This work focuses on...

The ability to analyze and understand massive data sets lags far behind the ability to gather and store the data. To meet this challenge, knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) is growing rapidly as an emerging field. However, no matter how powerful computers are now or will be in the future, KDD researchers and practitioners must consider how to manage ever-growing data which is, ironically, due to the extensive use of computers and ease of data collection with computers. Many different approaches have been used to address the data explosion issue, such as algorithm scale-up and data...

This book describes the theory and design of high-accuracy CMOS smart temperature sensors. The major topic of the work is the realization of a smart temperature sensor that has an accuracy that is so high that it can be applied without any form of calibration. Integrated in a low-cost CMOS technology, this yields at the publication date of this book one of the most inexpensive intelligent general purpose temperature sensors in the world. The first thermometers could only be read by the human eye. The industrial revolution and the following computerization asked for more intelligent sensors,...

The increasing amount of information available in today's world raises the need to retrieve relevant data efficiently. Unlike text-based retrieval, where keywords are successfully used to index into documents, content-based image retrieval poses up front the fundamental questions how to extract useful image features and how to use them for intuitive retrieval. We present a novel approach to the problem of navigating through a collection of images for the purpose of image retrieval, which leads to a new paradigm for image database search. We summarize the appearance of images by distributions...

Analog design still has, unfortunately, a flavor of art. Art can be beautiful. However, art in itself is difficult to teach to students and difficult to transfer from experienced analog designers to new trainee designers in companies.
Structured Electronic Design: High-Performance Harmonic Oscillators and Bandgap References aims to systemize analog design. The use of orthogonalization of the design of the fundamental quality aspects (noise, distortion, and bandwidth) and hierarchy in the subsequent design steps, enables designers to achieve high-performance designs, in...

Content-Based Audio Classification and Retrieval for Audiovisual Data Parsing is an up-to-date overview of audio and video content analysis. Included is extensive treatment of audiovisual data segmentation, indexing and retrieval based on multimodal media content analysis, and content-based management of audio data. In addition to the commonly studied audio types such as speech and music, the authors have included hybrid types of sounds that contain more than one kind of audio component such as speech or environmental sound with music in the background. Emphasis is also...

Systematic Design for Optimisation of Pipelined ADCs proposes and develops new strategies, methodologies and tools for designing low-power and low-area CMOS pipelined A/D converters. The task is tackled by following a scientifically-consistent approach. First of all, the state of the art in pipeline A/D converters is analysed with a double purpose: a) to identify the best suited among different strategies reported in literature and taking into account the objectives pursued; b) to identify the drawbacks of these strategies as a basic first step to improve them. Then, the book...

A major advantage of a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) is that its output frequency, phase and amplitude can be precisely and rapidly manipulated under digital processor control. Other inherent DDS attributes include the ability to tune with extremely fine frequency and phase resolution, and to rapidly hop' between frequencies. These combined characteristics have made the technology popular in military radar and communications systems. In fact, DDS technology was previously applied almost exclusively to high-end and military applications: it was costly, power-hungry, difficult to implement,...

Effective compilers allow for a more efficient execution of application programs for a given computer architecture, while well-conceived architectural features can support more effective compiler optimization techniques. A well thought-out strategy of trade-offs between compilers and computer architectures is the key to the successful designing of highly efficient and effective computer systems. From embedded micro-controllers to large-scale multiprocessor systems, it is important to understand the interaction between compilers and computer architectures.
The goal of the Annual Workshop...