Arbiter is the core element in shared-resources systems such as in network-on-chip (NoC), conventional interconnection buses and computer network switch schedulers. Arbiters are located in the critical path delay (CPD) of these systems, that necessitates fast and fair arbitration. This paper proposes two gate-level arbiter architectures. The first arbiter is an improved ping-pong arbiter (IPPA) that is optimized to offer lower execution delay compared to existing round robin arbiters (RRAs). One of the main disadvantages of ping-pong arbiter (PPA) is that fair arbitration is limited to the uniformly-distributed active requests pattern. To solve this problem, we propose a new gate-level RRA, called ping-lock arbiter (PLA). PLA, which is an improved IPPA offers fair arbitration under any distribution of active requests and has the advantage of low execution delay. The FPGA and ASIC implementations of PLA show up to 18% and 12% improvement in average delay, respectively, when compared to existing RRAs in literature.

One clock cycle is the ideal latency for a network-on-chip (NoC) router to pass the received flit in the current cycle to its requested destination output port when there is no contention with other flits. In order to achieve this goal, a newly arrived flit is required to go through all router's pipeline stages to the switch traversal stage. In this paper, we present a low latency synchronized NoC router micro-architecture that achieves single clock cycle latency for packets traveling to the same direction using a static straight VC/SW allocator (SSA). In comparison to existing single clock cycle latency routers which require more complex VC/SW allocator or crossbar switch architectures, our proposed SSA has simpler architecture and works in parallel with the previously proposed baseline VC/SW allocator. The simulation results using six different synthetic traffic patterns shows SSA reduces the communication latency of a 2-cycle latency baseline router by 24% in average.

An ultra-wideband power amplifier (PA) design employing Real Frequency Technique (RFT) with Gallium Nitride high-electron-mobility-transistor (GaN HEMT) technology is presented. The practical implementation was done with combination of distributed and lumped elements (mixed lumped elements combination) for the need of industrial requirements for the small form factor and low cost. This is an attractive approach for Software Defined Radio (SDR) products to meet wide bandwidth range of 80–2200 MHz. The measured results of the prototype reported good performance over the bandwidth of the interest (i.e. power of 34 dBm to 43 dBm, efficiency about 39% to 69% and gain in the range of 11 dB to 18 dB), and reasonable agreement with the simulated data. According to author’s knowledge, these results are significant for single-ended GaN HEMT device for the wideband operation starting from low frequency 80–2200 MHz.

In this brief, a new technique of efficiency enhancement of ultra-broadband RF power amplifier with simple load network approach is introduced, in which a combination of the reactance compensation and third-harmonic tuning is developed with design equations. The fabricated prototype board of the mixed mode power amplifier demonstrated 10 W output power over a wide frequency band of 0.4–2.0 GHz with an efficiency greater than 62% and observes good agreement between simulation and measured output. This implementation is suitable for two-way radio product applications.

We report a compact, all fiber, 150 ps fiber master oscillator power amplifier operating at 1064 nm that has the ability of producing a maximum average output power of 2.16 W with peak power as high as 10 kW. The output from the master oscillator power amplifier is spliced with a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber, generating a supercontinuum with an average power of 250 mW at repetition rate of 1 MHz and spectrum bandwidth spanning from 600 to 1700 nm. The developed supercontinuum system is used to detect the presence of heavy metal contaminants in water by a simple light transmittance method to ensure that the water is free from heavy metal contaminants and safe for consumption. The supercontinuum laser source was shone onto a water sample with a detector placed at another end in order to measure the transmitted supercontinuum light. By measuring the amount of light attenuated at particular wavelength, the concentration of heavy metal contaminants present in the water sample could be determined.

Heavy metal contaminant in the water aquifers is an environmental threat. In present study, by utilizing a broadband supercontinuum (SC) laser source, detection of the contaminants is achieved through emission of broad spectrum of lights. By measuring the amount of light transmitted through the water sample, the presence of heavy metal contaminants is thus determined. A statistical analysis is conducted to analyze the performance of water contaminants detection. Interactive effects between three independent factors namely wavelength of the SC source, concentration of the heavy metal contaminants and input power are examined. Optimal operational conditions are obtained along with longer wavelength, lesser concentration of contaminants and lower power source. Under these conditions, high detection rate could be achieved with a transmittance value at 0.751.

We report a novel detection technique for two types of common heavy metal contaminants in water, copper sulphate and ferric chloride, by analyzing the transmittance measurement of a supercontinuum laser source onto the samples.

A framework for optimizing Fuzzy ARTMAP (FAM) neural networks using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) is proposed in this paper. A number of variables were identified for optimization, which include the presentation order of training data during the learning step, the feature subset selection of the training data, and the internal parameters of the FAM such as baseline vigilance and match tracking. A single configuration of all three variables were encoded as a chromosome string and evaluated by creating and training the FAM according to the variables. The fitness of the chromosome is determined by the final classification accuracy of the FAM. Evaluation on benchmark data sets are conducted with the results compared with literature. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in undertaking data classification tasks.