As the CMOS technology continues to scale into the deep sub-micron regime, the demand for higher frequencies and higher levels of integration poses a significant challenge for the clock generation and distribution design of microprocessors. Hence, skew optimization schemes are necessary to limit clock inaccuracies to a small fraction of the clock period. In this thesis, a crude deskew buffer (CDB) is designed to facilitate an adaptive deskewing scheme that reduces the clock skew in an ASIC clock network under manufacturing process, supply voltage, and temperature (PVT)variations. The crude deskew buffer adopts a DLL structure and functions on a 1GHz nominal clock frequency with an operating frequency range of 800MHz to 1.2GHz. An approximate 91.6ps phase resolution is achieved for all simulation conditions including various process corners and temperature variation. When the crude deskew buffer is applied to seven ASIC clock networks with each under various PVT variations, a maximum of 67.1% reduction in absolute maximum clock skew has been achieved. Furthermore, the maximum phase difference between all the clock signals in the seven networks have been reduced from 957.1ps to 311.9ps, a reduction of 67.4%. Overall, the CDB serves two important purposes in the proposed deskewing methodology: reducing the absolute maximum clock skew and synchronizes all the clock signals to a certain limit for the fine deskewing scheme. By generating various clock phases, the CDB can also be potentially useful in high speed debugging and testing where the clock duty cycle can be adjusted accordingly. Various positive and negative duty cycle values can be generated based on the phase resolution and the number of clock phases being “hot swapped”. For a 500ps duty cycle, the following values can be achieved for both the positive and negative duty cycle: 224ps, 316ps, 408ps, 592ps, 684ps, and 776ps.

As the CMOS technology continues to scale into the deep sub-micron regime, the demand for higher frequencies and higher levels of integration poses a significant challenge for the clock generation and distribution design of microprocessors. Hence, skew optimization schemes are necessary to limit clock inaccuracies to a small fraction of the clock period. In this thesis, a crude deskew buffer (CDB) is designed to facilitate an adaptive deskewing scheme that reduces the clock skew in an ASIC clock network under manufacturing process, supply voltage, and temperature (PVT)variations. The crude deskew buffer adopts a DLL structure and functions on a 1GHz nominal clock frequency with an operating frequency range of 800MHz to 1.2GHz. An approximate 91.6ps phase resolution is achieved for all simulation conditions including various process corners and temperature variation. When the crude deskew buffer is applied to seven ASIC clock networks with each under various PVT variations, a maximum of 67.1% reduction in absolute maximum clock skew has been achieved. Furthermore, the maximum phase difference between all the clock signals in the seven networks have been reduced from 957.1ps to 311.9ps, a reduction of 67.4%. Overall, the CDB serves two important purposes in the proposed deskewing methodology: reducing the absolute maximum clock skew and synchronizes all the clock signals to a certain limit for the fine deskewing scheme. By generating various clock phases, the CDB can also be potentially useful in high speed debugging and testing where the clock duty cycle can be adjusted accordingly. Various positive and negative duty cycle values can be generated based on the phase resolution and the number of clock phases being “hot swapped”. For a 500ps duty cycle, the following values can be achieved for both the positive and negative duty cycle: 224ps, 316ps, 408ps, 592ps, 684ps, and 776ps.

<p>DARC is a technique for data broadcasting over the FM radio network. Sectra Wireless Technologies AB has developed a handheld DARC receiver known as the Sectra CitySurfer. The CitySurfer is equipped with a high-resolution display along with buttons and a joystick that allows the user to view and navigate through various types of information received over DARC. </p><p>Sectra Wireless Technologies AB has, among other services, also developed a paging system that enables personal message transmission over DARC. The background of this thesis is a wish to be able to send fax documents using the paging system and to be able to view received fax documents in the CitySurfer. </p><p>The presented solution is a central PC-based fax server. The fax server is responsible for receiving standard fax transmissions and converting the fax documents before redirecting them to the right receiver in the DARC network. The topics discussed in this thesis are fax document routing, fax document conversion and fax server system design.</p>

DARC is a technique for data broadcasting over the FM radio network. Sectra Wireless Technologies AB has developed a handheld DARC receiver known as the Sectra CitySurfer. The CitySurfer is equipped with a high-resolution display along with buttons and a joystick that allows the user to view and navigate through various types of information received over DARC. Sectra Wireless Technologies AB has, among other services, also developed a paging system that enables personal message transmission over DARC. The background of this thesis is a wish to be able to send fax documents using the paging system and to be able to view received fax documents in the CitySurfer. The presented solution is a central PC-based fax server. The fax server is responsible for receiving standard fax transmissions and converting the fax documents before redirecting them to the right receiver in the DARC network. The topics discussed in this thesis are fax document routing, fax document conversion and fax server system design.

Image registration, the process of finding the transformation that best maps one image to another, is an important tool in document image processing. Having properly-aligned microfilm images can help in manual and automated content extraction, zoning, and batch compression of images. An image registration algorithm is presented that quickly identifies the global affine transformation (rotation, scale, translation and/or shear) that maps one tabular document image to another, using the Fourier-Mellin Transform. Each component of the affine transform is recovered independantly from the others, dramatically reducing the parameter space of the problem, and improving upon standard Fourier-Mellin Image Registration (FMIR), which only directly separates translation from the other components. FMIR is also extended to handle shear, as well as different scale factors for each document axis. This registration method deals with all transform components in a uniform way, by working in the frequency domain. Registration is limited to foreground pixels (the document form and printed text) through the introduction of a novel, locally adaptive foreground-background segmentation algorithm, based on the median filter. The background removal algorithm is also demonstrated as a useful tool to remove ambient signal noise during correlation. Common problems with FMIR are eliminated by background removal, meaning that apodization (tapering down to zero at the edge of the image) is not needed for accurate recovery of the rotation parameter, allowing the entire image to be used for registration. An effective new optimization to the median filter is presented. Rotation and scale parameter detection is less susceptible to problems arising from the non-commutativity of rotation and "tiling" (periodicity) than for standard FMIR, because only the regions of the frequency domain directly corresponding to tabular features are used in registration. An original method is also presented for automatically obtaining blank document templates from a set of registered document images, by computing the "pointwise median" of a set of registered documents. Finally, registration is demonstrated as an effective tool for predictive image compression. The presented registration algorithm is reliable and robust, and handles a wider range of transformation types than most document image registration systems (which typically only perform deskewing).