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This paper presents a highly efficient dual-mode HV (high voltage) buck converter which operates at both light and heavy load currents. To improve the conversion efficiency at two different load conditions, a dual-mode design composed of pulse width modulation (PWM) and pulse frequency modulation (PFM) were implemented using TSMC 0.5- $\mu $ μ m HV CMOS process. The chip area is 2038.05 $ \times $ × 1689.85 $\mu $ μ m2, while the input voltage ranges from 12 V to 15 V. A 92.95% peak efficiency at a load current of 10 mA was achieved based on on-silicon measurement results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resolution of time-to-digital converters (TDC) is one parameter that will define its efficiency. This research demonstrates a 5.4 ps TDC with anti-PVT-variation implemented in 90-nm CMOS technology. The proposed converter uses a two-step architecture. The first stage is a Buffer Delay Line (BDL) to acquire a wide dynamic range characteristic. The second stage that will provide a higher resolution is Vernier delay line which receives the start and stop signals from the edge detector. A PVT (process, voltage, temperature) corner detector is equipped in the proposed TDC to resist the PVT variation. The proposed TDC's post-layout simulation results achieve a delay variation of 2 ps and a resolution of 5.4 ps, and an acceptable dynamic range of 890 ps. The INL and DNL attained a value of 0.8 and −1 LSB from the simulations. The proposed TDC attains the best FOM based on post-layout simulations with a value of 0.177, which makes it superior to all prior designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater images often encounter challenges such as attenuation, color distortion, and noise caused by artificial lighting sources. These imperfections not only degrade image quality but also impose constraints on related application tasks. Improving underwater image quality is crucial for underwater activities. However, obtaining clear underwater images has been a challenge, because scattering and blur hinder the rendering of true underwater colors, affecting the accuracy of underwater exploration. Therefore, this paper proposes a new deep network model for single underwater image enhancement. More specifically, our framework includes a light field module (LFM) and sketch module, aiming at the generation of a light field map of the target image for improving the color representation and preserving the details of the original image by providing contour information. The restored underwater image is gradually enhanced, guided by the light field map. The experimental results show the better image restoration effectiveness, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of the proposed method with a lower (or comparable) computing cost, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]