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This study aims to develop an effective and efficient method of analyzing user impressions of a product using virtual prototyping. A method to analyze the relationship between user impressions and design elements of a product using virtual prototyping was proposed, and then the method was applied to the case study of automobile interior design. Thirty-two participants in the experiment evaluated 32 different virtual prototypes of automobile interiors generated from the combination of 17 design elements. The results of the case study showed that user impressions can be well explained by design elements. Physically large design elements, such as the shapes of frontal area, center fascia, door trim, and steering wheel, were critical areas of automobile interior design. The proposed method is expected to be an effective and efficient alternative for industrial practitioners to analyze user impressions of design alternatives at the early stage of the design process. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rail-to-rail (R-to-R) regulating voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is employed to generate multiple-phase clocks for clock and data recovery in a display driver IC (DDI). To achieve a low supply and ground noise sensitivity, the proposed R-to-R regulating method generates VSP and VSN as the supply and the ground of the VCO instead of VDD and VSS. By applying the proposed method, the frequency-VDD variation rate of the VCO (%-fVCO/ %-VDD) changes from 3.5%-fVCO/1%-VDD to 0.0073%-fVCO/ 1%-VDD within the Vctrl range of 0.5-1.2 V. The DDI is fabricated in a 1P6M 0.18 μm 1.8 V CMOS technology for the interface block and in a 1.6 μm 18 V CMOS technology for the DAC. The R-to-R regulating VCO has a tuning range of 140-240 MHz with linear and small gain (KVCO) characteristics, and is suitable for the phaselocked loop used in flat-panel display interfaces that operate from 0.3 to 2 Gbits/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A voltage--current (V--I) converter-based voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is adapted to generate multiple-phase clocks for clock and data recovery for a display driver IC. The proposed V--I converter changed the second-order current equation of the VCO to a first-order current equation of the VCO, to achieve a wide operating frequency range, a linear gain (KVCO) within a wide control voltage, low power, and a small area without any extra circuits, such as a low-to-full amplifier. Owing to the V--I converter, KVCO is changed from 8.43 to 2.05MHz/mV with a wider Vctrl range, and its tuning range is changed from 114 to 452 MHz with a linear gain characteristic. The proposed VCO is implemented in a 1P6M 1.8 V technology and is suitable for the phase-locked loop used in flat-panel display interfaces that operate from 0.3 to 2 Gbit/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 2.56 GHz injection-locked phase-locked loop (ILPLL) cascaded with a delay-locked loop (DLL) for minimising phase noise is presented. Generally, an ILPLL includes an injection-locked voltage-controlled oscillator (ILVCO), which is directly injected with the reference clock phase. However, the proposed scheme connects the output multiphased clocks of the DLL to the injection node and they can be selected with turn on/off switches. This can shorten the realignment time of the VCO phases and thus the in-band phase noise is decreased. The proposed circuit is implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology, and reduces the phase noise by 10.86 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset with 16 multi-phased injections, compared with a conventional PLL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A high-performance wide-VDDH-range level converter (LC) is presented for mixed-signal systems. The proposed LC achieves a low power-delay product over a wide range of VDDH with VDDL in the near-threshold region. The proposed LC uses a feed-forward signal to pull down the output voltage at low VDDH, without increasing the size of the nMOS diode for the pseudo-VDDL. A comparison with conventional LCs shows that the proposed LC not only supports high VDDH but is also robust at low VDDH while exhibiting high performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]