The demand for high energy efficiency in IoT devices continues to increase, necessitating the development of low energy consumption techniques to enhance the computation performance of these devices. In this study, we present a CMOS clock generator that operates at high operating voltage, achieves low frequency, and exhibits low power (LP) consumption, thus obviating the need for scaling-unfriendly step-down converters. The avoidance of step-down converters, which require passive components in their design, facilitates the development of scaling-friendly IoTs. The architecture of the prototype chip is composed of a voltage stacking and charge recycling design, which is achieved by the implementation of stacked oscillator and multiple frequency dividers in a configuration. The fabrication of the prototype chip is conducted using a 65-nm CMOS process. This work presents two configurations that are based on the concept of voltage stacking. The first configuration prioritizes LP consumption, yielding a clock generation of 2.09 Hz with a power of 0.22 nW at a voltage supply of 1.2 V and an operating range of 1.2–2.2 V. Notably, this configuration represents the lowest power achieved at a foundry-recommended nominal voltage in a sub-10-Hz clock generator. Another configuration is oriented toward generating low-frequency output signals, and the test chip attains an output frequency of 0.079 Hz and a supply voltage range of 0.88–1.3 V. The proposed architecture exhibits potential benefits in advanced technology nodes, particularly in the context of technology scaling.

A multi-fingered hand that can grasp and manipulate a variety of objects is an option for assisting people in their daily lives. However, the range of torque output that can be handled by the multi-fingered hand is very limited compared to the capability of the human hand. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-fingered hand consisting of a dynamic pulley and a linkage mechanism, aiming to achieve a human-like output torque with a human-like size. The proposed multi-fingered hand can achieve a fingertip force of 50N, which is equivalent to that of a human, and at the same time can perform delicate operations such as picking up a coin on a desk. In addition, we realized the stay-on-tab opening task of a can by utilizing fingertip strength.

We propose a halo control method that is suitable for smoothed local histogram equalization (LHE). Smoothed LHE based tone mapping, e.g., Apical Iridix®, is effective and widely used for local adaptive image enhancement. However, halo artifacts occur at the edge, which causes unnaturalness. There are no detailed discussions on the principles of smoothed LHE halo-artifacts. In this paper, we analyze the cause of the artifacts and propose a halo reduction/control method that uses a weighted local histogram. In addition, we separate the artifacts into light and dark and evaluate the effectivity for the human visual sense. The adequate weighting function of our method can be set automatically at each pixel by using the difference between the input and mean luminance of the local window so as to enhance the natural local edge.

In this paper, we propose a coaxial-fed dipole array antenna in a borehole with ferrite loading to achieve a thin directional borehole radar sonde (diameter of 54 mm). This radar works between about 20 and 150 MHz. When the dipole array, proposed previously, is used for the thin radar sonde, this antenna suffers from scattered waves from the centered conducting cylinder (CCC). This disturbs the estimation of the direction of arrival (DOA) below 100 MHz. To overcome the interference of the CCC, commercial ferrite cores were added to the CCC. A method-of-moment analysis showed that we may decrease the resonant frequency of the CCC to below 20 MHz, making use of the inductive characteristics of the ferrite cores. This widens the frequency bandwidth of the antenna. Field experiments in soil showed that the ferrite core-loaded CCC works reliably and confirmed that we can estimate the DOA between 20 and 150 MHz. Other measurements in rock which examined the power spectrum of a direct wave found that the ferrite cores widened the operating frequency bandwidth of the radar system.

The detecting and tracking a specific person by using the image processing with the color camera is often influenced by illumination changes. The proposed robust detecting and tracking method to illumination changes is using the HSV color space and updating the histogram. However, the quantitative evaluating is not enough in the proposed method. In this paper, the robustness to illumination changes of the proposed method is evaluated quantitatively. Moreover, the accuracy of the tracking in the proposed method is also evaluated quantitatively. The extraction rate, the object detecting rate, and the tracking error are defined to evaluate quantitatively. The tracking error is also calculated by the MeanShift method based on the color information. The quantitatively experimental results show that the proposed method is the stable and robust tracking method.