Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has gained widespread popularity in recent years due to its ability to increase data rates, improve signal quality, and provide better coverage in challenging environments. In this paper, we investigate the MIMO beam selection (MBS) problem, which is proven to be NP-hard and computationally intractable. To deal with this problem, quantum computing that can provide faster and more efficient solutions to large-scale combinatorial optimization is considered. MBS is formulated in a quadratic unbounded binary optimization form and solved with Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) physical machine. We compare the performance of our solution with two classic heuristics, simulated annealing and Tabu search. The results demonstrate an average performance improvement by a factor of 261.23 and 20.6, respectively, which shows that CIM-based solution performs significantly better in terms of selecting the optimal subset of beams. This work shows great promise for practical 5G operation and promotes the application of quantum computing in solving computationally hard problems in communication.

With the semiconductor manufacturing technology approaching to 14 nm and below, the reliability of IC is challenged, as the speed of CMOS or FinFET is degraded by the aging mechanisms, including negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier injection (HCI). Furthermore, significant process variations differ the aging degradation rate of each individual IC, which causes significant failure time differences even for the ICs belonging to the same lot. Therefore, to select devices for the applications with various reliability requirements, it is necessary to conduct efficient predictive reliability screening during production test at time-zero. In this article, a fast time-zero aging prediction and predictive screening methodology based on a novel on-chip architecture named ZeroScreen is proposed. The pattern-based aging screening time is limited to 8.14 ms per device considering 50-MHz test clock frequency and 6.6-μs automatic test equipment (ATE) voltage settling time. In the experiment, fresh 45-nm FPGA devices and 130-nm ASIC chips are projected into four reliability bins with ZeroScreen-based aging prediction at time-zero. According to the silicon data, the reliability screening errors of ZeroScreen for the 45-nm FPGA chips are less than 6.5% and 4.3% for static and dynamic stress cases, respectively. And the screening errors for the 130 nm ASIC chips are close to 0, for both static and dynamic stress cases.

By studying two unsharp quantum structures, namely extended lattice ordered effect algebras and lattice ordered QMV algebras, we obtain some characteristic theorems of MV algebras. We go on to discuss automata theory based on these two unsharp quantum structures. In particular, we prove that an extended lattice ordered effect algebra (or a lattice ordered QMV algebra) is an MV algebra if and only if a certain kind of distributive law holds for the sum operation. We introduce the notions of (quantum) finite automata based on these two unsharp quantum structures, and discuss closure properties of languages and the subset construction of automata. We show that the universal validity of some important properties (such as sum, concatenation and subset constructions) depend heavily on the above distributive law. These generalise results about automata theory based on sharp quantum logic.