A low profile annular-ring patch antenna with circularly polarized (CP) radiation for radio frequency identification (RFID) reader applications in the ultra-high frequency (UHF) band (922-928 MHz) is presented in this article. Perturbation method is applied by loading a pair of triangular open-notch into the outer circumference of ring patch, and good impedance matching can be determined by using the coupled feeding technique. The overall size of this proposed antenna is 150 mm 3 150 mm 3 10.4 mm. The measured results show desirable 10-dB impedance bandwidth and 3-dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 3.5% (908-941 MHz) and 0.65% (922-928 MHz), respectively. Stable antenna peak gain and efficiency of 7.2 dBic and 87% are also exhibited, respectively. K E Y W O R D S annular-ring patch, circular polarization, coupled feeding technique, RFID, UHF Int. J. RF Microw. Comput. Aided Eng. 2016; 26: 819-828 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mmce

In designing acoustic broadband beamformers, the complexity can grow significantly when the number of microphones and the filter length increase. It is advantageous if many of the filter coefficients are zeroes so that the implementation can be executed with less computation. Moreover, the size of the array can also be pruned to reduce complexity. These problems are addressed in this paper. A suitable optimization model is proposed. Both array pruning and filter thinning can be solved together as a two-stage optimization problem to yield the final sparse designs. Numerical results show that the complexity of the designed beamformers can be reduced significantly with minimal effect on performance.

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Acoustic source localization has many important applications. Convex relaxation provides a viable approach of obtaining good estimates very efficiently. There are two popular convex relaxation methods using either semi-definite programming (SDP) or second-order cone programming (SOCP). However, the performances of the methods have not been studied properly in the literature and there is no comparison in terms of accuracy and performance. The aims of this article are twofold. First of all, we study and compare several convex relaxation methods. We demonstrate, by numerical examples, that most of the convex relaxation methods cannot localize the source exactly, even in the performance limit when the time difference of arrival (TDOA) information is exact. In addressing this problem, we propose a novel mixed SDP-SOCP relaxation model and study the characteristics of the optimal solutions and its localizable region. Furthermore, an error correction scheme for the proposed SDP-SOCP model is developed so that exact localization can be achieved in the performance limit. Experimental data have been collected in a room with two different array configurations to demonstrate our proposed approach.

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>For signal enhancement, beamforming remains to be an essential technique for many applications. In the design process, the microphone locations are prescribed and the signal from a target location is being enhanced. While the filter coefficients can be readily optimized, it is found that the signal enhancement capability depends significantly on the array configuration. Therefore, it is advantageous to consider both filters and microphone positions as design variables. In this paper, this problem is addressed. We formulate the beamformer design problem as a non-linear least square problem and propose Gauss-Newton algorithm to update both filters and configuration simultaneously during iterations. We illustrate by several designs to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.</p>