The physical limitations of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology have led many researchers to consider other alternative technologies. Quantum-dot cellular automate (QCA) is one of the nanotechnologies that is being considered as possible replacements for CMOS. In this paper, a QCA circuit for an n-bit non-restoring binary array divider (NRD) is designed. The proposed divider is developed using multi-layer and a QCA structure of the three-input XOR function. Compared to the previously proposed QCA designs for NRD, the proposed design provides further reduction in cell count, latency, and area. The results for a NRD show that the proposed design enables 14.8, 14.8, and 20.3% reductions in cell count, latency, and area, respectively. In addition, the proposed divider achieves 5.5, 18.8, and 33.1% reductions in cell count, latency, and area, respectively, compared to the existing designs.

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA), a new computing paradigm at nanoscale, may be a prospective substitution of conventional complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-based integrated circuits. A new dual-edge triggered JK flip-flop based on a novel dual-edge triggered structure with less fundamental building gates is proposed in QCA domain in this study. To get a more robust triggered structure, the probabilistic transfer matrix is employed to analyse the reliability of the structure. The functionalities of the dual-edge triggered structure and JK flip-flop are verified with QCADesigner, a simulation tool widely used. By arranging the clock zones serially and QCA cells logically, compared with previous circuits, both of the proposed triggered structure and JK flip-flop perform well in terms of cells count, area, complexity, QCA cost and power dissipation at different tunnelling energy levels at 2 K temperature, respectively.

For researching the effect of vibration induced by metro running to normal use of municipal tunnel, the Kunming Road Municipal Tunnel (construction) at Xi'an is taken as a background. Based on the distribution of soil layer in actually engineering and the designing parameter of metro and municipal tunnel, the finite element model of ‘metro-soil–municipal tunnel’ is established under three different positions, and the wheel–rail force at three different speeds (36, 72, and 108 km/h) is simplified by exciting force faction. Then the numerical model is analysed by transient dynamic analysis. The results show that the vibration of municipal tunnel wall is mainly characterised by vertical vibration, which increases sharply with the metro speed improved. The vibration magnitude is greatly affected by relative position between metro and municipal tunnel: the horizontal and vertical vibration magnitude above the position between two metro tunnels is 14.6–20.8% and 55.5–74.6%, respectively, of those at the top of the metro tunnel. Some suggestions are proposed that the vibration effect induced by metro running on normal use of nearby municipal tunnel could be reduced by choosing the reasonable relative position with some corresponding measures according to the metro speed.

The coupled inductor (CI) bidirectional DC–DC (BDC) converters are becoming popular in energy storage applications owing to high range factor, reduced device stress and high efficient. However, the applications of CI-BDC are limited due to the leakage energy of CI. Hence, this work proposes a voltage-clamp (VC) CI-BDC converter that effectively recovers the leakage energy while clamping switch turn-off voltage spikes, thus, guard the device from high-voltage stress. The working principle of proposed BDC converter with its characteristic waveforms and the steady-state analysis is presented. The equivalent circuits are obtained for the each interval operation of CI-BDC converter with voltage clamp in both boost (discharging) and buck (charging) mode. A Simulink/MATLAB-based design is presented for the CI-BDC converter with voltage clamp. A 60 W, prototype of proposed converter has been developed and validated experimentally with the simulation counterparts. To confirm the elimination of leakage energy of CI, the analyses of VC-CI-BDC converter are compared with CI-BDC converter counterparts.

This study presents a robust object tracking method based on occlusion detection via correlation filters. In the proposed method, multi-feature kernelised correlation filter is employed to estimate the preliminary location of the tracked target. To predict target occlusion state, the intrinsic relationship between the most reliable tracked target and its context information is exploited via correlation filters, together with a response stability constraint to make the detection more reliable. A long-term filter is activated to recover the target if the occlusion occurs. Furthermore, the model is updated adaptively based on the changes of occlusion state and target appearance to make the tracking process robust. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracking method with occlusion detection performs favourably against 15 state-of-the-art trackers over 100 challenge sequences on the object tracking benchmark OTB-2015.