This paper describes the formation of ultra-thin tantalum oxide capacitors, using rapid thermal nitridation (RTN) of the storage-node polycrystalline-silicon surface prior to low-pressure chemical vapor deposition of tantalum oxide, using penta-ethoxy-tantalum [(Ta(OC2H5)5) and oxygen gas mixture. The films are annealed at 600-900 in dry O2 atmosphere. Densification of the as-deposited film by annealing in dry O2 is indispensable to the formation of highly reliable ultra-thin tantalum oxide capacitors. The RTN treatment reduces the SiO2 equivalent thickness and leakage current of the tantalum oxide film, and improves the time dependent dielectric breakdown characteristics of the film.

This paper proposes a new signal peak power reduction technique, Peak Reduction based on Control Signal Insertion (PRCSI), for broadband mobile communications based on multi-channel signaling schemes. PRCSI reduces the peak power with a peak control signal that is generated symbol-by-symbol; no signal band expansion is incurred because the peak control signal is inserted into the transmission signal band. PRCSI can achieve 4 dB peak power reduction for 8-carrier signaling, while the Eb/N0 value required to achieve 10-3 average BER is 1 dB larger with PRCSI than without it. This BER performance degradation can effectively be compensated by the proper use of Trellis coding. The proposed technique is applied to OFDM transmission systems with large carrier number. The proposed technique can achieve 3-dB peak power ratio for 128-carrier OFDM signals with less than 1-dB performance degradation at the BER of 10-3.

Both available bit rate (ABR) service and unspecified bit rate (UBR) service with early packet discard (EPD) schemes have been considered for supporting data applications in ATM networks. Since transmission control protocol (TCP) is perhaps the most widely used transport layer protocol in existing data networks, the performance of TCP over ATM using ABR service and UBR service with EPD schemes is of great interest to ATM equipment vendors and service providers. In this paper, we present a simulation study of this interesting issue in a LAN environment using some benchmark network configurations proposed in the ATM Forum. Our simulation results show the following: (1) With UBR service and EPD schemes, TCP suffers significant performance degradation in terms of fairness and requires relatively large switch buffer even with a small number of active virtual connections over a LAN configuration, and (2) for the same set of network configurations and with ABR service using explicit rate feedback schemes, TCP achieves good performance in terms of fairness and link utilization, and requires relatively small switch buffer.

Cell losses due to statistical multiplexing of bursty traffic in ATM networks tend to be in clusters rather than uniformly scattered. Since the quality of service for users is quite sensitive to such bursty losses, it is necessary to characterize the temporal behavior of cell loss. This paper reports results obtained from investigating overload period and underload period in an ATM multiplexer with heterogeneous burst traffic input, using a bufferless model. The overload period is defined as the time interval when the instantaneous bit rate exceeds the output link capacity. With the bufferless model, we assume that all the instantaneous bit rate exceeding the link capacity is lost, and the loss rate is called "virtual cell loss probability". The virtual cell loss probability during the overload period, average overload period and underload period durations are analyzed. Numerical results show that the cell loss probability in overload periods and the average duration of overload periods (normalized by burst duration) are not very sensitive to link load or average rate/peak rate ratio of the burst, and that they are approximately on the order of peak bandwidth/link capacity ratio for the multiplexed burst. Furthermore, it is also shown that the mean underload duration is simply given as the inverse of the overall cell loss probability multiplied by the constant value inherently determined by peak bandwidth and link capacity. With these observations, applications to the call acceptance control using these measures are also presented.

We propose a new QOS routing algorithm for finding a path that guarantees several quality of service (QOS) parameters requested by users, for ATM networks. It is known that a routing problem is NP-complete, if the number of additive QOS parameters, such as delay and cost, are more than or equal to two. Although a number of heuristic algorithms have been proposed recently to solve this problem, the appropriate choice of routing algorithms is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic routing algorithm, while being compliant with PNNI routing and signaling specification in the ATM Forum. The performance of algorithms is evaluated by simulation with a various network topologies and loading scenarios. This simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves the performance while reducing computational complexity.

The random deployment of small cell base stations (BSs) causes the coverage areas of neighboring cells to overlap, which increases intercell interference and degrades the system capacity. This paper proposes a new intercell interference management (IIM) scheme to improve the system capacity in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) small cell networks. The proposed IIM scheme consists of both an interference cancellation (IC) technique on the receiver side, and a neural network (NN) based power control algorithm for intercell interference coordination (ICIC) on the transmitter side. In order to improve the system capacity, the NN power control optimizes downlink transmit power while IC eliminates interfering signals from received signals. Computer simulations compare the system capacity of the MIMO network with several ICIC algorithms: the NN, the greedy search, the belief propagation (BP), the distributed pricing (DP), and the maximum power, all of which can be combined with IC reception. Furthermore, this paper investigates the application of a multi-layered NN structure called deep learning and its pre-training scheme, into the mobile communication field. It is shown that the performance of NN is better than that of BP and very close to that of greedy search. The low complexity of the NN algorithm makes it suitable for IIM. It is also demonstrated that combining IC and sectorization of BSs acquires high capacity gain owing to reduced interference.

Performance of self-synchronizing scrambler/descrambler in mobile radio transmission systems is discussed theoretically and experimentally. Multiple-error characteristics in descrambler processing are analyzed in detail.

This paper proposes complex form BandPass Sampling (BPS) that is suitable for the software radio. This BPS utilizes offset frequency sampling and quadrature component interpolation. Three types of BPS techniques are first reviewed, which shows effectiveness of the proposed BPS technique. The major advantages over the conventional BPS techniques are: i) free from the DC offset that is caused by the leak of the sampling clock harmonics into the received signal, and ii) reduction of alias by the complex number processing in the signal detection. Next, detailed description of the BPS operation shows that it requires real-time interpolation for the time alignment of the sampled quadrature component. Finally, computer simulation shows that the misalignment generates distortion, and that effective interpolation techniques can reduce the distortion level less than -60 dB even for wideband signals.

As a blind linear-interference-canceller for DS-CDMA mobile communications, the orthogonal matched filter (OMF) minimizes the power of the output while maintaining constant power of the desired signal in the output. This paper studies the extension of OMF to an RAKE receiver (OMF-RAKE), which adaptively controls the steering vectors that determine the constraint. It also applies the QR-RLS algorithm to estimate the OMF-RAKE parameters and investigates a hardware implementation that employs a systolic array. Computer simulations show that OMF-RAKE with the QR-RLS algorithm and the systolic array structure can reduce the computational complexity to about a half that of the conventional RLS-type algorithm without degrading the BER.

A blind technique for adaptive signal suppression in multipath DS-CDMA communication channels for the downlink is considered. Its performance is degraded when mismatch problem occurs when multipath components arrive with fractional-chip delays. In order to surmount this problem, Multiple Finger Expansion Optimal Filter (MFE-OF) was recently proposed to estimate the received desired signal subspace using fractionally delayed despreading fingers. However, MFE-OF requires much computational complexity for good performance. In this paper, a modification to the MFE-OF is introduced by utilizing decision-directed steering vector to reduce the number of fingers required by MFE-OF down to that of the conventional OMF-RAKE without much performance degradation. This modified receiver is called Decision-Directed Optimal Filter (DDOF). Computer simulation validates the effectiveness of the new receiver to increase the downlink capacity of DS-CDMA systems.

The transmission and processing of multimedia information requires a high-speed communications network infrastructure. This is especially true for the networks between the user's computer and the information highway. An Ethernet LAN is widely used for these networks, but it has limited throughput. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) LAN technology is a promising approach to overcome this limitation. We have developed a chip set which can be used to connect personal computers (PCs) and workstations (WSs) to a 156-Mbps ATM LAN. The advanced architecture, optimized performance and efficient buffer management enables a sustained more than 100 Mbps transfer speed to be obtained. The chip set is implemented in a 0.8 µm triple metal-layer CMOS process to integrate total 460 K transistors and consumes total 4 W at 5 V.

When the multipath delay difference exceeds the guard interval (GI), the performance of MIMO-OFDM transmission suffers severely from both the inter-symbol interference (ISI) from the adjacent OFDM symbols and the inter-carrier interference (ICI) within the same symbol. This paper therefore proposes a MIMO-OFDM receiver employing the low-complexity turbo equalization. The proposed receiver initially separates the data streams and suppresses ICI by linear processing. In the iterative processing, it cancels the other data streams as well as ISI and ICI. The MIMO-OFDM turbo equalizer consists of an ISI canceller, an ICI canceller, an optimal detection filter, and a MAP detector. The proposed receiver can improve the transmission performance by exploiting the log-likelihood ratio that the decoding process produces for canceling both ISI and ICI and separating of the spatially multiplexed streams. Computer simulations, which apply the wireless LAN to MIMO, demonstrate that the proposed receiver can provide excellent performance in the severe multipath channels where the delay difference is greater than GI.

This paper reviews various switch architectures for Asynchronous Transfer Mode, which have been proposed and developed so far in Japan. The switch fabrics can be classified, owing to the arrangement of switch matrices and buffer memories, into four categories, input buffer switch, output buffer switch, shared buffer switch and crosspoint buffer switch. Those switches have their own advantages and disadvantages, which require additional effort to implement the switches for the practical network. This paper introduces examples of each category switch fabric and additional technical modifications to make it practical. Other general issues to construct ATM switch fabrics, such as non-blocking characteristics and path assignment within a multi-stage switch network, are also addressed. Furthermore, future directions in the ATM switch fabric is discussed.

This paper proposes a suboptimal algorithm for the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. The proposed algorithm regards transmitted signals as continuous variables in the same way as a common method for the discrete optimization problem, and then searches for candidates of the transmitted signals in the direction of a modified gradient vector of the metric. The vector is almost proportional to the direction of the noise enhancement, from which zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean square error (MMSE) algorithms suffer. This method sets the initial guess to the solution by ZF or MMSE algorithms, which can be recursively calculated. Also, the proposed algorithm has the same complexity order as that of conventional suboptimal algorithms. Computer simulations demonstrate that it is much superior in BER performance to the conventional ones.

A low-noise 2-GHz-band VCO for frequency synthesizers used in mobile/portable radio sets is designed and implemented. This frequency band has become increasingly important for mobile/portable radio to alleviate the present frequency congestion problem below 1 GHz. So far, however, low noise VCOs which satisfy the severe requirements of mobile radio systems operating above 1 GHz have not been investigated. The design specifications are summarized, and it is shown that the VCO phase noise reduction requires a rigorous designed oscillator. Oscillator noise characteristics are reviewed, and design principles are clarified. In order to suppress the 1/f noise, a Clapp oscillator circuit and a microstrip resonator are adopted. A Si BJT and GaAs MES FET are compared under optimum bias conditions. The noise level of the Si BJT oscillator is 13 dB less than to that of the GaAs MES FET at a 25-kHz offset frequency from the oscillation frequency, and was thus adopted in our VCO implementation. The following performance levels were obtained: 28 MHz variable frequency range with control voltage from 1 to 5 volts, 112 dB single sideband noise to carrier ratio in 1-Hz bandwidth at 25 kHz offset, and 37.5 dB noise ratio from 5 Hz to 20 kHz with respect to signal.

This paper proposes a maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) for the differential space-time block code (DSTBC) in cooperation with blind linear prediction (BLP) of fast frequency-flat fading channels. This method that linearly predicts the fading complex envelope derives its linear prediction coefficients by the method of Lagrange multipliers, and does not require data of decision-feedback or information on the channel parameters such as the maximum Doppler frequency in contrast to conventional ones. Computer simulations under fast fading conditions demonstrate that the proposed method with an appropriate degree of polynomial approximation is superior in BER performance to the conventional method that estimates the coefficients by the RLS algorithm using a training sequence.

This paper proposes joint maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection and spatial filtering for MIMO-OFDM mobile communications; it offers excellent receiver performance even over interference-limited channels. The proposed joint processor consists of a log likelihood generator and a MAP equalizer. The log likelihood generator suppresses cochannel interference by spatially filtering received signals and provides branch metrics of transmitted signal candidates. Using the branch metrics, the MAP equalizer generates log likelihood ratios of coded bits and performs channel decoding based on the MAP criterion. In the first stage, the log likelihood generator performs spatio-temporal filtering (STF) of the received signals prior to the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and is referred to as preFFT-type STF. Estimation of parameters including tap coefficients of the spatio-temporal filters and equivalent channel impulse responses of desired signals is based on the eigenvalue decomposition of an autocorrelation matrix of both the received and transmitted signals. For further improvement, in the second stage, the generator performs spatial filtering (SF) of the FFT output and is referred to as postFFT-type SF. Estimation of both tap coefficients of the spatial filters and channel impulse responses employs the recursive least squares (RLS) with smoothing. The reason for switching from preFFT-type STF into postFFT-type SF is that preFFT-type STF outperforms postFFT-type SF with a limited number of preamble symbols while postFFT-type SF outperforms preFFT-type STF when data symbols can be reliably detected and used for the parameter estimation. Note that there are two major differences between the proposed and conventional schemes: one is that the proposed scheme performs the two-stage processing of preFFT-type STF and postFFT-type SF, while the other is that the smoothing algorithm is applied to the parameter estimation of the proposed scheme. Computer simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve excellent PER performance under interference-limited channel conditions and that it can outperform the conventional joint processing of preFFT-type STF and the MAP equalizer.

This paper proposes a new MIMO-OFDM precoding technique that aims to minimize a bit error rate (BER) upper bound of the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) in mobile radio communications. Using a steepest descent algorithm, the proposed method estimates linear precoding matrices that can minimize the upper bound of BER under power constraints. Since the upper bound is derived from all the pairwise error probabilities, this method can effectively optimize overall Euclidean distances between signals received by multiple antennas and their replicas. Computer simulations evaluate the BER performance and channel capacity of the proposed scheme for 22 and 44 MIMO-OFDM systems with BPSK, QPSK, and 16 QAM. It is demonstrated that the proposed precoding technique is superior in terms of average BER to conventional precoding methods including a precoder which maximizes only the minimum Euclidean distance as the worst case.

In this paper, we propose a simple and accurate transfer function model of the power amplifiers for mobile communications. Detail analysis yields a generalized model for AM/AM characteristics in classes AB, B, and C. The analysis includes the effect of drain current variation with input level variation. This model introduces a loadline variation ratio to indicate the change of drain current and to represent the operation classes in a small signal region. Further discussion leads to simplified approximate equations for the AM/AM characteristics, and the estimation procedures for the simplified model parameters. Using the derived procedures, an efficient power amplifier employing pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (PHEMT) is fabricated for the 2 GHz band. Finally, the various characteristics given by the model, simulator and measurements are compared and found to agree well in the range of 20 dB below the saturated output level. The model is very effective for characterizing the power amplifiers that are used in linear compensation techniques such as predistortion methods, due to its severe nonlinearity of AM/AM and AM/PM characteristics.