Ice depolarization characteristics are discussed using cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) observations of the CS-2 beacon signal (19.45GHz, right-hand circular polarization, elevation angle of 49.5) in the stratus type rainfall events, which show a clear bright band in the simultaneous X-band radar observations. Both amplitude and phase of the mean ice depolarizations are deduced in each rainfall event by subtracting theoretical rain depolarizations from the observed values. In spite of the difference in rainfall rates on the ground, the inferred depolarizations indicate much the same amplitude and phase as those directly obtained in pure ice depolarization events without appreciable rain depolarizations. The origin of the ice depolarizations in the stratus type events, as well as in the pure ice events, seems to be ice crystals near the cloud top which are not very much concerned with the ground rainfall rates. Compared with the radar measurements above the bright band, the ice depolarizations are approximately proportional to the vertical length of the ice region at least up to 3km above the bright band. This result yields the equivalent "specific depolarization" per unit path length: |Ci|610-3km-1 (44dB in XPD) for the mean ice depolarizations in each event. Using this coefficient, the ice effects (XPD), which refer to the deviations of the observed depolarizations from the theoretical rain depolarization, are well described as a function of the height ratio of the ice region to the rain region in the stratus type events. Finally, the ice effects (XPD) are calculated against vertical lengths of the ice region in the case of specific rain heights of 2-4 km. These calculations are performed for various rainfall rates of 2-15mm/h in view of ground-based rain observations.

We have developed a novel method of numerical synthesis of optical waveguides, which consists of the endless loop of the random sampling of waveguide parameters, numerical analysis and the judgment of calculated result. This loop is repeated until some objective solutions satisfying required characteristics are discovered. When the structural condition is almost unknown and there is no clue to search it, this method is useful for discovering new-type waveguides, and this concept is applicable to any other devices. We applied this method to the search of new waveguide structures having multilayer claddings, and obtained many types of low loss single mode waveguides, including ARROW-type waveguides, waveguide-type polarizers and a very narrow band wavelength filter.

A simulation study on cylindrical semiconductor devices is described, where the internal behavior of power devices are analyzed under steady-state condition with considering heat generation. In simulation, circular cylindrical coordinate is used to consider the effect of three-dimensional spreading current flow with keeping calculation time and memory as in two-dimensional simulation. Numerical model is based on the well-known set of Shockley-Roosbroeck semiconductor equations--continuity equations for carriers and Poisson's equation, along with heat flow equation. Drift-diffusion approximation of carrier transport equations is used, taking temperature field as a driving force for carriers into account. Using the cylindrical simulator, numerical analysis of power MOSFETs, which integrate zener diodes to improve the avalanche capability, has been carried out. Results showed that, a parasitic bipolar transistor turns on under forward-biased condition in a power MOSFET with a zener diode. The highest lattice temperature takes place at source edge. Under reverse-biased condition, breakdown occurs at doughnut area around the bottom of source contact (at the upper region of zener junction), and the avalanche current flows detouring the base region of parasitic bipolar transistor which implies that secondary breakdown will be suppressed. The highest lattice temperature region under reverse-biased conditions is the same as the breakdown region. Without zener diodes, on the other hand, breakdown occurs ringing about the edge of source region, and the avalanche current flows through the base region of parasitic bipolar transistor which implies that even MOSFETs may suffer from the secondary breakdown. As channel length becomes short, breakdown caused by punchthrough becomes dominant at the edge of source region.

An exact analysis for magnetostatic surface wave excitation by a single microstrip is presented. Conventional approaches for such an excitation problem do not explain experimental results in a reasonable manner. The theory proposed here explains radiation resistances obtained by experiments, owing to having considered the edge conditions and an expansion form of excitation current on the microstrip properly.

This paper introduces a constraint logic programming (CLP) language cu-Prolog as an implementation framework for constraint-based natural language processing. Compared to other CLP languages, cu-Prolog has several unique features. Most CLP languages take algebraic equations or inequations as constraints. cu-Prolog, on the other hand, takes Prolog atomic formulas in terms of user-defined predicates. cu-Prolog, thus, can describe symbolic and combinatorial constraints occurring in the constraint-based grammar formalisms. As a constraint solver, cu-Prolog uses the unfold/fold transformation, which is well known as a program transformation technique, dynamically with some heuristics. To treat the information partiality described with feature structures, cu-Prolog uses PST (Partially Specified Term) as its data structure. Sections 1 and 2 give an introduction to the constraint-based grammar formalisms on which this paper is based and the outline of cu-Prolog is explained in Sect. 3 with implementation issues described in Sect. 4. Section 5 illustrates its linguistic application to disjunctive feature structure (DFS) and parsing constraint-based grammar formalisms such as Japanese Phrase Structure Grammar (JPSG). In either application, a disambiguation process is realized by transforming constraints, which gives a picture of constraint-based NLP.

The modular and growable photonic ATM switch architecture described in this paper uses both time-division and wavelength-division multiplexing technologies, so the switch capacity can be expanded in both the time and frequency domains. It uses a new implementation of output buffering scheme that overcomes the bottleneck in receiving and storing concurrent ultra fast optical cells. The capacity in one stage of a switch with this architecture can be increased from 32 gigabits per second to several terabits per second in a modular fashion. The proposed switch structure with output channel grouping can greatly reduce the amount of hardware and still guarantee the cell sequence.

A case structure expression is one of the most important forms to represent the meaning of the sentence. Case structure analysis is usually performed by consulting case frame information in a verb dictionary. However, this analysis is very difficult because of several problems, such as word sense ambiguity and structural ambiguity. A conventional method for solving these problems is to use the method of selectional restriction, but this method has a drawback in the semantic marker (SM) method --the trade-off between descriptive power and construction cost. In this paper, we propose a method of case structure analysis based on examples in case frame dictionary This method uses the case frame dictionary which has some typical example sentences for each case frame, and it selects a proper case frame for an input sentence by matching the input sentence with the examples in the case frame dictionary. The best matching score, which is utilized for selecting a proper case frame for a predicate, can be considered as the score for the case structure of the predicate. Therefore, when there are two or more readings for a sentence because of structural ambiguity, the best reading of a sentence can be selected by evaluating the sum of the scores for the case structures of all predicates in a sentence. We report on experiments which shows that this method is superior to the conventional, coarse-grained SM method, and also describe the superiority of the example-based method over the SM method.

The spectrum of irregular samples of a two-dimensional (2-D) signal is derived using nonharmonic Fourier series expansion. The assumption on the set of irregular samples is general except that this set should not deviate from a set of uniform samples by more than a finite amount. The spectral analysis suggests a simple method to reconstruct a 2-D signal from nonuniform samples. The accuracy of the recovery technique increases when the nonuniform samples do not deviate drastically from the uniform sampling set (less than T/π-where T is the Nyquist interval). The same analysis can be extended to n-dimensional signals.

This paper proposes a novel method to realize highly linear MOS circuits using MOSFETs in the nonsaturation region. The proposed method is based on the cancellation of nonlinearity of two MOSFETs by using a current inversiontype negative impedance converter. First, grounded and floating resistor realizations are discussed. Next, by exploiting the MOS resistor circuits, gyrators and inductors are realized. As an application example, a third-order doubly-terminated LC filter is simulated. SPICE analysis shows low total harmonic distortions, excellent controllability and small gain error in the passband.

An analytical method is developed to determine the critical value of the control parameter of a dynamical system above which chaos is initiated. An initial value problem for a dynamical system is shown to be solved with the aid of a continued fraction expansion which converges very rapidly. The result is confirmed by numerical experiments.

In this paper, we present a unified model for dialogue understanding involving various sorts of ambiguities, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic, and plan ambiguities. This model is able to estimate and revise the most preferable interpretation of utterances as a dialogue progresses. The model's features successfully capture the dynamic nature of dialogue management. The model consists of two main portions: (1) an extension of first-order logic for maintaining multiple interpretations of ambiguous utterances in a dialogue; (2) a device which estimates and revises the most preferable interpretation from among these multiple interpretations. Since the model is logic-based, it provides a good basis for formulating a rational justification of its current interpretation, which is one of the most desirable aspects in generating helpful responses. These features (contained in our model) are extremely useful for interactive dialogue management.

A family of new generalized LR parsing algorithms are proposed which make use of a set of ancestors tables introduced by Kipps. As Kipps's algorithm does not give us a method to extract any parsing results, his algorithm is not considered as a practical parser but as a recognizer. In this paper, we will propose two methods to extract all parse trees from a set of ancestors tables in the top vertices of a graph-structured stack. For an input sentence of length n, while the time complexity of the Tomita parser can exceed O(n3) for some context-free grammars (CFGs), the time complexity of our parser is O(n3) for any CFGs, since our algorithm is based on the Kipps's recognizer. In order to extract a parse tree from a set of ancestors tables, it takes time in order n2. Some preliminary experimental results are given to show the efficiency of our parsers over Tomita parser.

Naturalness of expressions reflects various pragmatic factors in addition to grammatical factors. In this paper, we discuss relations between expressions and two pragmatic factors: a point fo view of speaker and a hierarchical relation among participants. Degree of empathy" and class" is used to express these pragmatic factors as one-dimensional notion. Then inequalities and equalities of them become conditions for selecting natural expressions. The authors of this paper formulate conditions as principles about lexical and syntactical constraints, and have implemented a sentence generation grammar using the unification grammar formalism.

The power transfer characteristics of a symmetric nonlinear directional coupler (NLDC) are analyzed rigorously using the beam propagation method based on the finite difference scheme. The NLDC consists of two linear waveguides separated by a Kerr-like nonlinear gap layer. The change of nonlinear refractive index along the coupler is precisely evaluated by making use of the second-order iteration procedure with respect to a small propagation length. For the incidence of TE0 mode of the isolated linear waveguide, the highly accurate numerical results are obtained for the behavior of power transfer, and the coupling length and critical power for optical switching. The dependencies of the coupling length and critical power on the width of the gap layer and the input power levels are discussed, compared with those predicted by the coupled-mode approximations.

Junction leakage current of trench isolation devices is strongly influenced by trench configuration. The origin of the leakage current is the mechanical stress that is generated by the differential thermal expansion between the Si substrate and the SiO2 filled isolation trench during the isolation forming process. A two-dimensional mechanical stress simulation was used to analyze trench-isolated devices. The simulated distribution and magnitude of stress were found to agree with Raman spectroscopic measurements of actual devices. The stress in the deeper regions between deep trenches is likely to increase greatly as the size of devices diminishes, so it is important to reduce this stress and thus suppress junction leakage current.

The aim of this study is to evaluate mental workload (MWL) quantitatively by HRV (Heart Rate Variability) measures. The electrocardiography and the respiration curve were recorded in five different epochs (1) during a rest condition and (2) during mental arithmetic tasks (addition). In the experiment, subjects added two numbers. The work levels (figures of the number in the addition) were set to one figure, two figures, three figures and four figures. The work level had effects on the mean percent correct, the number of answers and the mean processing time. The psychological evaluation on mental workload obtained by the method of paired comparison increased with the work level. Among the statistical HRV measures, the number of peak and trough waves could distinguish between the rest and the mental loading. However, mental workload for each work level was not evaluated quantitatively by the measure. The HRV measures were also calculated from the power spectrum estimated by the autoregressive (AR) model identification. The ratio of the low frequency power to the high frequency power increased linearly with the work level. In conclusion, the HRV measures obtained by the AR power spectrum analysis were found to be sensitive to changes of mental workload.

It has become more important to shorten development periods of high performance computer systems and their LSIs. During debugging of computer prototypes, logic designers request very frequent LSI refabrication to change logic circuits and to add some functions in spite of their extensive logic simulation by several GFLOPS supercomputers. To meet these demands, an automated on-chip direct wiring modification system has been developed, which enables wire-cut and via-digging by a precise focused ion beam machine, and via-filling and jumper-writing by a laser CVD machine, directly on pre-redesign (original) chips. This modification system was applied to LSI reworks during the development of Hitachi large scale computers M-880 and S-3800, and contributed to shorten system debugging period by four to six months.

A new method for simulation of etching and deposition processes has been developed. This method is based on fundamental morphological operations derived from image and signal processing. As the material surface during simulation moves in time, the geometry either increases or decreases. If the simulation geometry is considered as a two-valued image (material or vacuum), etching and deposition processes can be simulated by means of the erosion and dilation operation. Together with a cellular material representation this method allows an accurate and stable simulation of three-dimensional arbitrary structures. Simulation results for several etching and deposition problems demonstrate accuracy and generality of our method.