We have developed a new model to analyze the thermal failure mechanism due to electrical-over-stress (EOS) for two-dimensional planar pn-junction structures where the failure power is proportional to about 1/5 power of the failure time. We adopted a pseudo two-dimensional numerical simulation method where a pn-junction diode is divided into small elements and represented by a circuit network composed of many minute resistors and diodes. The failure mechanism studied by Wunsch and Bell, that is one of many studies for one-dimensional pn-diodes, is not valid for the case of two-dimensional pn-junction, such as a planar type junction. On the contrary, the failure mechanism was found to be much correlative with the junction structure, especially the impurity concentration in the substrate in the two-dimensional case. When the impurity concentration in the substrate is high enough (e.g. Nsub1017[cm-3]), the breakdown occurs at the whole junction. The heat transfer is one-dimensional and the failure power is proportional to about 1/2 power of the failure time, which is well known results reported by many researchers: e.g. Wunsch &Bell. On the other hand, when the impurity concentration in the substrate is low enough (e.g. Nsub1016[cm-3]), the breakdown occurs locally at the junction edge. The heat transfer is two-dimensional and the failure power is in proportion to about 1/5 power of the failure time.

Theoretical network analysis of a network constructed of "Interconnectable Star Couplers" whose all diagonal elements of transmission matrix are zero is investigated. Under certain connection rules, Interconnectable Star Coupler can be connected each other without oscillation and ghost formation. The rules are: (1) Network should not contain any loop. (2)Only single port pair should be connected between neighbor star couplers. (3)Network shold not contain any usual star coulpler. "Coupled Star Network", which is constructed under the connection rules, is able to form Cascade Star topology, Stratified Star topology and their mixed topology. It is shown that the Coupled Star Network is equivalent to a large Interconnectable Star Coupler so that bidirectional communication, which can add confidentiality to the broadcasting bus and doubles communication capacity, is available. A new configuration of Coupled Star Network using passive Interconnectable Star Couplers and optical amplifiers is proposed. This network has two separated bidirectional communication channel which can be applied for so-called Multimedia LAN. As a result of comparison between Cascade Star topology and Stratifide Star topology, it is shown that the latter topology is superior to former topology, from the view point of signal degeneration and maximum round trip delay time. Cascade Star topology, however, is superior to Stratified Star topology from the angle of total fiber length. Accordingly, optimized network topology is thought to be mixed topology of these.

An optimum placement of capacitors in the layout of Switched Capacitor networks is presented in this paper. The performance of integrated circuits is generally degraded by perturbations of physical parameters of each device and parasitic strays. The optimality imposed in this paper is the minimum degradation of a transfer function with respect to the distribution of capacitance values. A capacitance value per unit area fabricated on a LSI chip is assumed to be perturbed linearly with its x and y coordinates. The capacitor placement is determined so that the effects of such perturbation of capacitances to the overall transfer-characteristics are canceled. As the result, input-output transfer function will stay nominal under the linear perturbation model with arbitrary gradients.

Binaural effects in two measures are studied. One measure is the detectable limen of click sounds under lateralization of diotic or dichotic noise signals, and the other is phoneme articulation score under localization or lateralization of speech and noise signals. The experiments use a headphones system with listener's own head related transfer function (HRTF) filters. The HRTF filter coefficients are calculated individually from the impulse responses due to the listener's HRTF measured in a slightly sound reflective booth. The frequency response of the headphone is compensated for using an inverse filter calculated from the response at the subject's own ear canal entrance point. Considering the speech frequency band in tele-communication systems is not sufficiently wide, the bandwidth of the HRTF filter is limited below 6.2 kHz. However, the experiments of the localization simulation in the horizontal plane show that the sound image is mostly perceived outside the head in the simulated direction. Under simulation of localization or lateralization of speech and noise signals, the phoneme articulation score increases when the simulation spatially separates the phonemes from the noise signals while the total signal to noise ratio for both ears is maintained constant. This result shows the binaural effect in speech intelligibility under the noise disturbance condition, which is regarded as a part of the cocktail party effect.

The groupware for new idea generation system, GUNGEN, has been developed. GUNGEN consists of a distributed and cooperative KJ method support system and an intelligent productive work card support system. The system was implemented on a network consisting of a number of personal computers. The distributed and cooperative KJ method is carried out on computers. The ideas proposed by participants are classified into several groups on the basis of similarity and then a conclusion is derived. The intelligent productive work card support system can be used as a multimedia database to refer to the previous data of the distributed and cooperative KJ method.

We have developed an efficient general-purpose two-dimensional device simulation system which consists of a solver, and pre- and post-processors. This system can easily handle any complicated device having a non-rectangular shape. It can also be applied to compound semiconductor devices with heterojunctions, including optical devices such as laser diodes. In order to handle any device, a new program for construction of device geometry is developed as a preprocessor. It has an efficient graphic interface to reduce the time required to input data for simulations, which is a very time consuming task for complicated devices. A new efficient data structure representing device geometry is introduced in the program. During postprocessing, any physical quantity can be displayed on the multi-window screen. In addition, a general-purpose solver for basic semiconductor equations is implemented in the system. Using this system, any device can be successfully analyzed in a unified manner and the turn-around time for the simulation is significantly reduced.

We present schemes for disseminating information in the n-dimensional hypercube with some faulty nodes/edges. If each processor can send a message to t neighbors at each round, and if the number of faulty nodes/edges is k(kn), then this scheme will broadcast information from any source to all destinations within any consecutive n+[(k+l)/t] rounds. We also discuss the case where the number of faulty nodes is not less than n.

An automatic optimization system for semiconductor devices has been built-up by fully interfacing an optimizer and a device-analysis code supplemented with sensitivity analysis. The device-analysis code is thought of as a part of a pipeline of simulators. The latters are regarded as subprocesses by the optimizer, which controls their I/O stream. The action of the pipeline is iterated until the optimum set of design parameters is determined. An important feature of the system is that all the derivatives required in the sensitivity analysis are calculated analytically, this providing a substantial improvement in both the numerical accuracy and computational efficiency, and making the scheme attractive from the application standpoint. A few examples of optimization of MOS devices are shown and the performance is reported, indicating that a system of this kind can usefully be exploited in a design environment.

Physical optics (PO) have been extensively used in radiation pattern analysis of offset parabola. Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD) proposed later has better accuracy. This paper presents an analytical/numerical comparative study of these methods to demonstrate the limitations of PO. PO envelope errors in co-polar patterns are expressed as functions of antenna parameters. Serious PO errors in cross polarization prediction are pointed out for antennas with cross-polar suppressing feeds polarized in the plane of asymmetry.

A new monolithic transmit-receive GaAs FET switch has been developed, named the FET series-shunt connected TR switch and capable of switching high rf transmitting power. Both insertion loss and isolation limitations of this type TR switch have been analyzed using the switching cutoff frequency of the control FET, and the formula for calculating the rated power is provided. A unique feature of this switch is that the power handling of the switch is not limited by the FET gate break-down voltage but is limited by the saturation current, so higher handling power capability is available by using FETs with a larger gate periphery. A design example of the TR switch at a rated power of 8 W in the transmit mode as well as the results of an X band switch are presented.

A yellow light emitting display using neon-hydrogen-argon mixture as filling gas is presented. Strong "monochromatisation" of the emitted light is reported for the first time on the wavelength λ585.3 nm. Experimental results on the dependence of the "monochromatisation effect" is given for various pressure values and filling gas composition. It is underlined the existence of a process of selective population of the upper level 3p[1/2]0 of the transition corressponding to the wavelength 585.3 nm. The obtained results are discussed in relation with the reported results on yellow light laser in which a discharge in neon-hydrogen mixture is used for laser radiation generation at λ585.3 nm. The proposed explanation of different authors on the upper level population through radiative or dissociative recombination of neon ions is discussed and a new hypothesis is advanced for the strong monochromatisation observed in neon-hydrogen or neon-hydrogen-argon filled displays. According to this hypothesis, in the feeding process of the upper level 3p[1/2]0 are taking part the neon metastable states too. If such an assumption will come true, cyclic processes in yellow light generation might appear.

In the coming information society, people will have to be engaged in the information environment for their everyday activities. We propose a new design concept of Contextual Metaphors for constructing a human interface. It introduces multiple metaphors and makes it easy for people to directly participate into the environment. The major part of the concept is to provide good contextual support for their everyday activities with a layered design of three cognitively distinct concepts. They are the use of everyday based object metaphors, the task oriented assignment of each of metaphors to system functions and the scenario based sequencings of scenes of those metaphors. A prototyping of the concept showed effectiveness of the concept together with some remarks on the actual design.

Unlike a noise removal recursive or averaging filter, this letter presents a temporal filter which attenuates temporal high frequency components and improves visual effects. Although temporal aliasing occurs, the proposed filter proceeds temporal bandlimitation not affected by them. To reduce effects caused by aliasing components, a spatial filtering which is applied along the trajectory of motion is investigated. The proposed filter presents a de-aliasing and effective bandlimiting characteristics as well as reducing of noises.

The behavior of TM-wave scattering from a dielectric-loaded semicircular trough in a conducting half-space is investigated. The dielectric loading is made of a circular cylinder which lies in a semi-circular trough in the perfectly conducting plane. The formulation is numerically evaluated to investigate the scattered field pattern for various dielectric loading conditions. It is found that the scattering patterns exhibit the resonant behavior due to both of the concave surface contour and the dielectric loading.

In speech output expected as an ideal man-machine interface, there exists an important issue on emotion production in order to not only improve its naturalness but also achieve more sophisticated speech interaction between man and machine. Speech has two aspects, which are prosodic information and phonetic feature. For the purpose of application to natural and high quality speech synthesis, the role of prosody in speech perception has been studied. In this paper, prosodic components, which contribute to the expression of emotions and their intensity, are clarified by analyzing emotional speech and by conducting listening tests of synthetic speech. The analysis is performed by substituting the components of neutral speech (i.e., one with no particular emotion) with those of emotional speech preserving the temporal correspondence by means of DTW. It has been confirmed that prosodic components, which are composed of pitch structure, temporal structure and amplitude structure, contribute to the expression of emotions more than the spectral structure of speech. The results of listening tests using prosodic substituted speech show that temporal structure is the most important for the expression of anger, while all of three components are much more important for the intensity of anger. Pitch structure also plays a significant role in the expression of joy and sadness and their intensity. These results make it possible to convert neutral utterances into utterances expressing various emotions. The results can also be applied to controlling the emotional characteristics of speech in synthesis by rule.

This paper investigates the performance of the line spectrum pair (LSP) frequency parameter representation for speech recognition. Transitional parameters of LSP frequencies are defined using first-order regression coefficients. The transitional and the instantaneous frequency parameters are linearly combined to generate a single feature vector used for recognition. The performance of the single vector is compared with that of the cepstral coefficients (CC) representation using a minimumdistance classifier in speaker-independent isolated word recognition experiments. In the speech recognition experiments, the transitional and the instantaneous coefficients are also combined in the distance domain. Also, inverse variance weighted Euclidean measures are defined using LSP frequencies to achieve Mel-scale-like warping and the new warped-frequencies are used in recognition experiments. The performance of the single feature vector defined with transitional and instantaneous LSP frequencies is found to be the best among the measures used in the experiments.

A method is presented for analyzing the scalar wave scattering from a conducting target of arbitrary shape in random media for both the Dirichlet and Neumann problems. The current generators on the target are introduced and expressed generally by the Yasuura method. When using the current generators, the scattering problem is reduced to the wave propagation problem in random media.

A reversible (or injective) cellular automaton (RCA) is a backward deterministic" CA, i.e., every configuration of it has at most one predecessor. Margolus has been shown that there is a computation-universal two-dimensional 2-state RCA model. Although his model is very interesting, it differs from a standard CA model because of its somewhat spatial and temporal non-uniformity. In this paper, we present two kinds of simple 16-state computation-universal models using the framework of two-dimensional reversible partitioned CA (PCA). Since PCA can be considered as a subclass of standard CA, we can immediately obtain 16-state standard RCA models from them. For each of these models, we designed a configuration which simulates a Fredkin gate. Since Fredkin gate has been known to be a universal logic element, computation-universality of these two models is concluded.