It has been a main subject to reduce design time and cost not only in the field of digital LSI layout but also in the field of analog LSI, due to increasing LSI packing density and circuit complexity. Semicustom approaches are insufficient to design analog LSIs which require higher density chips and have many kinds of design specifications. As for custom approaches, a symbolic layout method is widely used, where an automatic compaction serves to shrink its chip size after placement and routing. However, most of analog LSIs are fabricated by bipolar process technology, which has many kinds of devices with various shaped patterns. And besides, there are many layout specifications, which are peculiar to analog LSIs and directly affect to circuit performance. So, it is necessary taking account of the layout specifications not only for placement and routing but also for compaction. This paper describes an approach for analog compaction. Given a layout pattern of placement and routing satisfying layout specifications, various techniques to take account of such specifications in a compaction method are discussed. This paper also proposes a clean-up function after compaction, which reduces detoured wire patterns and removes unnecessary vias. By the compaction with clean-up function, a final layout pattern becomes refined in quality.

The cost trade-off between the number of additional vias employed and the number of layers decreased in Ref.(2) is discussed. We present a cost model and show that the technique in Ref.(2) really reduce the total cost for producing the board.

The authors found that the coloration in appearance as a noticeable defect of super twisted nematic LCD (STN-LCD) can be cancelled out and monochromatic display can be realized by adding an optical compensator to the STN-LCD. This NTN mode display shows the steepness of threshold characteristic and the response times equivalent to those in STN, but its contrast ratio, viewing angle, and multiplex driving capability are far better than those in STN. A liquid crystal cell is used as a compensator. Monochromatic display can be done when both display cell and compensator cell satisfy the following three conditions. (1) Product values nd of display cell and compensator cell coincide with each other. (2) The twist angles of liquid crystal layers are opposite to each other in their helix, but equal to each other in their absolute values. (3) The liquid crystal molecular directors adjacent to the opponent substrates of two cells are perpendicular to each other. In order to satisfy condition (1), the NTN cell gap must be controlled severer than the STN cell gap. The authors fabricated a prototype full-color NTN-LCD, and obtained an excellent contrast ratio of 10:1 to 17:1 by driving it at 1/240 duty ratio.

Novel optical FSK modulation/demodulation schemes with AMI coding are proposed to overcome degradation due to the non-uniform frequency modulation characteristic of DFB lasers. It is shown that an NRZ signal can be demodulated without a decoder as opposed to other coding schemes proposed earlier.

Recently, active matrix liquid crystal (LC) displays have been intensively investigated for realizing full color television sets. In order to obtain a high quality picture LC-TV, the color filter is important. Various processes for manufacturing color filters have been studied, such as dispersion, dyeing, printing, electrodeposition, color vacuum evaporation, multilayer interference film, sublimation transfer, photographic coloration, electrophotography, tinted polymer polymerization, and complex processes (combinations of two or more processes). Of these processes, the dispersion, dyeing, and printing processes, which are considered particularly promising, shall be discussed below.

Recently, thin film electroluminescent (TFEL) technology has made great progress in the development of multi-color display panels. In this paper, first, the state of the art in TFEL display devices is reviewed. Second, the characteristics of various kinds of color emitting materials are discussed, and present thin film deposition techniques and multi-color picture element composition methods are outlined. Third, the limitations of large capacity color EL displays based on signal pulse retardation are discussed, and then it is shown that a panel with up to approximately 1000 scanning lines can be realized by using mainly higher conductive transparent electrode materials and others. Finally, the future prospects of TFEL display devices for full color EL displays and associated problems are also mentioned.

The sequence of 8-point DCT and scalar quantization is effective in image data compression. The operation is executed very efficiently, if the DCT coefficients need not to be found explicitly. The present paper proposes a method, requiring only five times of multiplication for the transform. The 8-point DCT can be comopsed from the 16-point DFT which gives only the real parts of coefficients, and final scaling. The real part DFT can be implemented by the small FFT Winograd algorithm, which requires only five multiplications. The final scaling can be combined with the quantizing matrix without any change in arithmetic complexity of the qunatizer. Since each signal path in the proposed algorithm has one multiplication at most, the five multiplications can be executed in parallel. This will make the hardware implementation of the algorithm effective.

In this paper we give a method of transforming logic programs into equational dataflow programs. The equational dataflow program is a set of recursion equations as to variables over a sequence domain. A recursion equation corresponds to each definite (Horn) clause which is interpreted as a transformation of variables to a variable. Each variable denotes a function from the set of natural numbers to the Herbrand base, that is, a sequence of ground atoms. The fair merge function is necessary to realize OR-nondeterminism, which is essential in the deductions of logic programs, by means of an equational dataflow program. The nondeterminism in the transformation caused by a definite clause is eliminated and ensured fair by introducing a kind of oracle which will also be provided by simple recursion equations. Then it will be shown that the equational dataflow program with the oracle is both sound and complete in denoting the finite computation of the original logic program. The semantics of the equational dataflow program is given by fixpoint approach and is interpreted as a semantics of the given logic program.

This paper discusses an optimal software release problem, based on a software reliability growth model incorporating the time-dependent behavior of testing-effort expenditures in the software testing. The problem presents an optimum release time when to stop testing and to be ready for release to the user. In particular, we consider a penalty cost due to delay in the scheduled software delivery time. Using a testing-effort function described a Weibull curve, a software reliability growth process in the error detection phenomenon in software testing is modeled based on a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. The testing-effort parameters and the reliability growth parameters in the model are estimated by a modified least-squares estimation and by a maximum-likelihood estimation, respectively. Based on the software reliability growth mode, the optimal software release problem is formulated by using the total expected software cost to be minimized. Further, numerical examples are presented for illustrations.

Two design methods, namely method 1 and method 2, for class partial response FIR filters with equiripple stopband attenuation and low intersymbol interference (ISI) are investigated. For method 1, we design only a transmitter filter. For method 2, we design a transmitter and receiver filter pair having nearly the same amplitude response in the frequency domain. Both design methods have mainly three steps in common. First, a truncated sampled sequence of an ideal impulse response is used as an initial impulse response of the filter or filter pair in cascade. The optimum length of the sequence is examined. Second, z is transformed into such that the stopband section on the z-plane unit circle of the filter is mapped to be the entire unit circle in the -plane. Then a special all-zero function of is constructed having equiripple amplitude response along the unit circle. From this function, the filter transfer function of z with equiripple stopband attenuation is derived by inversely transforming into z. Finally, zero ISI approximation is performed with least-squares criterion, which drastically reduces ISI without significant change in the attenuation. Various characteristics of the filters designed by both methods are also illustrated.

Several types of Ne-orange monochrome plasma display panels (PDPs) of the 10-inch class with a pixel number equivalent to similar size CRTs have been developed, each with its own simple structure and good performance, and put on the market for personal computer terminals. Development of color DC-PDPs has progressed in terms of color reproduction, display panel size, high speed addressing for TV display with a sufficient number of gray levels, luminance and luminous efficiency. AC-PDPs have also resumed active development of color displays in several surface-discharge panel structures. Some recent topics in these developments are reviewed.

This paper describes status and trends in regard to resolution, large size panel, color display characteristics and related technologies for active-matrix addressed LCDs, especially, TFT-LCDs from a viewpoint of a high-definition and full-color display. The TFT-LCD is a most promising candidate for it.

Electro-optic constants of single-mode proton-exchanged slab waveguiding layers fabricated on z-cut LiNbO3 crystals are estimated, taking into account the field distribution of the propagating TM0 mode.

This is the first report on room temperature CW operation of GaAlAs/GaAs vertical Fabry-Perot cavity surface emitting lasers. A vertical microcavity was formed with a diameter of 7 µm and cavity length of 5.5 µm by a two-step MOCVD growth and fully monolithic technology. The threshold current was 32 mA under CW condition at 22.5. Stable single transverse and longitudinal mode operation was obtained.

A high speed tunnel current measurement technique called HSTCM has been proposed for characterizing insulating thin films. A voltage pulse (less than 100 µs) is applied across an insulator and a current pulse is measured using a specially devised operational amplifier. This technique enables measurement of high electric field current to voltage (I-V) characteristics of thin SiO2 films in electric fields up to 2 GV/m, and to measure time dependent tunnel current characteristics in insulators, such as a Si3N4-SiO2 two-layer insulator of an MNOS (Metal Nitride Oxide Semiconductor) device, in the 10 µs-1 ms range. Accurate high electric field I-V characteristics in thin SiO2, and a capacitor coupled model for a floating gate non-volatile memory device could provide a high-precision simulation program for write/erase characteristics for the memory device. Furthermore, high speed time-dependent tunnel current measurement enables characterization of transient carrier trap phenomena in the insulator of the MNOS device in the µs range, i.e., the device's actual operation period. As described above, the HSTCM technique is a strong tool for evaluating tunneling phenomena in various insulating films and the operation of non-volatile memory devices.

This paper discusses the present state and future prospects of directly addressed matrix liquid crystal display panels in which a thin film transistor switch matrix is not used.

Generally speaking, in the actual situation of evaluating or predicting the stochastic random phenomena, it is sometimes inevitable to consider the undesirable modelling error generated from an incomplete situation in the actual measurement (i.e., the observations in an actual environmental field are very often given under the unsatisfactory situation without keeping the idealized physical property assumed abstractively in the theoretical research), together with the inevitable additional background noise of arbitrary distribution type. Thus, the unified statistical treatment for the resultant data contaminated by these additional noises of different type is newly proposed in this paper from the system-theoretical viewpoint closely related to environmental field, based on Bayes' theorem and the information criterion. Its computer-aided identification algorithm is derived in a very compact form matched to the recurrence processing of succesive observations. Finally, the validity and the effectiveness of our theoretical result are experimentally confirmed through the application to the actual data of environmental noise in room acoustics.

We have implemented a program editor for Modula-2 at ETH Zurich, named Macpeth. Macpeth is running on Lilith, Macintosh and other machines. We show the data structure for translation from the internal parse tree to the external textual representation. The data structure keeps the information for efficient scrolling and partial refreshing operations on the window.

A novel interpretation is given to the information-theoretic meaning of Fano's inequality from the viewpoint of the rate-risk function which expresses the relationship between information rate of observed data and Bayes risk in a decision making context.