In this paper, we presented a novel method for automatic pronunciation quality assessment. Unlike the popular “Goodness of Pronunciation” (GOP) method, this method does not map the decoding confidence into pronunciation quality score, but differentiates the different pronunciation quality utterances directly. In this method, the student's utterance need to be decoded for two times. The first-time decoding was for getting the time points of each phone of the utterance by a forced alignment using a conventional trained acoustic model (AM). The second-time decoding was for differentiating the pronunciation quality for each triphone using a specially trained AM, where the triphones in different pronunciation qualities were trained as different units, and the model was trained in discriminative method to ensure the model has the best discrimination among the triphones whose names were same but pronunciation quality scores were different. The decoding network in the second-time decoding included different pronunciation quality triphones, so the phone-level scores can be obtained from the decoding result directly. The phone-level scores were combined into the sentence-level scores using maximum entropy criterion. The experimental results shows that the scoring performance was increased significantly compared to the GOP method, especially in sentence-level.

Distribution of current onset voltage (COV) as well as threshold voltage (VTH) and drain induced barrier lowering (DIBL) in MOSFETs fabricated by 65 nm technology is statistically analyzed. Although VTH distribution follows the normal distribution, COV and DIBL deviate from the normal distribution. It is newly found that COV follows the Gumbel distribution, which is known as one of the extreme value distributions. This result of statistical COV analysis supports our model that COV is mainly determined by the deepest potential valley between source and drain.

The average Hamming correlation is an important performance indicator of frequency-hopping sequences (FHSs). In this letter, the average partial Hamming correlation (APHC) properties of FHSs are discussed. Firstly, the theoretical bound on the average partial Hamming correlation of FHSs is established. It works for any correlation window with length 1≤ω≤υ, where υ is the sequence period, and generalizes the bound developed by Peng et al which is valid only when ω=υ. A sufficient and necessary condition for a set of FHSs having optimal APHC for any correlation window is then given. Finally, sets of FHSs with optimal APHC are presented.

Many deterministic small-world network models have been proposed so far, and they have been proven useful in describing some real-life networks which have fixed interconnections. Search efficiency is an important property to characterize small-world networks. This paper tries to clarify how the search procedure behaves when random walks are performed on small-world networks, including the classic WS small-world network and three deterministic small-world network models: the deterministic small-world network created by edge iterations, the tree-structured deterministic small-world network, and the small-world network derived from the deterministic uniform recursive tree. Detailed experiments are carried out to test the search efficiency of various small-world networks with regard to three different types of random walks. From the results, we conclude that the stochastic model outperforms the deterministic ones in terms of average search steps.

An SiO2/Si-cap/Si0.55Ge0.45 heterostructure was fabricated on p-type Si(100) and strained silicon on insulator (SOI) substrates by low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and subsequent thermal oxidation in an O2 + H2 gas mixture. Chemical bonding features and valence band offsets in the heterostructures were evaluated by using high-resolution x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements and thinning the stack layers with a wet chemical solution.

A variety of ubiquitous computing devices, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensor network (WSN), are generating huge and significant events that should be rapidly processed for business excellence. In this paper, we describe how complex event processing (CEP) technology can be applied to ubiquitous process management based on context-awareness. To address the issue, we propose a method for context-aware event processing using event processing language (EPL) statement. Specifically, the semantics of a situation drive the transformation of EPL statement templates into executable EPL statements. The proposed method is implemented in the domain of ubiquitous cold chain logistics management. With the proposed method, context-aware event processing can be realized to enhance business performance and excellence in ubiquitous computing environments.

A histogram is a common graphical descriptor to represent features of distribution of pixels in an image. However, for most of the applications that apply histograms, the time complexity of histogram construction is much higher than that of the other parts of the applications. Hence, column histograms had been presented to construct the local histogram in constant time. In order to increase its performance, this letter proposes a linked-list histogram to avoid generating empty bins, further using hash tables with bin entries to map pixels. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority to the state-of-the-art method.

The performance of a mobile database management system (DBMS) in which most queries are made up of random data accesses if the NAND flash memory is used as storage media of the DBMS is degraded. The reason for this is that the performance of NAND flash memory is good for writing sequentially but poor when writing randomly. Thus, a new storage structure and querying policies are needed in mobile DBMS when flash memory is used as the storage media. In this letter, we propose a new policy of database page management to enhance the frequent random update performance, and then evaluate the performance experimentally.

As technology scales to 45 nm and below, the reliability of VLSI declines due to small delay defects, which are hard to detect by functional clock frequency. To detect small delay defects, a method which measures the delay time of path in circuit under test (CUT) was proposed. However, because a large number of FFs exist in recent VLSI, the probability that the resistive defect occurs in the FFs is increased. A test method measuring path delay time including the transmission time of FFs is necessary. However, the path measured by the conventional on-chip path delay time measurement method does not include a part of a master latch. Thus, testing using the conventional measurement method cannot detect defects occurring on the part. This paper proposes an improved on-chip path delay time measurement method. Test coverage is improved by measuring the path delay time including transmission time of a master latch. The proposed method uses a duty-cycle-modified clock signal. Evaluation results show that, the proposed method improves test coverage 5.2511.28% with the same area overhead as the conventional method.

This paper presents link analysis based on rhetorical relations with the aim of performing extractive summarization for multiple documents. We first extracted sentences with salient terms from individual document using statistical model. We then ranked the extracted sentences by measuring their relative importance according to their connectivity among the sentences in the document set using PageRank based on the rhetorical relations. The rhetorical relations were examined beforehand to determine which relations are crucial to this task, and the relations among sentences from documents were automatically identified by SVMs. We used the relations to emphasize important sentences during sentence ranking by PageRank and eliminate redundancy from the summary candidates. Our framework omits fully annotated sentences by humans and the evaluation results show that the combination of PageRank along with rhetorical relations does help to improve the quality of extractive summarization.

In modern cryptographic systems, physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are efficient mechanisms for many security applications, which extract intrinsic random physical variations to generate secret keys. The classical PUFs mainly exhibit static challenge-response behaviors and generate static keys, while many practical cryptographic systems need reconfigurable PUFs which allow dynamic keys derived from the same circuit. In this paper, the concept of reconfigurable multi-port PUFs (RM-PUFs) is proposed. RM-PUFs not only allow updating the keys without physically replacement, but also generate multiple keys from different ports in one clock cycle. A practical RM-PUFs construction is designed based on asynchronous clock and fabricated in TSMC low-power 65 nm CMOS process. The area of test chip is 1.1 mm2, and the maximum clock frequency is 0.8 GHz at 1.2 V. The average power consumption is 27.6 mW at 27. Finally, test results show that the RM-PUFs generate four reconfigurable 128-bit secret keys, and the keys are secure and reliable over a range of environmental variations such as supply voltage and temperature.

Self-triggered control is a control method that the control input and the sampling period are computed simultaneously in sampled-data control systems, and is studied in the field of networked control systems. In this paper, a new approach for self-triggered control is proposed based on the model predictive control (MPC) method. First, self-triggered MPC with delay compensation in which the delay-compensation input is introduced is newly formulated. Next, in order to efficiently solve this MPC problem, the optimal control problem with horizon one is formulated, and an approximate solution method is derived. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown by a numerical example.

In this paper, we present the validity and potential capacity of a modeling and simulation environment for the nonresonant plasmonic terahertz (THz) detector based on the silicon (Si) field-effect transistor (FET) with a technology computer-aided design (TCAD) platform. The nonresonant and “overdamped” plasma-wave behaviors have been modeled by introducing a quasi-plasma electron charge box as a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the channel region only around the source side of Si FETs. Based on the coupled nonresonant plasma-wave physics and continuity equation on the TCAD platform, the alternate-current (AC) signal as an incoming THz wave radiation successfully induced a direct-current (DC) drain-to-source output voltage as a detection signal in a sub-THz frequency regime under the asymmetric boundary conditions with a external capacitance between the gate and drain. The average propagation length and density of a quasi-plasma have been confirmed as around 100 nm and 11019/cm3, respectively, through the transient simulation of Si FETs with the modulated 2DEG at 0.7 THz. We investigated the incoming radiation frequency dependencies on the characteristics of the plasmonic THz detector operating in sub-THz nonresonant regime by using the quasi-plasma modeling on TCAD platform. The simulated dependences of the photoresponse with quasi-plasma 2DEG modeling on the structural parameters such as gate length and dielectric thickness confirmed the operation principle of the nonresonant plasmonic THz detector in the Si FET structure. The proposed methodologies provide the physical design platform for developing novel plasmonic THz detectors operating in the nonresonant detection mode.

To improve metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET) performance, flat interface between gate insulator and silicon should be realized. In this paper, flattening process of Si surface below 1000 utilizing Ar/4.9%H2 annealing and its effect on ultrathin HfON gate insulator formation were investigated. The Si(100) substrates were annealed using conventional rapid thermal annealing (RTA) system in Ar or Ar/4.9%H2 ambient for 1 h. The surface roughness of Ar/4.9%H2-annealed Si was small compared to that of Ar-annealed Si because the surface oxidation was suppressed. The obtained root mean square (RMS) roughness was 0.08 nm (as-cleaned: 0.20 nm) in case of Ar/4.9%H2-annealed at 1000 measured by tapping mode atomic force microscopy (AFM). The HfON surface was also able to be flattened by reduction of Si surface roughness. The electrical properties of HfON gate insulator were improved by the reduction of Si surface roughness. We obtained equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of 0.79 nm (as-cleaned: 1.04 nm) and leakage current density of 3.510-3 A/cm2 (as-cleaned: 6.110 -1 A/cm2) by reducing the Si surface roughness.

As means to control interface reactions between HfO2 and Ge(100), chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of ultrathin Ta-rich oxide using Tri (tert-butoxy) (tert-butylimido) tantalum (Ta-TTT) on chemically-cleaned Ge(100) has been conducted prior to atomic-layer controlled CVD of HfO2 using tetrakis (ethylmethylamino) hafnium (TEMA-Hf) and O3. The XPS analysis of chemical bonding features of the samples after the post deposition N2 annealing at 300 confirms the formation of TaGexOy and the suppression of the interfacial GeO2 layer growth. The energy band structure of HfO2/TaGexOy/Ge was determined by the combination of the energy bandgaps of HfO2 and TaGexOy measured from energy loss signals of O 1s photoelectrons and from optical absorption spectra and the valence band offsets at each interface measured from valence band spectra. From the capacitance-voltage (C-V) curves of Pt-gate MIS capacitors with different HfO2 thicknesses, the thickness reduction of TaGexOy with a relative dielectric constant of 9 is a key to obtain an equivalent SiO2 thickness (EOT) below 0.7 nm.

We have fabricated MOS capacitors with a hybrid floating gate (FG) consisting of Ni silicide nanodots (NiSi-NDs) and silicon-quantum-dots (Si-QDs) and studied electron transfer characteristics in the hybrid FG structures induced by the irradiation of 1310 nm light. The flat-band voltage shift due to the charging of the hybrid FG under light irradiation was lower than that in the dark. The observed optical response can be attributed to the shift of the charge centroid in the hybrid FG caused by the photoexcitation of electrons in NiSi-NDs and their transfer to Si-QDs. The photoexcited electron transfer from the NiSi-NDs to the Si-QDs in response to pulsed gate voltages was also evaluated from the increase in transient current caused by the light irradiation. The amount of transferred charge is likely to increase in proportion to pulse gate voltage.

Optical buffering has been one of the major technical challenges in realizing optical packet switching routers and interconnects. We demonstrate a compact optical buffer module, comprising an InP 18 phased-array switch and a silica-based delay line circuit. The integrated delay line circuit is fabricated on the silica-based planar-lightwave circuit (PLC) platform, and has the ladder architecture for reducing the size. In addition, variable optical couplers are integrated to achieve effective power equalization. Tunable and uniform buffering of up to 21 ns is obtained with 3-ns temporal resolution.

In forthcoming sensor networks, a multitude of sensor nodes deployed over a large geographical area for monitoring traffic, climate, etc. are expected to become an inevitable infrastructure. Clustering algorithms play an important role in aggregating a large volume of data that are produced continuously by the huge number of sensor nodes. In such networks, equal-sized multi-hop clusters which include an equal number of nodes are useful for efficiency and resiliency. In addition, scalability is important in such large-scale networks. In this paper, we mathematically design a decentralized equal-sized clustering algorithm using a partial differential equation based on the Fourier transform technique, and then design its protocol by discretizing the equation. We evaluated through simulations the equality of cluster sizes and the resiliency against packet loss and node failure in two-dimensional perturbed grid topologies.

High-resolution time of arrival (TOA) estimation techniques have great promise for the high range resolution required in recently developed radar systems. A widely known super-resolution TOA estimation algorithm for such applications, the multiple-signal classification (MUSIC) in the frequency domain, has been proposed, which exploits an orthogonal relationship between signal and noise eigenvectors obtained by the correlation matrix of the observed transfer function. However, this method suffers severely from a degraded resolution when a number of highly correlated interference signals are mixed in the same range gate. As a solution for this problem, this paper proposes a novel TOA estimation algorithm by introducing a maximum likelihood independent component analysis (MLICA) approach, in which multiple complex sinusoidal signals are efficiently separated by the likelihood criteria determined by the probability density function (PDF) of a complex sinusoid. This MLICA schemes can decompose highly correlated interference signals, and the proposed method then incorporates the MLICA into the MUSIC method, to enhance the range resolution in richly interfered situations. The results from numerical simulations and experimental investigation demonstrate that our proposed pre-processing method can enhance TOA estimation resolution compared with that obtained by the original MUSIC, particularly for lower signal-to-noise ratios.