Studies on intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJs) of cuprate superconductors are reviewed. A system consisting of a few IJJs provides phenomena to test the Josephson phase dynamics and its interaction between adjacent IJJs within a nanometer scale, which is unique to cuprate superconductors. Quasiparticle density of states, which provides direct information on the Cooper-pair formation, is also revealed in the system. In contrast, Josephson plasma emission, which is an electromagnetic wave radiation in the sub-terahertz frequency range from an IJJ stack, arises from the synchronous phase dynamics of hundreds of IJJs coupled globally. This review summarizes a wide range of physical phenomena in IJJ systems having capacitive and inductive couplings with different nanometer and micrometer length scales, respectively.

In this paper, a coexistence mechanism between IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11b, Active Channel Reservation for cOexiStence (ACROS), is proposed. The key idea underlining ACROS is to reserve the channel for IEEE 802.15.4 transmission, where IEEE 802.11 transmissions are forbidden. The request-to-send (RTS)/clear-to send (CTS) mechanism within IEEE 802.11 is used to reserve a channel. The proposed ACROS mechanism is implemented into a PC based prototype. The embedded version of ACROS is also developed to mitigate the timing drift problem in the PC-based ACROS. The efficiency of ACROS is shown using the throughput and packet error rate achieved in actual experiments.

An ICI (Inter-Cell Interference) mitigation algorithm for exploiting macroscopic diversity for an up-link OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) system is proposed. To reduce the influence of carrier collision, the order of resource allocation is coordinated based on the location of each MS (Mobile Station) and the associated carrier group. This consideration significantly reduces ICI and enhances throughput at the boundary region.

The utilization of a high-Tc superconductor for implementing a superconducting qubit is to be expected. Recent researches on the quantum property of Josephson junctions in high-Tc superconductors indicate that the low energy quasiparticle excitation is weak enough to observe the macroscopic quantum tunneling. Therefore, a detailed study on the quantum property of high-Tc Josephson junctions becomes more important for applications. We show our experimental results of the macroscopic tunneling of current biased intrinsic Josephson junctions in Bi-2212 and its resonant activation in the presence of microwave radiation.

In CDMA cellular systems, the frequency reuse factor equals one. Therefore, the soft-handoff technology with combining macroscopic diversity was introduced to enhance the link performance. In this work, a novel macroscopic diversity combining scheme is proposed to enhance the link performance of the forward-link. The basic concept of this scheme is to integrate error correction coding into the soft-handoff technology. According to the number of soft-handoff channels, the source information is encoded by a convolutional code with a lower code rate. The coded symbols are then equally distributed to all channels from different BSs to the MS, and each channel carries a disjointed set of coded symbols. For this proposed scheme, no extra transmission power or bandwidth is required. The only cost is a slight increase of the encoding and decoding complexity of the convolutional codes. Numerical and simulation results show that a performance gain of 1 dB in bit energy-to-total noise power density ratio can be obtained as compared with the conventional scheme in the same conditions.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems applying macroscopic selection diversity (MSD) are analyzed in composite fading channels through derived expressions of capacity outage probability. The MSD system uses a maximum capacity MIMO base station (BS) selection algorithm, where the results show a significant improvement in outage capacity.

This paper describes an Embedded DRAM Hybrid Macro, which supports various memory specifications. The eDRAM module generator with Hybrid Macro provides more than 120,000 eDRAM configurations. This eDRAM includes a new architecture called Auto Signal Management (ASM) architecture, which automatically adjusts the timing of the control signals for various eDRAM configurations, and reduces the design Turn Around Time. An Enhanced-on-chip Tester performs the maximum 512b I/O pass/fail simultaneous judgments and the real time repair analysis. The eDRAM testing time is reduced to about 1/64 of the time required using the conventional technique. A test chip is fabricated using a 0.18 µm 4-metal embedded DRAM technology, which utilizes the triple-well, dual-Tox, and Co salicide process technologies. This chip achieves a wide voltage range operation of 1.2 V at 100 MHz to 1.8 V at 200 MHz.

A new approach for extracting significant characteristic within speech signal for distinct speaker is presented. Based on the multiresolution property of wavelet transform, quadrature mirror filters (QMFs) derived by Daubechies is used to decompose the input signal into varied frequency channels. Owning to the uncorrelation property of each resolution derived from QMFs, Linear Predict Coding Cepstrum (LPCC) of lower frequency region and entropy information of higher frequency region for each decomposition process are calculated as the speech feature vectors. In addition, a hard thresholding technique for lower resolution in each decomposition process is also used to remove the effect of noise interference. The experimental result shows that by using this mechanism, not only effectively reduce the effect of noise inference but improve the recognition rate. The proposed feature extraction algorithm is evaluated on MAT telephone speech database for Text-Independent speaker identification using vector quantization (VQ). Some popular existing methods are also evaluated for comparison in this paper. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is more effective and robust than that of the other existing methods. For 80 speakers and 2 seconds utterance, the identification rate is 98.52%. In addition, the performance of our method is very satisfactory even at low SNR.

Crosstalk from digital to analog circuits can be causative of operation fails in analog-digital mixed LSIs. This paper describes modeling techniques and simulation strategies of the substrate coupling noise. A macroscopic substrate noise model that expresses the noise as a function of logic state transition frequencies among digital blocks is proposed. A simulation system based on the model is implemented in the mixed signal simulation environment, where performance degradation of the 2nd order ΔΣADC coupled to digital noise sources is clearly simulated. These results indicate that the proposed behavioral modeling approach allows practicable full chip substrate noise simulation measures.

It is well known that extracting parallel loops plays a significant role in designing parallelizing compilers. The execution efficiency of a loop is enhanced when the loop can be executed in parallel or partial parallel, like a DOALL or DOACROSS loop. This paper reports on the practical parallelism detector (PPD) that is implemented in PFPC (a portable FORTRAN parallelizing compiler running on OSF/1) at NCTU to concentrate on finding the parallelism available in loops. The PPD can extract the potential DOALL and DOACROSS loops in a program by invoking a combination of the ZIV test and the I test for verifying array subscripts. Furthermore, if DOACROSS loops are available, an optimization of synchronization statement is made. Experimental results show that PPD is more reliable and accurate than previous approaches.

Estimating the macroscopic demand for telephones is essential to long-term planning construction of telecommunication networks facilities. Although there are several useful forecast equations, they need some types and/or vast amounts of data that are sometimes unavailable, especially in developing countries. This paper presents a sophisticated telephone demand estimation technique that is based on the demands of residential and business users. It uses several parameters to estimate the increase in telephone demand. A simplified equation is also presented that is a function of only one parameter: normalized gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. This simplified equation is shown to be useful by using data for more than ten countries.

A method of tone recognition has been developed for dissyllabic speech of Standard Chinese based on discrete hidden Markov modeling. As for the feature parameters of recognition, combination of macroscopic and microscopic parameters of fundamental frequency contours was shown to give a better result as compared to the isolated use of each parameter. Speaker normalization was realized by introducing an offset to the fundamental frequency. In order to avoid recognition errors due to syllable segmentation, a scheme of concatenated learning was adopted for training hidden Markov models. Based on the observations of fundamental frequency contours of dissyllables, a scheme was introduced to the method, where a contour was represented with a series of three syllabic tone models, two for the first and the second syllables and one for the transition part around the syllabic boundary. Corresponding to the voiceless consonant of the second syllable, fundamental frequency contour of a dissyllable may include a part without fundamental frequencies. This part was linearly interpolated in the current method. To prove the validity of the proposed method, it was compared with other methods, such as representing all of the dissyllabic contours as the concatenation of two models, assigning a special code to the voiceless part, and so on. Tone sandhi was also taken into account by introducing two additional models for the half-third tone and for the first 4th tone of the combination of two 4th tones. With the proposed method, average recognition rate of 96% was achieved for 5 male and 5 female speakers.