Long-period gratings (LPGs) are written in the fibers un-preheated and preheated. The influence of residual stress on trimming resonance wavelengths by heating the LPGs is investigated comparing the post-heating changes of the transmission characteristics. It becomes evident that the residual stress relaxation shifts resonance wavelengths to shorter wavelengths quickly and the glass structure modification moves them to longer wavelengths slowly. The relaxation rate of the glass structure drops rapidly with the decrease in heating temperature, and the influence of the residual stress relaxation appears more strongly at the early stage of heating at a lower temperature. The trimming wavelength range can be broadened on the short wavelength side by decreasing the heating temperature. We could adjust resonance wavelengths without significant peak loss changes by the residual stress relaxation before writing LPGs, though the trimming range becomes narrow.

The purpose of our study is to develop an algorithm that would enable the automated detection of lacunar infarct on T1- and T2-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images. Automated identification of the lacunar infarct regions is not only useful in assisting radiologists to detect lacunar infarcts as a computer-aided detection (CAD) system but is also beneficial in preventing the occurrence of cerebral apoplexy in high-risk patients. The lacunar infarct regions are classified into the following two types for detection: "isolated lacunar infarct regions" and "lacunar infarct regions adjacent to hyperintensive structures." The detection of isolated lacunar infarct regions was based on the multiple-phase binarization (MPB) method. Moreover, to detect lacunar infarct regions adjacent to hyperintensive structures, we used a morphological opening processing and a subtraction technique between images produced using two types of circular structuring elements. Thereafter, candidate regions were selected based on three features -- area, circularity, and gravity center. Two methods were applied to the detected candidates for eliminating false positives (FPs). The first method involved eliminating FPs that occurred along the periphery of the brain using the region-growing technique. The second method, the multi-circular regions difference method (MCRDM), was based on the comparison between the mean pixel values in a series of double circles on a T1-weighted image. A training dataset comprising 20 lacunar infarct cases was used to adjust the parameters. In addition, 673 MR images from 80 cases were used for testing the performance of our method; the sensitivity and specificity were 90.1% and 30.0% with 1.7 FPs per image, respectively. The results indicated that our CAD system for the automatic detection of lacunar infarct on MR images was effective.

When we consider user's convenience for electronic transactions, it might be desirable to generate a digital signature using biometrics. However, it is not easy nor practicable in today's communications environment because of inaccurate measuring and potential hill-climbing attacks with regard to biometrics, unless specific hardware storage is provided for manipulating signature keys or biometric templates securely. In this paper, we study a simple practical method for biometrics based digital signature generation without such restriction. It is based on the existing tools in software in our proposed model where a general digital signature such as RSA can be applied without losing its security. This is not a cryptography paper but rather written from the practical perspectives.

Power supply noise waveforms are acquired in a voltage domain by an on-chip monitor at resolutions of 0.3 ns/1.2 mV, in a digital test circuit consisting of 0.18-µm CMOS standard logic cells. Concurrently, magnetic field variation on a printed circuit board (PCB) due to power supply current of the test circuit is measured by an off-chip magnetic probing technique. An equivalent circuit model that unifies on- and off-chip impedance network of the entire test setup for EMI analysis is used for calculating the on-chip voltage-mode power supply noise from the off-chip magnetic field measurements. We have confirmed excellent consistency in frequency components of power supply noises up to 300 MHz among those derived by the on-chip direct sensing and the off-chip magnetic probing techniques. These results not only validate the state-of-the art EMI analysis methodology but also promise its connectivity with on-chip power supply integrity analysis at the integrated circuit level, for the first time in both technical fields.

An age-group classification method based on a fusion of different classifiers with different two-dimensional feature extraction algorithms is proposed. Theoretically, an integration of multiple classifiers can provide better performance compared to a single classifier. In this paper, we extract effective features from one sample image using different dimensional reduction methods, construct multiple classifiers in each subspace, and combine them to reduce age-group classification errors. As for the dimensional reduction methods, two-dimensional PCA (2DPCA) and two-dimensional LDA (2DLDA) are used. These algorithms are antisymmetric in the treatment of the rows and the columns of the images. We prepared the row-based and column-based algorithms to make two different classifiers with different error tendencies. By combining these classifiers with different errors, the performance can be improved. Experimental results show that our fusion-based age-group classification method achieves better performance than existing two-dimensional algorithms alone.

Detecting edge directions and estimating the exact value of a missing line are currently active research areas in deinterlacing processing. This paper proposes a spatial domain fuzzy rule that is based on an interpolation algorithm, which is suitable to the region with high motion or scene change. The algorithm utilizes fuzzy theory to find the most accurate edge direction with which to interpolate missing pixels. The proposed fuzzy direction oriented interpolator operates by identifying small pixel variations in seven orientations (0°, 45°, -45°, 63°, -63°, 72°, and -72°), while using rules to infer the edge direction. The Bayesian network model selects the most suitable deinterlacing method among three deinterlacing methods and it successively builds approximations of the deinterlaced sequence, by evaluating three methods in each condition. Detection and interpolation results are presented. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides a significant improvement over other existing deinterlacing methods. The proposed algorithm is not only for speed, but also effective for reducing deinterlacing artifacts.

This paper discusses the resistive termination of on-chip high-performance interconnects. Resistive termination is effective to improve the bandwidth of on-chip interconnects, on the other hands, increases the power dissipation and the area. Therefore trade-off analysis about resistive termination is necessary. This paper proposes a method to determine the termination of on-chip interconnects. The termination derived by the proposed method provides minimum sensitivity to process variation as well as maximum eye-opening in voltage.

In real-time systems, deadline misses of the tasks cause a degradation in the quality of their results. To improve the quality, we have to allocate CPU utilization for each task adaptively. Recently, Buttazzo et al. address a feedback scheduling algorithm, which dynamically adjusts task periods based on the current workloads by applying a linear elastic task model. In their model, the utilization allocated to each task is treated as the length of a linear spring and its flexibility is described by a constant elastic coefficient. In this paper, we first consider a nonlinear elastic task model, where the elastic coefficient depends on the utilization allocated to the task. We propose a simple iterative method for calculating the desired allocated resource and derive a sufficient condition for the convergence of the method. Next, we apply the nonlinear elastic model to an adaptive fair sharing controller. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulation.

This paper studies nonlinear dynamics of a simplified model of multiple-input parallel buck converters. The dynamic winner-take-all switching is used to achieve N-phase synchronization automatically, however, as parameters vary, the synchronization bifurcates to a variety of periodic/chaotic phenomena. In order to analyze system dynamics we adopt a simple piecewise constant modeling, extract essential parameters in a dimensionless circuit equation and derive a hybrid return map. We then investigate typical bifurcation phenomena relating to N-phase synchronization, hyperchaos, complicated superstable behavior and so on. Ripple characteristics are also investigated.

In this paper, we discuss the effects of switch resistances on the step response of switched-capacitor (SC) circuits, especially multiplying digital-to-analog converters (MDACs) in pipelined analog-to-digital converters. Theory and simulation results reveal that the settling time of MDACs can be decreased by optimizing the switch resistances. This switch resistance optimization does not only effectively increase the speed of single-bit MDACs, but also of multi-bit MDACs. Moreover, multi-bit MDACs are faster than the single-bit MDACs when slewing occurs during the step response. With such an optimization, the response of the switch will be improved by up to 50%.

A new method of cancellation of IM3 using current feedback has been proposed for a multi-stage RFIC amplifier. In order to cancel the IM3 present in an output signal of the amplifier, the IIP3 level and IM3 phase of the amplifier are adjusted by means of feedback circuit techniques, so that the target specification is satisfied. By estimating the IIP3 level and IM3 phase variations for two states in situations with and without feedback possessing linear factors, the parameters of a feedback circuit can be calculated. To confirm the validity of the method, we have investigated two approaches; one including an analytical approach to designing a two-stage feedback amplifier, achieving an IIP3 level improvement of 14.8 dB. The other method involves the fabrication of single-stage amplifiers with and without feedback, operating at 850 MHz, both of which were designed as an integrated circuit using a 0.18 µm SiGe BiCMOS process. The fabricated IC's were tested using a load-pull measurement system, and a good agreement between the estimated and measured IIP3 level and IM3 phase variations has been achieved. Further studies show that the error in these variations, as estimated by the method, has been found to be less than 1.5 dB and 15 degrees, respectively, when the load admittance at 1701 MHz was greater than 1/50 S.

We propose a service differentiation scheme for optical burst switching (OBS) with the scheduling algorithm Horizon. In the proposed scheme, in addition to the latest horizon used in the conventional Horizon, we introduce the second latest horizon and use them for reservation preemption. Burst priority order is perfectly guaranteed according to the burst class information informed by its control packet if the arrival time of the burst is later than the second latest horizon and earlier than the latest horizon. Since the extra offset time is no longer needed for service differentiation, the burst blocking probability and the data latency will be reduced. We assume a multi-hop network with ring topology where bursts traverse five intermediate nodes, and evaluate the performance in terms of the end-to-end and hop-by-hop burst blocking probabilities. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve service differentiation with smaller blocking probability than the extra-offset-time-based scheme with Horizon. Furthermore, we show that the proposed scheme preserves service differentiation even in multi-hop environments.

The peak SAR values of two-element array antennas for mobile handsets in the vicinity of a spherical phantom of a human head are evaluated numerically as a function of the distance between the array antenna and the head phantom when the two elements of a two-element array antenna are either co-phase voltage-fed or reverse-phase voltage-fed. It is found that relation between the worst case of the SAR and the phase difference of array elements strongly depends on the distance. When part of the head phantom is located in the reactive near-field region of the array antenna, although the co-phase feed SAR value is slightly smaller than the reverse-phase feed SAR value, the SAR value is practically independent of the phase difference, but when the head is completely outside the reactive near-field region, the co-phase feed SAR value is larger than the reverse-phase feed SAR value.

In this paper, we propose a predictive block-constrained trellis-coded quantization (BC-TCQ) to quantize cepstral coefficients for distributed speech recognition. For prediction of the cepstral coefficients, the first order auto-regressive (AR) predictor is used. To quantize the prediction error signal effectively, we use the BC-TCQ. The quantization is compared to the split vector quantizers used in the ETSI standard, and is shown to lower cepstral distance and bit rates.

In this letter, we investigate the application of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) in the downlink of multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where multiple antennas are located at all the transceivers. Based on the criterion of maximum system sum-capacity, a per-layer optimization scheme is proposed, in which the subchannel ordering and transceiver filters design are generated. In the proposed scheme, the successive character of THP can be fully exploited, so that both the minimum cost of interference suppression and the maximum power and diversity gains can be implemented, and hence, the system sum-capacity can be improved effectively.

To improve the channel estimation accuracy of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing, we previously proposed iterative QR-decomposition with M-algorithm (QRD-M) with decision directed channel estimation. In this paper, to keep the computational complexity low while further improving the transmission performance, we will modify previously proposed iterative QRD-M by incorporating cyclic redundancy check (CRC) coding. In the proposed method, transmitted signals are ranked according to their results of CRC decoding and the received signal-to-interference plus noise power ratio (SINR). In the modified M-algorithm, since the results of Turbo decoding and CRC decoding are used to generate the surviving symbol replica, the accuracy of signal detection in the following steps can be improved. Furthermore, based on the results of CRC decoding, iterative process can be terminated before reaching the maximum allowable number of iterations. Computer simulation results show that the loss in the required average received signal energy per bit-to-noise power spectrum density ratio Eb/N0 for average packet error rate (PER) = 10-2 is only about 0.4 dB from maximum likelihood detection (Full MLD) with ideal channel estimation.

This paper proposes a frequency diversity scheme using only even-numbered samples for single-carrier transmission with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE). In the proposed scheme, a periodical frequency spectrum generated by using only even-numbered samples in the time domain provides the frequency redundancy, which is utilized for frequency diversity. Moreover, in order to avoid the data rate reduction due to the decrease in the samples within one block, the high-level modulation is applied to each sample and the transmitting power of each sample can be doubled for the equivalent power transmission instead. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a steeper BER curve than the typical SC-FDE over frequency selective fading channels, while the typical SC-FDE is more favorable than the proposed scheme over flat fading channels. Moreover, the proposed scheme still retains its characteristic even when channel estimation and channel coding are additionally taken into account.

This paper proposes an OFDM mobile radio packet system that employs a new protocol of automatic repeat request (ARQ) for nonlinear multiuser detection (MUD) with log likelihood ratio combining (LC) on the appropriate bits. The conventional metric combining (MC) MUD separates collided packets by using nonlinear MUD, accumulates the Euclidian distance metrics of the received subcarrier symbols in the packets, and then achieves throughput improvement. However, when MC-MUD detects a packet error, it makes user terminals retransmit the same packets so as to reproduce the collision of the same packets. The proposed LC-MUD scheme simplifies the ARQ protocol and requires no reproduction of the same packet collision. The computer simulations demonstrate the superior throughput of LC-MUD to that of MC-MUD, and further improvement due to adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) optimized for the nonlinear MUD in LC-MUD.

A new radio-frequency (RF) radiated immunity/susceptibility test method using four-septum TEM cell is proposed. A rotating-EM field can be generated inside the cell by feeding four-different RF DSB-SC signals to four septa arranged in the cell. Since a polarization plane of the rotating-EM field rotates in a low speed, the immunity/susceptibility test for the EM field with various polarizations can be conducted more easily. In this paper, a technique for generating the rotating-EM field in the cell is investigated. The basic characteristics of the cell and the rotating-EM field by using the technique are clarified. To verify the validity of this test method, a RF radiated susceptibility of a printed circuit board is measured. The measured results are verified by comparing with the theoretical results based on modified telegrapher's equations.

In this letter, the effect of a propagation delay resulting from the use of an OFDM system with a transparent mobile multi-hop relay (MMR) is initially analyzed. Then, a least square (LS) channel estimation technique for the OFDM system with throughput enhancement (TE) MMR or cooperative MMR is proposed. It is demonstrated by computer simulation that the proposed LS channel estimation technique for OFDM systems with transparent MMR is superior to the conventional technique in terms of mean square error (MSE) and bit error rate (BER).