Buffer insertion plays a great role in modern global interconnect optimization. But too many buffers exhaust routing resources, and result in the rise of the power dissipation. Unfortunately, simplified delay models used by most of the present buffer insertion algorithms may introduce redundant buffers due to the delay estimation errors, whereas accurate delay models expand the solution space significantly, resulting in unacceptable runtime. Moreover, the power dissipation problem becomes a dominant factor in the state-of-the-art IC design. Not only transistor but also interconnect should be taken into consideration in the power calculation, which makes us have to use an accurate power model to calculate the total power dissipation. In this paper, we present two stochastic optimization methods, simulated annealing and solution space smoothing, which use accurate delay and power models to construct buffered routing trees with considerations of buffer/wire sizing, routing obstacles and delay and power optimization. Experimental results show our methods can save much of the buffer area and the power dissipation with better solutions, and for the cases with pins ≤ 15, the runtime of solution space smoothing is tens of times faster.

This paper presents a method for lossy compression of digital video data by parametric line and Natural cubic spline approximation. The method estimates the variation of pixel values in the temporal dimension by taking group of pixels together as keyblocks and interpolating them in Euclidean space. Break and fit criterion is used to minimize the number of keyblocks required for encoding and decoding of approximated data. Each group of pixels at fixed spatial location is encoded/decoded independently. The proposed method can easily be incorporated in the existing video data compression techniques based on Discrete Cosine Transform or Wavelet Transform.

Interactive audio-video applications over IP networks have subjective tradeoffs between fidelity and latency owing to packet buffering at the receiver. Increasing the buffering time improves the fidelity, whereas it degrades the latency. This paper makes the subjective tradeoff between fidelity and latency clear in a quantitative way. In addition, we examine the effect of tasks on the subjective tradeoff. In evaluating the effect of tasks, we use two tasks according to ITU-T Recommendation P.920. An experiment was conducted to measure user-level QoS of an interactive application with the psychometric methods. We then investigate the subjective tradeoff quantitatively by QoS mapping. The experimental results confirm that there exists the buffering time which makes user-level QoS the highest. The results also show that the optimum buffering time depends on the kind of task.

In order to reconstruct 3-D Euclidean shape by the Tomasi-Kanade factorization, one needs to specify an affine camera model such as orthographic, weak perspective, and paraperspective. We present a new method that does not require any such specific models. We show that a minimal requirement for an affine camera to mimic perspective projection leads to a unique camera model, called symmetric affine camera, which has two free functions. We determine their values from input images by linear computation and demonstrate by experiments that an appropriate camera model is automatically selected.

In this paper, we propose a new preemptive scheme with release message in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. In the proposed scheme, when a low priority burst is preempted at some intermediate node, two RELEASE messages are sent immediately from the intermediate node to both source and destination nodes (two-way release message transmission), and the RELEASE messages release the corresponding wavelengths for the preempted burst. We consider six wavelength selection rules for the preemption and evaluate the performances of the selection rules by simulations. Numerical examples show that our scheme utilizes wavelengths effectively and, with the optimal selection rule, can decrease the burst loss probability in a large-scale DWDM network.

This paper proposes the most effective deployment scenario of the passive double-star (PON) system to provide multiple broadband services, such as high speed Internet access and broadcast services. The deployment costs of the two major PON technologies, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and 10 Gbps time division multiplexing (TDM), are analyzed using the latest cost trend and the most popular access network architecture. These two technologies are compared using the cost analysis results to identify the cost-effective scenarios of PON system deployment. Based on the comparison, this paper reveals that the WDM network becomes cost effective when the service penetration and the shift ratio becomes high.

In this paper, a weighted element-wise block adaptive frequency-domain equalization (WEB-FDE) is proposed for a single-carrier system with the cyclic-prefix. In the WEB-FDE, the one-tap equalizer corresponding to a frequency-bin first preserves input DFT elements (element-wise block). Its coefficient in each block is then calculated by minimizing a weighted squared norm of the a posteriori error. Simulation results in a time-varying typical urban (TU) channel show that the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the WEB-FDE outperform that of the normalized least-mean-square (NLMS)-FDE and recursive-least-square (RLS)-FDE.

In numerical simulations of microwave structures using the alternating-direction implicit finite-difference time-domain (ADI-FDTD) method, the time marching scheme comprises two sub-iterations, where different updating schemes for evaluating E and H fields at each sub-iteration can be adopted. In this paper, the E-field implicit-updating (EFIU) and H-field implicit-updating (HFIU) schemes are compared with each other especially with regard to the implementation of local boundary conditions.

A two-dimensional (2-D) physical model of n-channel poly-Si LDD TFTs in comparison with that of SD TFTs is presented to analyze hot-carrier degradation. The model is based on 2-D device simulator's Gaussian doping profiles for the source and drain junctions fitted to the lateral and vertical impurity profiles in poly-Si obtained from a 2-D process simulator. We have shown that, in the current saturation bias (Vg

The aim of our paper is to show how Partially Balanced Incomplete Block Designs (PBIBD) may be used to construct (2,n) visual cryptographic schemes for black and white images with small pixel expansion. In situations where uniformity of the participants with respect to the relative contrast is not important, our schemes work well since by allowing the relative contrast to vary depending on which two participants are recovering the image, they can keep the pixel expansion quite small. Thus our schemes have considerably smaller pixel expansion than many of the existing schemes. For some n and some pairs of participants recovering the image, our schemes have larger relative contrast than some existing schemes.

The frame-level R-D optimization in H.264 is very important in video storage scenarios. Among all of the sub-optimal algorithms, a greedy iteration algorithm (GIA) can best lower the computational complexity of frame-level R-D optimization. In order to further lower the computational complexity, a ρ-domain frame-level R-D optimization algorithm is proposed in this letter. Different from GIA, every frame's rate and distortion can be estimated accurately without actual encoding in our proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can lower the computational complexity greatly with negligible variation in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) compared with GIA.

In this paper, we propose a useful algorithm that can be applied to reduce the response time of speech recognizers based on HMM's. In our algorithm, to reduce the response time, promising HMM states are selected by single Gaussians. In speech recognition, HMM state likelihoods are evaluated by the corresponding single Gaussians first, and then likelihoods by original full Gaussians are computed and replaced only for the HMM states having relatively large likelihoods. By doing so, we can reduce the pattern-matching time for speech recognition significantly without any noticeable loss of the recognition rate. In addition, we cluster the single Gaussians into groups by measuring the distance between Gaussians. Therefore, we can reduce the extra memory much more. In our 10,000 word Korean POI (point-of-interest) recognition task, our proposed algorithm shows 35.57% reduction of the response time in comparison with that of the baseline system at the cost of 10% degradation of the WER.

In July 2006, International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 13 initiated the approval process for a batch of framework Recommendations on the Next Generation Network (NGN) Release 1. One of the new Recommendations, Y.2012, illustrates the NGN from the viewpoint of a functional architecture consisting of various functional blocks, namely functional entities. In conjunction with this Recommendation, this paper explains how the NGN can be built and how the NGN utilizes functional entities to provide expected services and required capabilities. This paper also identifies open issues for extending the functional architecture towards Release 2.

The quantization error of phase delay in an ultrasonic annular arrays imaging system is analyzed which impairs image resolution, and proper sampling rate is considered to reduce system complexity.

Antimony tilt implantation has been utilized for source and drain extension formation of n-MOSFETs. The tilt implantation is a very convenient method to provide adequate overlap between the extensions and a gate electrode. MOSFET drive current was effectively improved by the tilt implantation without degrading short channel effects.

We consider the capacitated multi-source multicast tree routing problem (CMMTR) in an undirected graph G=(V,E) with a vertex set V, an edge set E and an edge weight w(e) ≥ 0, e ∈ E. We are given a source set S ⊆ V with a weight g(e) ≥ 0, e ∈ S, a terminal set M ⊆ V-S with a demand function q : M → R+, and a real number κ > 0, where g(s) means the cost for opening a vertex s ∈ S as a source in a multicast tree. Then the CMMTR asks to find a subset S′⊆ S, a partition {Z1,Z2,...,Zl} of M, and a set of subtrees T1,T2,...,Tl of G such that, for each i, ∑t∈Ziq(t) ≤ κ and Ti spans Zi∪{s} for some s ∈ S′. The objective is to minimize the sum of the opening cost of S′and the constructing cost of {Ti}, i.e., ∑s∈S′g(s)+w(Ti), where w(Ti) denotes the sum of weights of all edges in Ti. In this paper, we propose a (2ρUFL+ρST)-approximation algorithm to the CMMTR, where ρUFL and ρST are any approximation ratios achievable for the uncapacitated facility location and the Steiner tree problems, respectively. When all terminals have unit demands, we give a ((3/2)ρUFL+(4/3)ρST)-approximation algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a stochastic dynamic local search (SDLS) method for Multiple-Valued Logic (MVL) learning by introducing stochastic dynamics into the traditional local search method. The proposed learning network maintains some trends of quick descent to either global minimum or a local minimum, and at the same time has some chance of escaping from local minima by permitting temporary error increases during learning. Thus the network may eventually reach the global minimum state or its best approximation with very high probability. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has the superior abilities to find the global minimum for the MVL network learning within reasonable number of iterations.

To overcome the demerits of two passive optical networks; the small link capacity of the TDM-PON, and the ineffective link utilization of the WDM-PON; we propose a novel access network architecture featuring a WDM-based feeder network and a TDM-based distribution network. In this paper, we examine the design issues of the key constituent of SWE-PON (Scalable WDM-based Ethernet hybrid-PON) to validate its economic and practical feasibility. For flawless network operation, the wavelength tuning rule is investigated so that it does not collide between wavelengths from the tunable lasers belonging to the WDM coupler. Also, the potential problem between the tunable laser and the reflective operational device is analyzed in detail. From the numerical analysis and simulation, we demonstrate the variation of the network performance in terms of the upstream traffic delay and throughput of the ONU in accordance with the sharing structure of distribution network and the number of tunable laser devices (TLDs) at the feeder network.

A novel method of voice frame aggregation for wireless mesh networks is presented. In the method, the degree of aggregation is automatically regulated by the congestion level on the wireless link. On the IEEE 802.11-based mesh network, it is shown to yield approximately twice the call capacity, while incurring no additional delay for frame aggregation.

In this paper, the effect of Halo concentration on performance of 30 nm gate length Double-Gate MOSFET with 30 nm thin body-Si is investigated by using two dimensional device simulator. We quantitatively show the dependency of electrical characteristic (subthreshold-slope, threshold voltage: Vth, drivability and leak current: Ion and Ioff) on the Halo concentration. This dependency can be explained by the reasons why the Halo concentration has directly effect on the potential distribution of the body. It is made clear that from viewpoint of body potential control, the design of Halo concentration is key technology for suppressing short-channel effect and improving subthreshold-slope, Ion and Ioff adjusting the Vth.