This paper presents a numerical approach to the time-domain analysis of N-branch-line couplers. The approach is based on the modified central difference (MCD) method combined with internal boundary treatments, which consist of the time-domain scattering matrix for the three-port junction discontinuity. The behavior of the signal propagation including multiple reflections on the N-branch-line coupler with and without line loss is analyzed and demonstrated in the time domain. Additionally, the S-parameters obtained from Gaussian pulse responses of the N-branch-line directional couplers are shown. The simulated results are in good agreement with those of the commercial simulator.

Existence of backward TE volume modes which are to be identified as Magnetostatic Wave (MSW) in anisotropic single-negative slab with partly negative permeability tensor component have already been revealed by present authors. In this paper, detailed modal analysis has been carried out for this kind of TE volume modes to find out their novel and peculiar properties. From these numerical results, it has been clarified that dispersion curve of the lowest order mode for thicker slab has a frequency of turning point below which both forward and backward waves can be simultaneously observed and also there is a critical slab thickness for each order of TE volume modes to exist.

Designing NURBS surfaces by manipulating control points directly requires too much trial and error for immersive VR applications. A more natural interface is provided by deforming a NURBS surface so that it passes through a given target point; and by repeating such deformations we can make the surface follow one or more target curves. These deformations can be achieved by modifying the pseudo-inverse matrix of the basis functions, but this matrix is often ill-conditioned. However, the application of a modified FE approach to the weights and control points provides controllable deformations, which are demonstrated across a range of example shapes.

An analog circuit testing scheme is presented. The testing technique is a sinusoidal fault signature characterization, involving the measurement of DC offset, amplitude, frequency and phase shift, and the realization of two crossing level voltages. The testing system is an extension of the IEEE 1149.4 standard through the modification of an analog boundary module, affording functionalities for both on-chip testing capability, and accessibility to internal components for off-chip testing. A demonstrating circuit-under-test, a 4th-order Gm-C low-pass filter, and the proposed analog testing scheme are implemented in a physical level using 0.18-µm CMOS technology, and simulated using Hspice. Both catastrophic and parametric faults are potentially detectable at the minimum parameter variation of 0.5%. The fault coverage associated with CMOS transconductance operational amplifiers and capacitors are at 94.16% and 100%, respectively. This work offers the enhancement of standardizing test approach, which reduces the complexity of testing circuit and provides non-intrusive analog circuit testing.

In this paper, a motion field representation algorithm based on directional edge information has been developed. This work is aiming at building an ego-motion detection system using dedicated VLSI chips developed for real time motion field generation at low powers . Directional edge maps are utilized instead of original gray-scale images to represent local features of an image and to detect the local motion component in a moving image sequence. Motion detection by edge histogram matching has drastically reduced the computational cost of block matching, while achieving a robust performance of the ego-motion detection system under dynamic illumination variation. Two kinds of feature vectors, the global motion vector and the component distribution vectors, are generated from a motion field at two different scales and perspectives. They are jointly utilized in the hierarchical classification scheme employing multiple-clue matching. As a result, the problems of motion ambiguity as well as motion field distortion caused by camera shaking during video capture have been resolved. The performance of the ego-motion detection system was evaluated under various circumstances, and the effectiveness of this work has been verified.

In this paper, we design and analyze some new and practical (selectively) convertible undeniable signature (SCUS) schemes in both random oracle and standard model, which enjoy several merits over existing schemes in the literature. In particular, we design the first practical RSA-based SCUS schemes secure in the standard model. On the path, we also introduce two moduli RSA assumptions, including the strong twin RSA assumption, which is the RSA symmetry of the strong twin Diffie-Hellman assumption (Eurocrypt'08).

A number of inter-cell interference coordination schemes have been proposed to mitigate the inter-cell interference problem for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems and among them, partial frequency reuse is considered one of the most promising approaches. In this paper, we propose an inter-cell interference mitigation scheme for an OFDMA downlink system, which makes use of both partial frequency reuse and soft handover. The basic idea of this hybrid scheme is to dynamically select between a partial frequency reuse scheme and a soft handover scheme to provide better signal quality for cell edge users. Compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme, simulation results show that approximately one quarter of cell edge users can get improvements in signal quality as well as link spectral efficiency from using the proposed hybrid scheme. We also observe that by using our approach, there is a significant cell edge throughput gain over the standard partial frequency reuse scheme. Furthermore, based on a well defined data rate fairness criterion, we show that our method achieves higher overall system capacity as compared with the standard partial frequency reuse scheme.

A CMOS current-mode nth-switchable-root circuit composed of a compact logarithm circuit, a divide-by-n circuit, and a compact exponential circuit is proposed. The n can be selected from 5 values by three switches. Simulation results indicate that the compact nth-switchable-root circuit has a wide input-current range for relative errors less than 3%, low power dissipations below 630 µW, and high bandwidth over 330 MHz.

Since scan testing is not based on the function of the circuit, but rather the structure, it is considered to be both a form of over testing and under testing. Moreover, it is important to test VLSIs using the given function. Since the functional specifications are described explicitly in the FSMs, high test quality is expected by performing logical fault testing and timing fault testing. This paper proposes a fault-dependent test generation method to detect specified fault models completely and to increase defect coverage as much as possible under the test length constraint. We present experimental results for MCNC'91 benchmark circuits to evaluate bridging fault coverage, transition fault coverage, and statistical delay quality level and to show the effectiveness of the proposed test generation method compared with a stuck-at fault-dependent test generation method.

In 2007, Ding et al. proposed an attractive scheme, which is called the -Invertible Cycles (IC) scheme. IC is one of the most efficient multivariate public-key cryptosystems (MPKC); these schemes would be suitable for using under limited computational resources. In 2008, an efficient attack against IC using Grobner basis algorithms was proposed by Fouque et al. However, they only estimated the complexity of their attack based on their experimental results. On the other hand, Patarin had proposed an efficient attack against some multivariate public-key cryptosystems. We call this attack Patarin's attack. The complexity of Patarin's attack can be estimated by finding relations corresponding to each scheme. In this paper, we propose an another practical attack against the IC encryption/signature scheme. We estimate the complexity of our attack (not experimentally) by adapting Patarin's attack. The attack can be also applied to the IC- scheme. Moreover, we show some experimental results of a practical attack against the IC/IC- schemes. This is the first implementation of both our proposed attack and an attack based on Grobner basis algorithm for the even case, that is, a parameter is even.

Carbon nanofibers (CNFs) were fabricated on graphite plates using "Ar+ ion sputtering method" in large amount at room temperature. The morphology of CNFs was controlled by a simultaneous carbon supply during ion sputtering. CNF-tipped cones were formed on graphite plate surfaces without carbon supply whereas those with a simultaneous carbon supply featured mainly needle-like protrusions of large size. The field electron emission (FE) properties, measured using parallel plate configurations in 10-4 Pa range, showed the threshold fields of 4.4 and 5.2 V/µm with a current density of 1 µA/cm2 for CNF-tipped cones and needle-like protrusion, respectively. Reliability test results indicated that CNF-tipped cones were more stable than needle-like protrusion. The morphological change after reliability test showed a so-called "self-regenerative" process and structure damage for CNF-tipped cones and needle-like protrusions, respectively.

An inversion method of bridge height over water by polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is developed. A geometric ray description to illustrate scattering mechanism of a bridge over water surface is identified by polarimetric image analysis. Using the mapping and projecting algorithm, a polarimetric SAR image of a bridge model is first simulated and shows that scattering from a bridge over water can be identified by three strip lines corresponding to single-, double-, and triple-order scattering, respectively. A set of polarimetric parameters based on the de-orientation theory is applied to analysis of three types scattering, and the thinning-clustering algorithm and Hough transform are then employed to locate the image positions of these strip lines. These lines are used to invert the bridge height. Fully polarimetric image data of airborne Pi-SAR at X-band are applied to inversion of the height and width of the Naruto Bridge in Japan. Based on the same principle, this approach is also applicable to spaceborne ALOSPALSAR single-polarization data of the Eastern Ocean Bridge in China. The results show good feasibility to realize the bridge height inversion.

In recent years, there have been many studies on integrating a number of heterogeneous wireless networks into one network by establishing standards like IEEE 802.16. For this purpose, the base station (BS) should allocate the appropriate bandwidth to each connection with a network scheduler. In wireless networks, the signal to noise ratio (SNR) changes with time due to many factors such as fading. Hence, we estimate the SNR based on the error rate reflecting wireless network condition. Using the estimated SNR, we propose a new time slot allocation algorithm so that the proposed algorithm guarantees the delay requirement and full link utilization.

A filter integrated antenna configuration that suppresses the coupling signal from the transmitter (Tx) to receiver (Rx) base station antenna is investigated. We propose an aperture coupled patch antenna with multiple trapezoidal elements installed on the substrate of the Rx antenna between the radiation and feed layers in order to increase the bandwidth in the Rx band while maintaining low mutual coupling in the Tx band. The mutual coupling characteristics and the fractional bandwidth of the Rx antenna are presented as functions of the shape and width of the trapezoidal elements.

Many signal processing systems, particularly in the multimedia and telecommunication domains, are synthesized to execute data-intensive applications: their cost related aspects -- namely power consumption and chip area -- are heavily influenced, if not dominated, by the data access and storage aspects. This paper presents an energy-aware memory allocation methodology. Starting from the high-level behavioral specification of a given application, this framework performs the assignment of the multidimensional signals to the memory layers -- the on-chip scratch-pad memory and the off-chip main memory -- the goal being the reduction of the dynamic energy consumption in the memory subsystem. Based on the assignment results, the framework subsequently performs the mapping of signals into both memory layers such that the overall amount of data storage be reduced. This software system yields a complete allocation solution: the exact storage amount on each memory layer, the mapping functions that determine the exact locations for any array element (scalar signal) in the specification, and an estimation of the dynamic energy consumption in the memory subsystem.

This paper presents a technique for class-dependent decoding for statistical machine translation (SMT). The approach differs from previous methods of class-dependent translation in that the class-dependent forms of all models are integrated directly into the decoding process. We employ probabilistic mixture weights between models that can change dynamically on a sentence-by-sentence basis depending on the characteristics of the source sentence. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by evaluating its performance on travel conversation data. We used this approach to tackle the translation of questions and declarative sentences using class-dependent models. To achieve this, our system integrated two sets of models specifically built to deal with sentences that fall into one of two classes of dialog sentence: questions and declarations, with a third set of models built with all of the data to handle the general case. The technique was thoroughly evaluated on data from 16 language pairs using 6 machine translation evaluation metrics. We found the results were corpus-dependent, but in most cases our system was able to improve translation performance, and for some languages the improvements were substantial.

Active Shape Model (ASM) is a powerful statistical tool for image interpretation, especially in face alignment. In the standard ASM, local appearances are described by intensity profiles, and the model parameter estimation is based on the assumption that the profiles follow a Gaussian distribution. It suffers from variations of poses, illumination, expressions and obstacles. In this paper, an improved ASM framework, GentleBoost based SIFT-ASM is proposed. Local appearances of landmarks are originally represented by SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) descriptors, which are gradient orientation histograms based representations of image neighborhood. They can provide more robust and accurate guidance for search than grey-level profiles. Moreover, GentleBoost classifiers are applied to model and search the SIFT features instead of the unnecessary assumption of Gaussian distribution. Experimental results show that SIFT-ASM significantly outperforms the original ASM in aligning and localizing facial features.

We investigate per-flow flit and packet worst-case delay bounds in on-chip wormhole networks. Such investigation is essential in order to provide guarantees under worst-case conditions in cost-constrained systems, as required by many hard real-time embedded applications. We first propose analysis models for flow control, link and buffer sharing. Based on these analysis models, we obtain an open-ended service analysis model capturing the combined effect of flow control, link and buffer sharing. With the service analysis model, we compute equivalent service curves for individual flows, and then derive their flit and packet delay bounds. Our experimental results verify that our analytical bounds are correct and tight.

This paper presents a novel method using multi-objective optimization algorithm to automatically find the best solution from a topology library of analog circuits. Firstly this method abstracts the Pareto-front of each topology in the library by SPICE simulation. Then, the Pareto-front of the topology library is abstracted from the individual Pareto-fronts of topologies in the library followed by the theorem we proved. The best solution which is defined as the nearest point to specification on the Pareto-front of the topology library is then calculated by the equations derived from collinearity theorem. After the local searching using Nelder-Mead method maps the calculated best solution backs to design variable space, the non-dominated best solution is obtained. Comparing to the traditional optimization methods using single-objective optimization algorithms, this work can efficiently find the best non-dominated solution from multiple topologies for different specifications without additional time-consuming optimizing iterations. The experiments demonstrate that this method is feasible and practical in actual analog designs especially for uncertain or variant multi-dimensional specifications.

Spectrum sensing is a key technology within Cognitive Radio (CR) systems. Cooperative spectrum sensing using a distributed model provides improved detection for the primary user, which opens the CR system to a new security threat. This threat is the decrease of the cooperative sensing performance due to the spectrum sensing data falsification which is generated from malicious users. Our proposed scheme, based on robust statistics, utilizes only available past sensing nodes' received power data for estimating the distribution parameters of the primary signal presence and absence hypotheses. These estimated parameters are used to perform the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence data fusion which causes the elimination of malicious users. Furthermore, in order to enhance performance, a node's reliability weight is supplemented along with the data fusion scheme. Simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme can provide a powerful capability in eliminating malicious users as well as a high gain of data fusion under various cases of channel condition.