A simple modeling technique for symmetric inductors is proposed. Using the proposed technique, all model parameters for an equivalent circuit of symmetric inductors are easily calculated from geometric, process and substrate resistance parameters without using electromagnetic (EM) simulators. Comparison of simulated results with measured results verifies the effectiveness of the proposed modeling technique up to 5 GHz with center-tapped or non-center-tapped configurations.

Heart sound is an acoustic wave generated by the mechanical movement of the heart and blood flow, and is a complicated, non-stationary signal composed of many signal sources. It can be divided into normal heart sounds and heart murmurs. Murmurs are abnormal signals that appear over wider ranges of frequency than normal heart sounds. They are generated at random spots in the whole period of heart sounds. The recognition of heart sounds is to differentiate heart murmurs through patterns that appear according to the generation time of murmurs. In this paper, a group of heart sounds was classified into normal heart sounds, pre-systolic murmurs, early systolic murmurs, late systolic murmurs, early diastolic murmurs, and continuous murmurs. The suggested algorithm was standardized by re-sampling and then added as an input to the neural network through wavelet transform. The neural network used Error Back - Propagation algorithm, which is a representative learning method, and controlled the number of hidden layers and the learning rate for optimal construction of networks. As a result of recognition, the suggested algorithm obtained a higher recognition rate than that of existing research methods. The best result was obtained with the average of 88% of the recognition rate when it consisted of 15 hidden layers. The suggested algorithm was considered effective for the recognition of automatic diagnosis of heart sound recognition programs.

We propose a web community chart that is a tool for navigating the Web and for observing its evolution through web communities. A web community is a set of web pages created by individuals or associations with a common interest in a topic. Recent research shows that such communities can be extracted by link analysis. Our web community chart is a graph of whole communities, in which relevant communities are connected by edges. Using this chart, we can navigate through related communities. Moreover we can answer historical queries about topics on the Web and understand sociology of web community creation, by observing when and how communities emerged and evolved. We observe the evolution of communities by comparing three charts built from Japanese web archives crawled in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Several metrics are introduced for measuring the degree of community evolution, such as growth rate, novelty. Finally, we develop a web community evolution viewer that allows us to extract evolving communities using the relevance and metrics. Several evolution examples are shown using this viewer.

Design patterns can be regarded as an approach to encapsulate and reuse good design practices. However, most design patterns are specified using informal text and examples. To obtain all of the benefits of patterns, formal specification and tool support are indispensable. This paper proposes a Design Pattern Specification Language (DPSL) that is both manageable and effective. The DPSL provides software developers with the capability to treat design patterns as concrete design units without lowering abstraction. To demonstrate the usability of our DPSL and its application in design modeling, we have developed a prototype tool that supports the DPSL in UML diagrams. This prototype allows us to demonstrate the tool's support possibilities and the usability of patterns for software development applications.

Many feature tracking algorithms have been proposed for motion segmentation, but the resulting trajectories are not necessarily correct. In this paper, we propose a technique for removing outliers based on the knowledge that correct trajectories are constrained to be in a subspace of their domain. We first fit an appropriate subspace to the detected trajectories using RANSAC and then remove outliers by considering the error behavior of actual video tracking. Using real video sequences, we demonstrate that our method can be applied if multiple motions exist in the scene. We also confirm that the separation accuracy is indeed improved by our method.

In order to establish rapid diagnosing in TDX signaling service, it has developed a PCM signal acquisition (PCMA) system which can analyze status of signals sent from/received to a signaling equipment, providing the fully electronic switching system. The system has a function of acquirement PCM signal of the preferred channel from the subhighway (SHW), connecting a universal signal transceiver unit (USTU) and time switch unit (TSU), and then it classifies the type of signal such as R2MFC/DTMF/CCT/VOICE, and finally discriminates the digit. This paper analyze the signal status of the PCMA system using the quick Fourier transform (QFT) based the symmetric properties, and discusses the algorithm of signal analysis and discrimination. In the experimental results, it shows the improved performance to the PCMA and reduce memory waste and process the real-time.

The low phase noise, low supply voltage 1.3 GHz CMOS VCO has been realized by 0.25 µm standard CMOS technology without any trimming and any tuning. The phase noise characteristics of -109 dBc/Hz and -123 dBc/Hz at 100 kHz offset and 500 kHz offset were achieved from carrier, respectively, with 1.3 GHz oscillation frequency at 1.4 V supply voltage. The performance of 1.4 V supply voltage phase noise was superior to that of 2.0 V supply voltage phase noise due to low output impedance current source. The tuning ranges of 13.3%, 16.6%, and 20.1% for 1.4 V, 1.8 V, and 2.0 V supply voltage were achieved, respectively. The amplifier consisted of one pair of PMOS differential stage with large gate length NMOS current source to realize low supply voltage operation and to avoid flicker noise contribution for phase noise. The on-chip spiral inductor consisted of three terminals arranged in a special shape to obtain high Q and small chip area. The power dissipation of this VCO was 22.4 mW without buffer amplifier.

AgCdO12wt% contacts mounted on electromagnetic relays are tested in a DC 42 V-8.4 A resistive circuit as make-only contacts and break-only contacts. In this experiment, the arc duration has been measured for each operation and the shape of the transferred pip on each contact has been observed using photograph records taken every 1000 operations. The transferred pip grows markedly at make-only contacts. Furthermore, as a few samples with the long arc duration have the flat hill transferred from the cathode on the anode surface of break-only contacts, we believe that the transferred direction reverses at a certain arc length.

An experimental equation of V-I characteristics of breaking arc was investigated in the air at atmospheric pressure. Material of the contact pair is Ag, Au, Cu and Ni. Supply voltage is set to 42, 48 and 54 V. The electrical resistance of experimental circuit is 5 Ω. The time evolutions of arc voltage, arc current and gap length were measured, simultaneously. V-I characteristics were obtained from those measured values. The dependence of the arc voltage on the gap length was represented by an approximate formula as a straight line in order to obtain the experimental equation. And the dependence of the strength of electric field of arc column on the supply voltage was approximated to a straight line. Using these approximate formulae, the experimental equation of the dependence of the arc voltage on the arc current was obtained with the gap length as a parameter. It was shown that the experimental equation agreed with experimental data in the experimental conditions for each contact material.

In recent years, sliding electric contacts came to be often used under very severe conditions such as high temperature, extremely low temperature, high vacuum, etc. Conventionally, solid lubricants having excellent properties in lubricating performance are generally used compositely with a metal of high electric conductivity, because of their high electrical resistivity. In the present study, we proved that more excellent sliding electrical contacts can be produced with a design made by controlling the distribution on contact surface of a solid lubricant having excellent lubricating performance and of a metal with high electric conductivity through expansion of Greenwood's theory.

In this paper, a Micro-Step-Separating System is realized for investigating phenomena of initial state of separating contacts. This system can control the contact separation in a discrete way with about 0.5 µm step. By using this system, we observed a relationship between contact voltage and contact separation gap. Ag contacts were observed. The observation showed that the contact voltage rose up and then fell down to the stable voltage at each step separation. From this observation, we expect to elucidate the contact bridge phenomena with more sophisticated way because we can approach them under the thermal equilibrium condition.

The paper presents a dual-band switchable low noise amplifier implemented in 0.25-µm CMOS technology for 5-GHz wireless multimedia applications. The high-speed wireless multimedia applications call for broadband design techniques for RF circuits. Instead of using conventional broadband techniques not well suitable for CMOS implementation, a dual-band switchable load is proposed for broadband LNA design. The dual-band switchable load enables the LNA operate at the lower or the upper band at 5-GHz band by a 1-bit control signal. The LNA exhibits over 17 dB power gain, 3.5 dB noise figure and input 1-dB compression point -23 dBm in both frequency bands. It draws 9.5 mA from 2.5 V supply. The power gain remains larger than 16 dB as temperature varies from -5 to 65.

The authors study the performance of a disk storing WWW data by using a broadcast polling model. The model has single message queues, an exponential server and asymmetric exponential arrivals. Numerical examples show that the analytical results are close to the simulation results.

In this paper, we analyze wavelet-based coding in a rate-distortion (R-D) sense by using Laplacian and Markov models and verify the results with the performance of the typical embedded coders, EZW and SPIHT, and the non-embedded coder implemented here. Laplacian represents the probability density function (pdf) of wavelet coefficients and Markov statistical dependency within and among subbands. The models allow us to easily understand the behavior of a thresholding and quantization part and a lossless coding part and associate the embedded coders with the nonembedded coder, which is the point the paper approaches. The analytic results are shown to coincide well with the actual coding results.

The energy conservation law and the optical theorem in the grating theory are discussed: the energy conservation law states that the incident energy is equal to the sum of diffracted energies and the optical theorem means that the diffraction takes place at the loss of the specularly reflection amplitude. A mathematical relation between the optical theorem and the energy conservation law is given. Some numerical examples are given for a TM plane wave diffraction by a sinusoidal surface.

A novel postprocessing algorithm for concealing spatial block errors in block-based coded images is proposed using block classification with a variable operating region (VOR). In the proposed algorithm, a missing block is classified as flat, edge, or complex based on local information from the surrounding blocks which is extracted using a Sobel operation in a VOR. In this case, the VOR is determined adaptively according to the number of edge directions in the missing block. Using the classification, the flat blocks are then concealed by the linear interpolation (LI) method, the edge blocks are concealed by the boundary multi-directional interpolation (BMDI) method, and the complex blocks are concealed by a combined linear interpolation and boundary matching (CLIBM) method. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm improved the PSNR and visual quality of the concealment for both original images and JPEG compressed images, and produced better results than conventional algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a new multistage (iterative) structure where Kalman channel estimation and parallel interference cancellation multiuser detection are conducted in every stage (iteration). The proposed scheme avoids the complexity of the decorrelator in front of Kalman channel estimator, and has better performance than the previous scheme.

A new power and bandwidth efficient modulation technique - Superposed Quadrature Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (SQ2AM) - for use in nonlinear satellite channel is presented. SQ2AM technique expands 2-dimensional SQAM signals into 4-dimensional quadrature modulated signals by using orthogonal baseband waveforms and carriers. The power spectrum and BER performance of SQ2AM are analyzed and compared with those of QPSK, SQAM and Q2PSK in a nonlinearly amplified multi-channel environment.

In an attempt to improve the performance under frequency selective fading environment, we develop in this paper an orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) system in which adaptive interleaving is applied. The adaptive interleaving is a method that assigns symbols adaptively to the subcarriers in order to cope with frequency selective fading based on a channel state information (CSI) sent back from the reception end. The concept of adaptive interleaving is to maximize a free Euclidean distance in the limited interleave size. In this paper, we extend the method by an introduction of bit interleaving and multiple trellis coded modulation (MTCM). MTCM assigns two or more symbols to one trellis branch and shows good performance in frequency selective fading. If we could assign those set of symbols with an aid of the adaptive interleaving, the performance improvement can be expected. Another improvement method considered in this paper is the use of bit interleaving. The bit interleaving techniques randomize the effect of channel more efficiently compared to the case of symbols interleaving. Thus the further performance improvement is expected. One draw back is that since the interleaving process is done in bit level, bit interleaving can not be applied to TCM nor MTCM. In this paper, we mainly focus on adaptive bit and symbol interleaving and discuss the performance from the point of interleaving effect, and the error correcting code (convolutional code and MTCM).

A Hyper-Universal Switch Box (HUSB) [1]-[3] can yield a feasible (detailed) routing solution for any given routing requirement of multi-pin nets or multi-point connections of surrounding terminals. This flexible routing structure obviously possesses multiple potential applications for re-configurable systems such as FPGAs and communication switching networks [4],[5]. Based on the same decomposition theory developed in the design scheme of such powerful switching structure, a simple routing algorithm can also be developed. The router is exact in terms of its assured capability in finding a routing solution, and it is efficient due to the divide and conquer nature and simple mapping scheme for pre-analyzed routing patterns saved in data base.