A new analysis method for random dopant induced threshold voltage fluctuations by using Monte Carlo ion implantation were presented. The method was applied to investigate Vt fluctuations due to statistical variation of pocket dopant profile in 0.1µm MOSFET's by 3D process-device simulation system. This method is very useful to analyze a statistical fluctuation in sub-100 nm MOSFET's efficiently.

The validity and capability of an iterative coupling scheme between single-particle frozen-field Monte Carlo simulations and nonlinear Poisson solutions for achieving self-consistency is investigated. For this purpose, a realistic 0.1 µm lightly-doped-drain (LDD) n-MOSFET with a maximum doping level of about 2.5 1020 cm-3 is simulated. It is found that taking the drift-diffusion (DD) or the hydrodynamic (HD) model as initial simulation leads to the same Monte Carlo result for the drain current. This shows that different electron densities taken either from a DD or a HD simulation in the bulk region, which is never visited by Monte Carlo electrons, have a negligible influence on the solution of the Poisson equation. For the device investigated about ten iterations are necessary to reach the stationary state after which gathering of cumulative averages can begin. Together with the absence of stability problems at high doping levels this makes the self-consistent single-particle approach (SPARTA) a robust and efficient method for the simulation of nanoscale MOSFETs where quasi-ballistic transport is crucial for the on-current.

A brief review is given on a crossover in transport between quantum and classical regimes due to the presence of inelastic scattering destroying the phase coherence. In the integer quantum Hall effect, the quantum regime corresponds to the edge-current picture and the classical to the bulk Hall current picture. The crossover between two regimes occurs through inelastic scattering. In a metallic carbon nanotube, there is a perfectly transmitting channel independent of energy for conventional scatterers having potential range larger than the lattice constant, making the nanotube a perfect conductor. When several bands coexist at the Fermi level, such a perfect channel is destroyed by inelastic scattering.

A high power dissipation density in today's miniature electronic/mechanical systems makes on-chip thermal management very important. In order to achieve quick to evaluate, yet accurate electro-thermal models, needed for the thermal management of microsystems, a model order reduction is necessary. In this paper, we present an automatic, Krylov-subspace-based order reduction of a electro-thermal model, which we illustrate by a novel type of micropropulsion device. Numerical simulation results of the full finite element model and the reduced order model, that describes the transient electro-thermal behavior, are presented. A comparison between Krylov-subspace-based order reduction, order reduction using control theoretical approaches and commercially available reduced order modeling has been performed. A Single-Input-Single-Output setup for the Arnoldi reduction algorithm was proved to be sufficient to accurately represent the complete time-dependent temperature distribution of the device.

A software module for the three-dimensional simulation of etching processes has been developed. It works on multilayer structures given as triangulated surface meshes. The mesh is moved nodewise according to rates which, in this work, have been determined from isotropic and anisotropic components. An important feature of the algorithm is the automatic detection of triple lines along mask edges and the refinement of triangles at these triple lines. This allows for the simulation of underetching. The capabilities of the algorithm are demonstrated by several examples such as the simulation of glass etching for the fabrication of a phase shift mask for optical lithography and the etching of an STI trench structure. Moreover, etch profiles of a silicon substrate covered by an oxide mask are shown for different parameters of the etch components. Spacer etching has also been performed. Furthermore, a specific algorithm for the simulation of purely isotropic etching is described and demonstrated.

This paper presents a new hierarchical scheduling method for a large-scale manufacturing system based on the hybrid Petri-net model, which consists of CPN (Continuous Petri Net) and TPN (Timed Petri Net). The study focuses on an automobile production system, a typical large-scale manufacturing system. At a high level, CPN is used to represent continuous flow in the production process of an entire system, and LP (Linear Programming) is applied to find the optimal flow. At a low level, TPN is used to represent the manufacturing environment of each sub-production line in a decentralized manner, and the MCT algorithm is applied to find feasible semi-optimal process sequences for each sub-production line. Our proposed scheduling method can schedule macroscopically the flow of an entire system while considering microscopically any physical constraints that arise on an actual shop floor.

Accurate estimation of accentual attribute values of words, which is required to apply rules of Japanese word accent sandhi to prosody generation, is an important factor to realize high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. The rules were already formulated by Sagisaka et al. and are widely used in Japanese TTS conversion systems. Application of these rules, however, requires values of a few accentual attributes of each constituent word of input text. The attribute values cannot be found in any public database or any accent dictionaries of Japanese. Further, these values are difficult even for native speakers of Japanese to estimate only with their introspective consideration of properties of their mother tongue. In this paper, an algorithm was proposed, where these values were automatically estimated from a large amount of data of accent types of accentual phrases, which were collected through a long series of listening experiments. In the proposed algorithm, inter-speaker differences of knowledge of accent sandhi were well considered. To improve the coverage of the estimated values over the obtained data, the rules were tentatively modified. Evaluation experiments using two-mora accentual phrases showed the high validity of the estimated values and the modified rules and also some defects caused by varieties of linguistic expressions of Japanese.

This paper presents a study on modeling inter-word pauses to improve the robustness of acoustic models for recognizing noisy conversational speech. When precise contextual modeling is used for pauses, the frequent appearances and varying acoustics of pauses in noisy conversational speech make it a problem to automatically generate an accurate phonetic transcription of the training data for developing robust acoustic models. This paper presents a proposal to exploit the reliable phonetic heuristics of pauses in speech to aid the detection of varying pauses. Based on it, a stepwise approach to optimize pause HMMs was applied to the data of the DARPA SPINE2 project, and more correct phonetic transcription was achieved. The cross-word triphone HMMs developed using this method got an absolute 9.2% word error reduction when compared to the conventional method with only context free modeling of pauses. For the same pause modeling method, the use of the optimized phonetic segmentation brought about an absolute 5.2% improvements.

One of the biggest limitations of BP algorithm is its low rate of convergence. The Variable Learning Rate (VLR) algorithm represents one of the well-known techniques that enhance the performance of the BP. Because the VLR parameters have important influence on its performance, we use learning automata (LA) to adjust them. The proposed algorithm named Adaptive Variable Learning Rate (AVLR) algorithm dynamically tunes the VLR parameters by learning automata according to the error changes. Simulation results on some practical problems such as sinusoidal function approximation, nonlinear system identification, phoneme recognition, Persian printed letter recognition helped us better to judge the merit of the proposed AVLR method.

This paper derives a set of orthogonal polynomials for a complex random variable that is uniformly distributed in two dimensions (2D). The polynomials are used in a series expansion to approximate memoryless nonlinearities in digital QAM systems. We also study stochastic identification of nonlinearities using the orthogonal polynomials through analysis and simulations.

This is the first paper to report the influence of fuzzy thresolding-based buffer management scheme on the end-to-end delay performance of cell switching networks including asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. In this approach, the fraction of the selectively blocked cells, corresponding to the difference of cell loss due to buffer overflow, between the traditional fixed and fuzzy schemes, are re-routed to their final destinations. A 50-switch, representative, cell-switching network under fuzzy thresholding is first modeled, second, simulated on a testbed consisting of a network of 25+ Pentium workstations under Linux, configured as a loosely-coupled parallel processor, and third, its performance is studied under realistic input traffic conditions. A total of 10,000 user calls, generating between 1.0 and 1.5 million ATM cells, is stochastically distributed among the nodes. Performance analysis reveals that for different input traffic distributions ranging from light to moderate to heavy traffic, the re-routing approach successfully routes these blocked cells, although it causes the average end-to-end cell delay in the network to increase, compared to the fixed scheme, by a factor ranging from 1.65 for relatively light traffic to 6.7 for heavy traffic.

In this paper, we discuss crosstalk equalization technique for high-speed digital transmission systems. This equalization technique makes use of the cyclostationarity of the crosstalk interferer. We first analyze the eigenstructure of the equalizer in the presence of cyclostationary crosstalk interference. It is shown that the eigenvalues of the equalizer depend upon the folded signal and interferer power spectra, and the cross power spectrum between the signal and the interferer. The expressions of the minimum mean square error (MMSE) and the excess MSE are then obtained by using the equalizer's eigenstructure. Analysis and simulation results indicate that such peculiar equalizer's eigenstructure in the presence of cyclostationary interference results in significantly different initial convergence and steady-state behaviors as compared with the stationary noise case. We also show that the performance of the equalizer varies depending on the relative clock phase of the symbol clocks used by the signal and the crosstalk interferer.

Since the beginning of the last two decades, many researchers have been involved in the problem of Blind Source Separation (BSS). Whilst hundreds of algorithms have been proposed to solve BSS. These algorithms are well known as Independent Component Analysis (ICA) algorithms. Nowadays, ICA algorithms have been used to deal with various applications and they are using many performance indices. This paper is dedicated to classify the different algorithms according to their applications and performances.

In this paper, a grey filtering approach based on GM(1,1) model is proposed. Then the grey filtering is applied to speech enhancement. The fundamental idea in the proposed grey filtering is to relate estimation error of GM(1,1) model to additive noise. The simulation results indicate that the additive noise can be estimated accurately by the proposed grey filtering approach with an appropriate scaling factor. Note that the spectral subtraction approach to speech enhancement is heavily dependent on the accuracy of statistics of additive noise and that the grey filtering is able to estimate additive noise appropriately. A magnitude spectral subtraction (MSS) approach for speech enhancement is proposed where the mechanism to determine the non-speech and speech portions is not required. Two examples are provided to justify the proposed MSS approach based on grey filtering. The simulation results show that the objective of speech enhancement has been achieved by the proposed MSS approach. Besides, the proposed MSS approach is compared with HFR-based approach in [4] and ZP approach in [5]. Simulation results indicate that in most of cases HFR-based and ZP approaches outperform the proposed MSS approach in SNRimp. However, the proposed MSS approach has better subjective listening quality than HFR-based and ZP approaches.

In this letter we propose a new fast matching algorithm that has no degradation of predicted images such as found in the conventional full search (FS) algorithm, so as to reduce the amount of computation of the FS algorithm for motion estimation in real-time video coding applications. That is, our proposing algorithm reduces only unnecessary computations in the process of motion estimation without decreasing the prediction quality compared to the conventional FS algorithm. The computational reduction comes from rapid elimination of impossible motion vectors. In comparison to the FS algorithm, we obtained faster elimination of inappropriate candidate motion vectors using efficient matching units based on image complexity. Experimentally, we demonstrated that the unnecessary computations were removed by about 30% as compared to the other fast FS algorithms.

In many applications of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Blind Source Separation (BSS) estimated sources signals and the mixing or separating matrices have some special structure or some constraints are imposed for the matrices such as symmetries, orthogonality, non-negativity, sparseness and specified invariant norm of the separating matrix. In this paper we present several algorithms and overview some known transformations which allows us to preserve several important constraints.

There is a growing demand that mobile networks should provide quality-of-service (QoS) to mobile users since portable devices become popular and more and more applications require real-time services. Providing QoS to mobile hosts is very difficult due to mobility of hosts. The resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) establishes and maintains a reservation state to ensure a given QoS level between the sender and receiver. However, RSVP is designed for fixed networks and thus it is inadequate in wireless mobile networking environments. In this paper, we propose a resource reservation protocol for mobile hosts in mobile networks. The proposed protocol extends the RSVP by introducing RSVP agents in local networks to manage the reservations. The proposed protocol reduces packet delay, bandwidth overhead, and the number of RSVP messages to maintain reservation states. We examined the performance of the proposed protocol by simulation and we got an improved performance over the existing protocols.

We have developed a fiber physical contact (FPC) connector for the high-density connection of optical fibers. This connector individually aligns multiple bare fibers in micro-holes without ferrules and realizes physical contact by using the buckling force of the fibers themselves. The fiber endfaces must be tapered to allow the fibers to be inserted into the micro-holes. The endfaces must also be polished so that they realize physical contact (PC) with excellent optical performance. For each process, we examined the required shape and processing condition of the fiber endface for the FPC connector. As regards tapering, we determined the processing condition for achieving a target tapering angle and developed a non-breaking process with the optical fibers bent. In terms of polishing, we revealed that it is important for the fiber endface angle error to be less than 0.7 degrees if we are to achieve excellent optical performance. These results allowed us to fabricate an FPC connector that exhibited excellent levels of optical performance.

In this paper, we propose a TCAD driven hot carrier reduction methodology of 3.3 V I/O pMOSFETs design. The hot carrier reliability of surface channel I/O pMOSFET having drain structure in common with core devices has a critical issue. It is substantially important for the high-reliability devices to reduce both drain avalanche and channel hot hole components. The drain structures are successfully optimized in short time by applications of TCAD local models. Considering tradeoffs between hot carrier injection (HCI) and drive current (ION), SDE/HALO of both core and I/O transistors can be totally optimized for reduction of process-steps and/or photo-masks.

We propose a method to realize soft-decision decoding for hard-detected signals. In this paper, a novel concept is introduced as "error-detected reliability. " The method is very useful for optical fiber communications (OFC) as hard detection is the only detection method for the OFC systems. We demonstrate our proposed method using the turbo code in which soft information is required for decoding. As a result, the simulation shows slight difference in the range of moderate to high signal-to-noise ratio between the proposed decoding scheme and the conventional turbo decoding scheme. Moreover, the bit error rate of 10-11 can be achieved by serial concatenation of a Reed-Solomon code and a turbo code for Q-factor lower than 8.0 dB with a bandwidth expansion ratio of 33.3%.