Recently, feature maps have been applied to various problem domains. The success of some of these applications critically depends on whether feature maps are topologically ordered. Several different approaches have been proposed to improve the conventional self-organizing feature map (SOM) algorithm. However, these approaches do not guarantee that a topologically-ordered feature map can be formed at the end of a simulation. Therefore, the trial-and-error procedure still dominates the procedure of forming feature maps. In this paper, we propose a healing mechanism to repair feature maps that are not well topologically ordered. The healed map is then further fine-tuned by the conventional SOM algorithm with a small learning rate and a small-sized neighborhood set so as to improve the accuracy of the map. Two data sets were tested to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

We describe hybrid integration technologies that employ silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) platforms, and report several high-performance optical components based on these technologies. First, we describe the requirements for optical integrated circuits. Then, we discuss the technologies used in hybrid integration, namely optical coupling between a semiconductor optical device and a silica waveguide, electrical signal transmission to the semiconductor optical device, and high quality optical signal processing. In addition, we describe optical integrated circuits developed for short- and long-haul networks. We realized these high-performance integrated components by combining appropriate hybrid integration technologies.

We studied various types of 2D and 3D Si-based photonic crystal structures that are promising for future photonic integrated circuit application. With regard to 2D SOI photonic crystal slabs, we confirmed the formation of a wide photonic bandgap at optical communication wavelengths, and used structural tuning to realize efficient single-mode line-defect waveguides operating within the bandgap. As regards 3D photonic crystals, we used a combination of lithography and the autocloning deposition method to realize complicated 3D structures. We used this strategy to fabricate 3D full-gap photonic crystals and 3D/2D hybrid photonic crystals.

The Recursively Decomposable Interconnection Network (RDIN) is a set of interconnection networks that can be recursively decomposed into smaller substructures whose topologies and properties are similar to the original one. The examples of the RDIN are hypercubes, star graph, mesh, tree, pyramid, pancake, and WK-recursive network. This paper proposed a uniform and simple model to represent the RDIN inside computers at first. Based on the model, a generalized and efficient allocation scheme capable of being applied to all the members of the RDIN is developed. The proposed scheme can fully recognize the substructures (such as subcube, substar, subtree,. . . ) more easily than ever, and it is the first one that can fully recognize all the incomplete substructures. The best-fit allocation is also proposed. The criterion aims at keeping the largest free parts from being destroyed, as is the philosophy of the best-fit allocation. Moreover, the proposed scheme can be performed in an injured RDIN with its processors and/or links faulty. Finally, the mathematical analysis and simulations for two instances, hypercubes and star graphs, of the RDIN are presented. The results show that the generalized scheme outperforms or is comparable to the other proprietary allocation schemes designed for the specific structure.

System specifications should be refined to meet stakeholders' requirements as much as possible, because the first specification does not satisfy all stakeholders in general. This paper presents a procedure to refine behavioral specification to satisfy stakeholders. Non-functional requirements are used for checking stakeholders' satisfaction. With this procedure, stakeholder-dissatisfaction can be reduced and new possibilities to satisfy or dissatisfy other stakeholders can be found, since a modification to cancel dissatisfaction can sometimes influence the satisfaction of the others.

At high-level synthesis for system VLSIs, their power consumption is efficiently reduced by applying gated clocks to them. Since using gated clocks causes the reduction of power consumption and the increase of area/delay, estimating trade-off between power and area/delay by applying gated clocks is very important. In this paper, we discuss the amount of variance of area, delay and power by applying gated clocks. We propose a simple gate-level circuit model and estimation equations. We vary parameters in our proposed circuit model, and evaluate power consumption by back-annotating gate-level simulation results to the original circuit. This paper also proposes a conditional expression for applying gated clocks. The expression shows whether or not we can reduce power consumption by applying gated clocks. We confirm the accuracy of proposed estimation equations by experiments.

A digital circuit technique is proposed to process directly bit-stream signals from analog-to-digital converters based on sigma-delta modulation. Newly developed adder and multiplier are fundamental circuit modules for the processing. Using the fundamental modules and up/down counters, other circuit modules such as divider and square root circuits are also realized. The signal processors built of the modules have advantages over multi-bit Nyquist rate processors in circuit scale by the following two distinct features: First, single-bit/multi-bit converters are not needed at the inputs of the processors because the arithmetic modules directly process bit-stream signals. Secondly, the arithmetic modules consist of small number of logic gates. As an application of the technique to digital signal processing for communications, a QPSK demodulator is presented. The demodulator is structured with 40% of logic gates consumed by an equivalent multi-bit demodulator.

We have developed a distributed optical fiber strain sensor for detecting the collapse of river embankments. The sensor uses a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometer (BOTDR) and consists of an optical fiber cable and pieces of nonwoven cloth. Pieces of cloth are fixed to the cable at 1.5-meter intervals and it is then embedded in a U-shaped configuration in a river embankment. The pieces of cloth are displaced when there is movement of the soil in which they are embedded. If one of two adjacent pieces of cloth remains stationary while the other moves, the optical fiber between the two pieces is stretched. The collapse of an embankment can be detected by using a BOTDR to monitor any such stretching in the 1.5-m lengths of fiber. The developed sensor operates at a sensitivity of 0.025%/kgf, which is equivalent to 0.067%/mm, and is thus capable of detecting soil movements of a few mm in river embankments. The sensor is also able to provide effective advance warning of the collapse of a river embankment resulting from water penetration. We subjected the sensor system to field tests that demonstrated the effectiveness of its construction and its long-term stability. The developed sensor system is an effective tool for use in river management systems of the very near future.

Optical disk systems have been used in a wide range of applications and the performance of these systems has been improving rapidly. The optical integration is one of the important technologies of the progress of the optical pickup head in the system. It can make the optical pickup head miniature, light sized, ease to assemble, cost reduced and reliable during long time operation. In this paper, at first, merits and features of the optical integration for optical disk systems are briefly reviewed. Then, our activities on the development of the various hybrid-integrated optical devices, "Laser Couplers" are reported. Especially, the most recent results on the "Two-wavelength-beam Laser Coupler," are described in detail. It has two-wavelength laser emission/detection functions and easily realizes an ultimate solution of the optical pickup head for the DVD/CD system, now being used in "PlayStaion2. " To simplify the structure and the fabrication of this device, a new monolithic-integrated two-wavelength laser diode, called a visible and infrared laser diode, has been developed, which can be easily fabricated using only two steps of metal organic chemical vapor deposition. The structures and characteristics of this device are reported. Lastly, other recent technologies of the optical integration, including monolithically integration, near field optics and so on, are reviewed.

This paper discusses the application of a fuzzy-ARTMAP neural network to digital communications channel equalization. This approach provides new solutions for solving the problems, such as complexity and long training, which found when implementing the previously developed neural-basis equalizers. The proposed fuzzy-ARTMAP equalizer is fast and easy to train and includes capabilities not found in other neural network approaches; a small number of parameters, no requirements for the choice of initial weights, automatic increase of hidden units, no risk of getting trapped in local minima, and the capability of adding new data without retraining previously trained data. In simulation studies, binary signals were generated at random in a linear channel with Gaussian noise. The performance of the proposed equalizer is compared with other neural net basis equalizers, specifically MLP and RBF equalizers.

This paper discusses solutions that provide forward link power allocation based on 3GPP (FDD) standardization reports and that meet the Eb/No required for forward link channels. In addition, we determine the forward link user capacity under a mixed service environment. Cell coverage is derived using the solutions from the forward link user capacity problem and an urban propagation model. These results are achieved with the introduction of various factors, such as the number of users, service types, macro/microcell environments, and others. Our study shows that for IMT-2000 systems offering a mixed service environment, forward link power should be carefully allocated depending on the ratio of users occupied by each service type if one is to achieve optimal cell planning.

In this paper, a novel method to reduce additive time-varying noise is proposed. Unlike the previous methods, the proposed method requires neither the assumption about noise nor the estimate of the noise statistics from any pause regions. The enhancement is performed on a band-by-band basis for each time frame. Based on both the decision on whether a particular band in a frame is speech or noise dominant and the masking property of the human auditory system, an appropriate amount of noise is reduced in time-frequency domain using modified spectral subtraction. The proposed method was tested on various noisy conditions: car noise, F16 noise, white Gaussian noise, pink noise, tank noise and babble noise. On the basis of segmental SNR, inspection of spectrograms and MOS tests, the proposed method was found to be more effective than spectral subtraction with and without pause detection in reducing noise while minimizing distortion to speech.

The redundancy allocation problem for a series-parallel system is a well known as one of NP-hard combinatorial problems and it generally belongs to the class of nonlinear integer programming (nIP) problem. Many researchers have developed the various methods which can be roughly categorized into exact solution methods, approximate methods, and heuristic methods. Though each method has both advantages and disadvantage, the heuristic methods have been received much attention since other methods involve more computation effort and usually require larger computer memory. Genetic algorithm (GA) as one of heuristic optimization techniques is a robust evolutionary optimization search technique with very few restrictions concerning with the various design problems. However, GAs cannot guarantee the optimality and sometimes can suffer from the premature convergence situation of its solution, because it has some unknown parameters and it neither uses a priori knowledge nor exploits the local search information. To improve these problems in GA, this paper proposes an effective hybrid genetic algorithm based on, 1) fuzzy logic controller (FLC) to automatically regulate GA parameters and 2) incorporation of the iterative hill climbing method to perform local exploitation around the near optimum solution for solving redundancy allocation problem. The effectiveness of this proposed method is demonstrated by comparison results with other conventional methods on two different types of redundancy allocation problems.

The reverse link bandwidth efficiency of a spectrally overlapped CDMA system with fast transmit power control is evaluated to find the optimum overlapping, where the bandwidth efficiency is defined as the maximum aggregate bit rate of all subsystems per unit bandwidth (bps/Hz). Single and multiple cell environments are considered. Besides the rectangular chip pulse, the impact of a pulse-shaping filter is discussed. It is found that the raised cosine spectrum pulse shaping helps to increase the bandwidth efficiency and strict pulse shaping filter problem can be avoided if a large number of subsystems are overlapped. It is also found that the optimum carrier spacing remains unchanged irrespective of the power delay profile shape of the multipath channel, whether multipath fading exists or not, and whether a single cell or multiple cell system is considered. However, the bandwidth efficiency strongly depends on them and the impacts of the related parameters are discussed.

Verb phrases are sometimes omitted in natural language (ellipsis). It is necessary to resolve the verb phrase ellipses in language understanding, machine translation, and dialogue processing. This paper describes a practical way to resolve verb phrase ellipses by using surface expressions and examples. To make heuristic rules for ellipsis resolution we classified verb phrase ellipses by checking whether the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis appears in the surrounding sentences or not. We experimented with the resolution of verb phrase elipses on a novel and obtained a recall rate of 73% and a precision rate of 66% on test sentences. In the case when the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis appeared in the surrounding sentences, the accuracy rate was high. But, in the case when the referent of a verb phrase ellipsis did not appear in the surrounding sentences, the accuracy rate was not so high. Since the analysis of this phenomena is very difficult, it is valuable to propose a way of solving the problem to a certain extent. When the size of corpus becomes larger and the machine performance becomes greater, the method of using corpus will become effective.

In this paper, we propose the multirate repeating method for alias free subband adaptive filters (AFSAFs) and consider its convergence property. It is shown that we can adjust the convergence speed and the final error of the adaptive filters by varying its two parameters according to the requirements of the applications where the method is applied. The proposed method has two parameters, namely, the number of channel and the number of repetition. We show that by increasing the number of channels we can reduce the final error, and this property is preferred when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. On the other hand, we show that the convergence speed of the AFSAF approaches to that of the affine projection algorithm (APA) by increasing the number of repetition. Through the computer simulations, we show the effect of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a quasi-coherent equivalent-time sampling method to acquire repetitive wideband waveform signals with high throughput. We have already proposed a new sampling system which incorporates the pre-trigger ability and the time jitter reduction function for a fluctuated input signal while maintaining the waveform recording efficiency. The quasi-coherent sampling method proposed in this paper can be adopted to it in order to improve its data acquisition throughput significantly. Numerical simulation results show effectiveness of our proposed method.

We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate low loss branches in a Si photonic wire waveguide. Approximate calculation by the two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (2-D FDTD) method and detailed design by the 3-D FDTD method indicate that low excess loss less than 0.2 dB is expected for a µm-size bend-waveguide-type branch at a wavelength of 1.55 µm. This branch is fabricated in a silicon-on-insulator substrate and the loss is evaluated to be 0.3 dB. This value is small enough to construct a very compact branching circuit.

In this paper, we present an approximate analysis method for computing the call blocking probability and Erlang capacity of CDMA systems. The approximated results provide only a few percent difference from the exact values, while reducing the calculation complexity. For CDMA systems with 3 sectors, we also show that the system performances such as call blocking probability and Erlang capacity can be characterized just with two traffic parameters (the traffic load of the most loaded sector and the sum of traffic loads of the other remaining sectors) instead of three sector traffic loads especially when the required call blocking probability is given less than 2e-2, which makes the traffic engineers manage the system more easily.

Properly representation of the complexity of class structure will be useful in object oriented software developments. Although some class complexity metrics have been proposed, they have ignored directions of coupling relationships among methods and attributes, such as whether a method writes data onto an attribute or reads data from the attribute. In this paper, we use a directed graph model to represent such coupling relationships. Based on the directed graph model, we propose a metric of class structural complexity. The proposed metric satisfies necessary conditions of complexity metric suggested by Briand and others. The following fact is showed by experimental data of Java classes. While the proposed metric follows a conventional metric, the proposed metric can capture an aspect of class structural complexity which is lost by the conventional one.