Multi-cycle paths are paths between registers where 2 or more clock cycles are allowed to propagate signals, and the detection of multi-cycle paths is important in deciding proper clock period, timing verification and logic optimization. This paper presents a satisfiability-based multi-cycle path detection method, where the detection problems are reduced to CNF formulae and the satisfiability is checked using SAT provers. We also show heuristics on conversion from multi-level circuits into CNF formulae. We have applied our method to ISCAS'89 benchmarks and other sample circuits. Experimental results show the remarkable improvements on the size of manipulatable circuits.

A program is developed to simulate the signal received by a bistatic pulse radar for a defined scenario. The signal collected at the receiving antenna is calculated as a function of time by taking into account the vectorial aspect of the electromagnetic waves and various elements operating in the radar radiolink. The radar radiolink is designed in a modular structure for a general configuration where the transmitter, the target and the receiver are moving. Modules such as elements characterizing the antennas radiation or defining the target scattering can be inserted in accordance with the desired radar scenario. Then the developed model permits to simulate a wide range of radar scenarios where returns from targets and clutter can be individually processed and their characteristics can be investigated in time or frequency. The interest of this model is great because it permits, for a defined scenario, to generate radar data which can be used in signal processing algorithms for target detection, clutter suppression or target classification. This paper shows the implementation of the simulation program considering a concrete radar scenario. The presented scenario deals with the simulation of the sea clutter occurring in a bistatic radar radiolink over the sea surface. In this application where the sea surface is considered as the target, the electric field scattered from the sea surface is calculated by assuming that the surface is described by two independent scales of roughness.

In reliable multicast communications, retransmission control plays an important role from the viewpoint of scalability. Previous works show that the implosion of control packets, e.g. ACKs or NAKs, degrades the total performance of reliable multicast communications. Local recovery which enables receivers receiving a packet successfully to initiate recovering a lost packet may have the possibility to solve this scalability problem. This paper presents the performance evaluation of local recovery caused by grouping receiving nodes in reliable multicast communication. There seems to be many features dominating the performance of local recovery, the number of nodes in a group, the shared loss occurring simultaneously at multiple receivers and so on. When the number of receivers in a group increases, the geographical expansion of a group will degrade the delay performance of the receivers. In a configuration where most nodes in a local-recovery group suffer from shared loss, the failure of local recovery degrades the total performance. Our simulation results under a hierarchical network topology like the real Internet show that a local-recovery group configuration with two-adjacent MANs grouping performs well.

Timing verification of digital synchronous designs is a complex process that is traditionally carried out deep in the design cycle, at the gate level. A method, embodied in a C++ based design system, is presented that allows modeling and verification of clock regions at a higher level. By combining event-driven, clock-cycle true and behavioral simulation, we are able to perform static and dynamic timing analysis of the clock regions.

The signed regressor algorithm, a variation of the least mean square (LMS) algorithm, is characterized by the estimation way of using the clipped reference signals, namely, its sign (). This clipping, equivalent to quantizing the reference signal to 1, only increases the estimation error by about 2 dB. This paper proposes to increase the number of the quantization steps to three, namely, 1 and 0, and shows that the 'tri-quantized-x' normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm with three quantization steps improves the convergence property.

In this paper we present a case study of a hierarchical statistical analysis. The method which we use here bridges the statistical information between process-level and system-level, and enables us to know the effect of the process variation on the system performance. We use two modeling techniques--intermediate model and response surface model--in order to link the statistical information between adjacent design levels. We show an experiment of the hierarchical statistical analysis applied to a Phase Locked Loop (PLL) circuit, and indicate that the hierarchical statistical analysis is practical with respect to both accuracy and simulation cost. Following three applications are also presented in order to show advantage of this linking method; these are Monte Carlo analysis, worst-case analysis, and sensitive analysis. The results of the Monte Carlo and the worst-case analysis indicate that this method is realistic statistical one. The result of the sensitive analysis enables us to evaluate the effect of process variation at the system level. Also, we can derive constraints on the process variation from a performance requirement.

This paper introduces a flexible, stream-oriented dataflow processing model based on the "Communicating Logic (CL)" framework. As the target architecture, we adopt the dual layered "Plastic Cell Architecture (PCA). " Datapath processing functionality is encapsulated in asynchronous hardware objects with variable graining and implemented using look-up tables. Communication (i.e. connectivity and control) between the distributed processing objects is achieved by means of inter-object message passing. The key point of the CL approach is that it offers the merits of scalable performance, low power hardware implementation with the user friendly compilation and linking capabilities unique to software.

QoS restoration, a new approach to keep QoS of end-to-end ATM connections for failures is proposed. In a network with QoS restoration, each end-to-end connection's customer pre-defines the minimum QoS requirements such as minimum throughput. When a failure occurs, resources such as bandwidth of working connections are reallocated for restoration if they are dispensable to keep the minimum requirements along with the pre-assigned spare resources. This resource reallocation is done in a distributed manner and the result of the modification of a connection is notified to the customer of the connection to help him adjust the way of using it. The effect of the reallocation is mathematically evaluated. It is shown that the reallocation enables to achieve high restoration ratio with insufficient pre-assigned spare resources, such as to restore double-link failures with spare resources prepared for single-link failures, or even to restore single-link failures with no spare resources. It is also shown that pre-assigned spare resources can be reduced if the reallocation is considered in network design phase. The performance of the proposed distributed algorithm is evaluated with an event-driven simulator. The result shows that regardless of whether or not pre-assigned spare resources exist, a restoration ratio which is close to the theoretical maximum can be achieved. A proof-of-concept experimental system is developed by controlling commercial ATM switches via SNMP. The system shows it can effectively manage failures in WAN environment.

A Generalized Hypercube Network (GHNet) with shared channels which requires only one fixed-wavelength transmitter and r(m-1) fixed-wavelength receivers per node is proposed. The proposed network topology reduces not only the number of transmitters per node but also the number of WDM channels required to service the same number of nodes compared with the GHNet with dedicated channels by sharing the available WDM channels, while it maintains the same channel efficiency as the GHNet with dedicated channels. The proposed network topology may be preferred in a situation where the number of available WDM channels and the cost of the transmitter may cause a major restriction on the lightwave network construction. For performance analysis, the network capacity and the mean queueing delay for the proposed network topology are obtained. Also, the performance measures of the proposed GHNet with shared channels are compared with those of the ShuffleNet with shared channels.

Frequency-selective fading due to multipath propagation is serious hindrance in high-speed TDMA mobile communications. An adaptive antenna has been proposed to reduce the frequency-selective fading and realize path-diversity. This paper presents a criterion which selects multipath signals and weighting factors for combining them. First, we describe a selection criterion which chooses the multipath signals for the path-diversity. We propose a ratio of signal power to error power for the criterion. Furthermore, we propose weighting factors which realize approximately the maximal ratio combining. Computer simulation results show that the proposed selection criterion and weighting factors reveal excellent performance.

This paper proposes a new restoration concept for ATM networks. It realizes the rapid and multiple reliability/cost level restoration required to support many different network services. First, the necessity in realizing rapid and multiple-reliability-level restoration in the future network is shown. The self-healing schemes that is based on distributed restoration mechanism satisfies the rapidity in restoration, but does not satisfy multiple reliability levels. Thus a new self-healing scheme that satisfies them is presented and a Multiple Reliability Level Virtual Path network concept is proposed based on the new self-healing scheme. Next, how to realize the new self-healing scheme is explained as an extension of the existing self-healing scheme with two new simple functions. Finally, evaluations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. These results show that the proposed new scheme realizes a network that fulfills the rapidity and multiple reliability requirements that are strongly required.

Semantic ambiguity is a serious problem in information retrieval. Query expansion has been proposed as one method of solving this problem. However, queries tend not to have much information for fitting query vectors to the latent semantics, which are difficult to express in a few query terms given by users. We propose a document vector modification method that modifies document vectors based on the relevance of documents. This method is expected to show better retrieval effectiveness than conventional methods. In this paper, we evaluate our method through retrieval experiments in which the relevance of documents extracted from scientific papers is assessed, and a comparison with tfidf is described.

New designs of MAXFLAT discrete and differentiating Hilbert transformers are presented using their interrelationships with digital differentiators. The new designs have the explicit formulas for their tap-coefficients, which are further modified to obtain a new class of narrow transition band filters, with a performance comparable to the Chebyshev filters.

Methods for implementing SS7 functions are proposed for a large-capacity decentralized switching node; they satisfy the condition of hiding distributed configurations from adjacent nodes. First, line accommodation and acquisition methods are clarified for a large-capacity switching node in which multiple modules are used to realize trunk circuits and SS7 signaling links. Two methods are then proposed for allocating SS7 functions within the switching node. One distributes the functions over multiple circuit-switched modules (distributed allocation) while the other centralizes the functions in dedicated signaling modules (centralized allocation). We quantitatively evaluate both methods in terms of node scale versus the number of modules and signaling links required, the inter-module data transfer rate required, and the node traffic handling capacity when a particular module fails. From the evaluation results, we show that the distributed allocation should be employed for small-scale nodes and the centralized allocation for large-scale nodes. We also show the effectiveness of a method for avoiding a characteristic problem that arises when a particular module fails. Finally, we implement an experimental system as an example.

A minimum classification error formulation based on genetic algorithm is proposed for discriminative training of the bigram language model. Results of Chinese dialect identification were reported which demonstrate performance improvement with use of the genetic algorithm over the generalized probabilistic descent algorithm.

High-speed systems require a wide-frequency-range clock system for data processing. Phase-locked loop (PLL) is used for such a system that requires wide-range variable frequency clock. Frequency calibration method enables the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) in a PLL to cover the expected frequency range for high-speed applications that require a wide locking range. Frequency range adjustment is implemented by means of a current digital to analog converter (DAC), which controls the performance curves of a VCO and a bias circuit. This method adjusts the VCO's frequency-voltage performance curves before functional operation so that a PLL can cover requested frequency range with its best condition. Both the limit of control voltage and its target reference voltage are given with same voltage reference. This ensures correct performance after frequency adjustment even under the temperature fluctuation. It eliminates post-production physical adjustment such as fuse trimming which increases the cost and TAT in manufacturing and testing. A high-speed wide-locking range VCO with an automatic frequency performance calibration circuit is implemented within small space in a high-speed hard disk drive channel with 0.25-µm 2.5 V CMOS four-layer metal technology.

Recently, an efficient algorithm has been proposed for finding all solutions of systems of nonlinear equations using linear programming. In this algorithm, linear programming problems are formulated by surrounding component nonlinear functions by rectangles. In this letter, it is shown that weakly nonlinear functions can be surrounded by smaller rectangles, which makes the algorithm very efficient.

An Off-line mammography screening system is used in pre-screening mammograms to separate high-risk mammograms from most normal cases. Off-line system can run before radiologist's review and is particularly useful in the national breast cancer screening program which usually consists of high percentage of normal cases. Until now, the shortcomings of on-line detection of clustered microcalcifications from a mammogram remain in the necessity of manual selection of regions of interest. The developed technique focuses on detection of microcalcifications within a region of interest indicated by the radiologist. Therefore, this kind of system is not efficient enough to process hundreds of mammograms in a short time without a large number of radiologists. In this paper, based on a "hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach, an off-line mammography screening system for the detection and segmentation of clustered microcalcifications is presented. A serial off-line procedures without any human intervention should consider the complexity of organization of mammograms. In practice, it is impossible to use one technique to obtain clustered microcalcifications without consideration of background text and noises from image acquisition, the position of breast area and regions of interest. "Hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach is a serial procedures without any manual operations to reduce the potential areas of clustered microcalcifications from a mammogram until clustered microcalcifications are found. The reduction of potential areas starts with a mammogram, through identification of the breast area, identification of the suspicious areas of clustered microcalcifications, and finally segmentation of clustered microcalcifications. It is achieved hierarchically from coarse level to fine level. In detail, the proposed system includes breast area separation, enhancement, detection and localization of suspicious areas, segmentation of microcalcifications, and target selection of microcalcifications. The system separates its functions into hierarchical steps and follows the rule of thumb "coarse detection followed by fine segmentation" in performing each step of processing. The decomposed hierarchical steps are as follows: The system first extracts the breast region from which suspicious areas are detected. Then precise clustered microcalcification regions are segmented from the suspicious areas. For each step of operation, techniques for rough detection are first applied followed by a fine segmentation to accurately detect the boundaries of the target regions. With this "hierarchically-coarse-to-fine" approach, a complicated work such as the detection of clustered microcalcifications can be divided and conquered. The effectiveness of the system is evaluated by three experienced radiologists using two mammogram databases from the Nijmegen University Hospital and the Taichung Veterans General Hospital. Results indicate that the system can precisely extract the clustered microcalcifications without human intervention, and its performance is competitive with that of experienced radiologists, showing the system as a promising asset to radiologists.

When a single-mode LD is subjected to distant reflection, relative intensity noise and the width of the optical spectrum are drastically increased. This phenomenon is known as 'coherence collapse. ' This letter demonstrates that penalty-free operation is possible at 2.5 Gbit/s even when a DFB-LD is in a state of coherence collapse. In addition, an LD in a state of coherence collapse is applied to a situation where signal light suffers from interferometric crosstalk. The results show that the LD reduces the influence of interferometric noise because of its wide spectral width.

In this paper, the electromagnetic scattering from a cylinder with a computer-generated random rough surface is analyzed by a numerical simulation method. The validity of the proposed numerical method is confirmed by comparing the present numerical results with those calculated by the perturbation method to second order and its Pade approximation. It is shown that the present proposed method can be applied to the case where the surface roughness becomes relatively large.