Based on the partially-depleted, thin-film SOI/CMOS technology, the influence of reduced junction capacitance on the performance of the elementary gates and large scale gate array chip is reviewed. To further reduce the power consumption, SOI-specific device configurations, in which the body-bias is individually controlled, are effective in lowering the supply voltage and hence the power consumption while keeping the circuit speed. Two attempts are introduced: (1) DTMOS (Dynamic-Threshold MOS)/SOI to achieve ultra low-voltage and yet high-speed operation, and (2) ABB (Active-Body-Bias) MOS to enhance the current drive under the low supply voltage.

Numerous scientific and engineering fields extensively utilize optimization techniques for finding appropriate parameter values of models. Various optimization methods are available for practical use. The optimization algorithms are classified primarily due to the rates of convergence. Unfortunately, it is often the case in practice that the particular optimization method with specified convergence rates performs substantially differently on diverse optimization tasks. Theoretical classification of convergence rates then lacks its relevance in the context of the practical optimization. It is therefore desirable to formulate a novel classification framework relevant to the theoretical concept of convergence rates as well as to the practical optimization. This article introduces such classification framework. The proposed classification framework enables specification of optimization techniques and optimization tasks. It also underlies its inherent relationship to the convergence rates. Novel classification framework is applied to categorizing the tasks of optimizing polynomials and the problem of training multilayer perceptron neural networks.

This paper presents a new neural network structure, called Temporal-CombNET (T-CombNET), dedicated to the time series analysis and classification. It has been developed from a large scale Neural Network structure, CombNET-II, which is designed to deal with a very large vocabulary, such as Japanese character recognition. Our specific modifications of the original CombNET-II model allow it to do temporal analysis, and to be used in large set of human movements recognition system. In T-CombNET structure one of most important parameter to be set is the space division criterion. In this paper we analyze some practical approaches and present an Interclass Distance Measurement based criterion. The T-CombNET performance is analyzed applying to in a practical problem, Japanese Kana finger spelling recognition. The obtained results show a superior recognition rate when compared to different neural network structures, such as Multi-Layer Perceptron, Learning Vector Quantization, Elman and Jordan Partially Recurrent Neural Networks, CombNET-II, k-NN, and the proposed T-CombNET structure.

This paper proposes aspiration controls which restrains aspiration branches and keeps the original tabu-based searching by considering past and/or (predicted) future searching profiles. For implementation of the aspiration control we employ not only the short-term and long-term memory but also future memory which is first introduced in this paper as a new concept in the tabu search field. The tabu search with the aspiration control is also parallelized. Moreover two types of parallel cooperative searching scheme are proposed. Through computational experiment, we observe efficiency of our approach comparing to the traditional ones. Especially, we find that cooperative searching has possibility to improve the solution quality very well.

In this paper, we study decentralized supervisory control of discrete event systems where local disabling actions are fused by the OR rule. We generalize an on-line procedure for synthesizing decentralized supervisors proposed by Prosser. By using the generalized procedure, we can achieve a sublanguage of a specification which is not achieved by a class of decentralized supervisors synthesized by the Prosser's procedure.

As a preprocessor of the automatic speech recognizer in a noisy environment, a microphone array system has been investigated to reduce the environmental noise. In usual microphone array design, a plane wave is assumed for the sake of simplicity (far-field assumption). However, this far-field assumption does not always hold, resulting in distortion in the array output. In this report, the subspace method, which is one of the high resolution spectrum estimator, is applied to the near-field source localization problem. A high resolution method is necessary especially for the near-field source localization with a small-sized array. By combining the source localization technique with a spatial inverse filter, the signal coming from the multiple sources in the near-field range can be separated. The modified minimum variance beamformer is used to design the spatial inverse filter. As a result of the experiment in a real environment with two sound sources in the near-field range, 60-70% of word recognition rate was achieved.

New explicit formulas for tap-coefficients of halfband low/high pass MAXFLAT non-recursive filters are presented by using their relationship with already presented maximally linear type IV differentiators. These formulas are modified to give a new class of narrow transition band filters, with a performance comparable to that of optimal filters.

In this paper, we study macro/micro diversity techniques for code acquisition of a direct-sequence spread-spectrum signal in an indoor packet communication system. In the system discussed, the base station has several radio ports each with a cluster of antennas, and the terminal also has multiple antennas. The performance in the uplink of this system is analyzed under Lognormal shadowing and flat Rayleigh fading. The numerical results show great performance improvements by proposed diversity techniques. In addition, it is clarified that the mean acquisition time, which is often used as the measure of performance, is not suitable for packet radio systems as it underestimates the necessary preamble length for initial code acquisition.

In this letter, the constant amplitude transmission for orthogonal multicode systems is discussed. In order to obtain the high power efficiency, we require the high power amplifier which has non-linear characteristic. The nonlinear distortion, however, may occur because of the multicode signals having large amplitude fluctuations. If we can achieve the constant amplitude transmission, the nonlinear distortion can be neglected. In this letter, I investigate the property of the information bit streams that can achieve the constant amplitude transmission and show that the bent sequences can achieve the constant amplitude transmission.

An algorithm for finding the optimal sectionalization for sectionalized trellises with respect to distinct optimality criterions was presented by Lafourcade and Vardy. In this paper, for linear block codes, we give a direct method for finding the optimal sectionalization when the optimality criterion is chosen as the total number |E| of the edges, the expansion index |E|-|V|+1, or the quantity 2|E|-|V|+1, only using the dimensions of the past and future sub-codes. A more concrete method for determining the optimal sectionalization is given for the Reed-Muller codes with the natural lexicographic coordinate ordering.

We consider a discrete event system controlled by a decentralized supervisor consisting of n local supervisors. Given a nonempty and closed language as the upper bound specification, we consider a problem to synthesize a reliable decentralized supervisor such that the closed-loop behavior is still legal under possible failures of any less than or equal to n-k (1 k n) local supervisors. We synthesize two such reliable decentralized supervisors. One is synthesized based on a suitably defined normal sublanguage. The other is the fully decentralized supervisor induced by a suitably defined centralized supervisor. We then show that the generated languages under the control actions of these two decentralized supervisors are incomparable.

Generating state spaces is one of important and general methods in the analysis of Petri nets. There are two reasons why state spaces of Petri nets become so large. One is concurrent occurring of transitions, and the other is periodic occurring of firing sequences. This paper focuses on the second problem, and proposes a new algorithm for exploring state spaces of finite capacity Petri nets with large capacities. In the proposed algorithm, the state space is represented in the form of a tree such that a set of markings generated by periodic occurrences of firing sequences is associated with each node, and it is much smaller than the reachability graph.

In computer science, concepts of resource such as data consumption and of time such as execution time are very important. Logical systems which can treat them have been applied in that field. Linear logic has been called a resource conscious logic. The expressive power is enough to describe a dynamic change in process environments. However, linear logic is not enough to treat a dynamic change in environments with the passage of time since it does not include a concept of time directly. A typical example is the relation between linear logic and Petri nets. It is well known that the reachability problem for Petri nets is equivalent to the provability for the corresponding sequent of linear logic. But linear logic cannot naturally represent timed Petri nets which are extensions of ordinary Petri nets with respect to time concept. So we extend linear logic with respect to time concept in order to introduce a resource-conscious and time-dependent logical system, that is, temporal linear logic. This system has some temporal operators "" which means a resource usable only once at the next time, "" which means a resource usable only once at anytime, and a modal storage operator "!" which means a resource usable any times at anytime. We can show that the reachability problem for timed Petri nets is equivalent to the provability for the corresponding sequent of temporal linear logic. In this paper, we also represent the description of synchronous communication model by temporal linear logic. The expressive power of temporal linear logic will be applicable to various fields of computer science.

A workflow is a flow of work carried out in parallel and in series by people. In order to improve efficiency, it is required to change the current workflow dynamically. Since dynamic change of workflows may probably make the series of work inconsistent, it is necessary to find out consistent change of workflow. As consistent ways, three types of dynamic changes: flush, abort, and synthetic cut-over (SCO), have been proposed. However, the concrete analysis and evaluation have not been done. To do the performance evaluation for the dynamic workflow changes, comparison of the times (called change time) cost in the individual change and the methods how to obtain such times become ever important. In this paper, we first give a definition of change time and then propose the computation methods individually for each change type. Finally, we do experiments to evaluate the performance of three changes by doing the comparison of the change times.

A new method of sequential control has been developed in order to increase the productivity and flexibility of production systems. This advanced sequential control (ASC) method is proposed for sequential control systems based on the autonomous decentralized system (ADS) architecture. The ADS defines the system software and message formats and makes it easy to expand the number of devices and software modules. The ASC method increases productivity because it minimizes the processing and adjustment times of production lines by adjusting the starting times of production processes automatically. Experimental evaluation results of the ASC method showed that it increases the productivity of production systems. It is also applied to an actual production system and the results are reported.

If the direction of arrival (DOA) of a source is perturbed due to some reasons in a statistical way as in the environment of wireless mobile communications, a new model appropriate for such environment should be used instead of the point source model. In this paper, an angle-perturbed source model is proposed and an estimation method based on the eigen-decomposition technique is investigated under the model. The asymptotic distribution of the estimation errors is obtained to see the statistical properties.

A distributed system is said to be self-stabilizing if it converges to some legitimate state from an arbitrary state in a finite number of steps. The number of steps required for convergence is usually referred to as the stabilization time, and its reduction is one of the main performance issues in the design of self-stabilizing systems. In this paper, we propose an automated method for computing the stabilization time. The method uses Boolean functions to represent the state space in order to assuage the state explosion problem, and computes the stabilization time by manipulating the Boolean functions. To demonstrate the usefulness of the method, we apply it to the analysis of existing self-stabilizing algorithms. The results show that the method can perform stabilization time analysis very fast, even when an underlying state space is very huge.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a network that uses unspecified bit rate (UBR) for a virtual channel (VC) accommodating AAL2 connections. AAL2 is a new ATM adaptation layer that has recently been standardized. Since it is designed to carry low-bit-rate voice signals efficiently, it should be used in the ATM backbone for mobile networks, especially in the IMT-2000 network (International Mobile Telecommunication in the Year 2000 network). Normally, constant-bit-rate (CBR) VCs or variable-bit-rate (VBR) VCs are used to accommodate AAL2 connections. In our previous work, however, we showed that using UBR VCs (equivalent to no VC-level bandwidth management) to accommodate AAL2 connections needs much less VP bandwidth than using CBR or VBR VCs. In this paper, the previous results are extended to the network and the network bandwidth reduction is shown to be larger than that of the virtual path. In addition, the bandwidth reduction achieved by using UBR VCs is comparable with that achieved by introducing AAL2 switching nodes. Based on these results, the core network of the IMT-2000 is discussed.

A hybrid system in which mobile terminals (MTs) themselves select whether to communicate directly or via base stations (BSs) from communication conditions, "cellularad-hoc united communication system," has been proposed by the authors. It has been confirmed to have effective channel usage and battery consumption, especially for MTs which tend to communicate with partners which are close together, such as operational mobile robots. In this paper, the hybrid system is examined with respect to handoff rate. This hybrid system uses two modes, a cellular mode and an ad-hoc mode. The former mode is for communication using BSs and the latter is for direct communication. Thus, there will be two kinds of handoffs. One is the ordinary one between BSs and the other is between the two modes. Such a system may suffer from frequent handoffs. Thus the handoff rate of the system was examined. However, by the addition of a simple hysteresis characteristic, the handoff rate was held down closer to that of a pure cellular system in a multipath environment.

In this study, the shielding effect of high-loss dielectric and magnetic materials themselves and also an oval human model placed behind these material, were investigated by the FDTD method, for near- and far-field exposure, using the half-wave length dipole antenna. According to the results, a high-loss magnetic material showed a large shielding effect (average 20 dB) compared to the high-loss dielectric material, for near- and far-field shields. Also, the reduction of the shielding effect was small (2 dB) for the high-loss magnetic material, while it was large for the high loss dielectric material, on decreasing the distance between the antenna and shield. Moreover, the variation of the shielding effect on a human model placed behind the shield was small (0.2-1.5 dB) for the high-loss magnetic material, but large for the high-loss dielectric material. This is similar to the results of the shield materials themselves, for the close antenna-shield and human-shield distances, respectively.