Connection of internal scan chains in core wrapper design (CWD) is necessary to handle the width match of TAM and internal scan chains. However, conventional serial connection of internal scan chains incurs power and time penalty. Study shows that the distribution and high density of don't care bits (X-bits) in test patterns make scan slices overlapping and partial overlapping possible. A novel parallel CWD (pCWD) approach is presented in this paper for lowering test power by shortening wrapper scan chains and adjusting test patterns. In order to achieve shift time reduction from overlapping in pCWD, a two-phase process on test pattern: partition and fill, is presented. Experimental results on d695 of ITC2002 benchmark demonstrated the shift time and test power have been decreased by 1.5 and 15 times, respectively. In addition, the proposed pCWD can be used as a stand-alone time reduction technique, which has better performance than previous techniques.

Howling is very annoying problem to the hearing-aid users and it limits the maximum usable gain of hearing aids. We propose a new feedback cancellation system by inserting a time-varying decorrelation filter in the forward path. We use a second-order all-pass filter with control parameters whose time variation is implemented using a low-frequency modulator. A noticeable reduction of weight-vector misalignment is achievable using our proposed method.

We proposed a new electric contact device that suppresses the arc phenomena. The functions of electric contacts are divided into energizing and switching for arc suppression. Switching contacts consist of multielectrodes and each electrode current is suppressed by the series resistance. For realization of multicontacting, cantilever beam array electrodes were formed on a silicon substrate using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The finite element method was used to optimize the structure. The fabrication process of the cantilever was examined. Au-Au contact current of 0.97 A was broken without arc ignition.

The author prepared new composition of Cu-Sn based composite materials containing lamellar solid lubricants, and measured their performance with focus on contact resistance and the coefficient of friction using a low-speed tribo-meter. Among three kinds of composite materials, the composite material containing 26wt.% of total solid lubricants was lower in both of contact resistance and the coefficient of friction and showed stable characteristics compared with those containing 25wt.% and 35wt.% respectively. The author analyzed the characteristics of these materials using several techniques including BSE image, element analysis through EPMA, and mapping analysis, and examined why the composite material containing 26wt.% of total solid lubricants showed higher performance.

This paper proposes an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) with low signal-distortion for human-robot communication. The proposed ANC has two sets of adaptive filters for noise and crosstalk; namely, main filters (MFs) and subfilters (SFs) connected in parallel thereto. To reduce signal-distortion in the output, the stepsizes for coefficient adaptation in the MFs are controlled according to estimated signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the input signals. This SNR estimation is carried out using SF output signals. The stepsizes in the SFs are determined based on the ratio of the primary and the reference input signals to cope with a wider range of SNRs. This ratio is used as a rough estimate of the input signal SNR at the primary input. Computer simulation results using TV sound and human voice recorded in a carpeted room show that the proposed ANC reduces both residual noise and signal-distortion by as much as 20 dB compared to the conventional ANC. Evaluation in speech recognition with this ANC reveals that with a realistic TV sound level, as good recognition rate as in the noise-free condition is achieved.

This paper proposes a "structuring search space" (SSS) method aimed to accelerate recognition of large character sets. We divide the feature space of character categories into smaller clusters and derive the centroid of each cluster as a pivot. Given an input pattern, it is compared with all the pivots and only a limited number of clusters whose pivots have higher similarity (or smaller distance) to the input pattern are searched in, thus accelerating the recognition speed. This is based on the assumption that the search space is a distance space. We also consider two ways of candidate selection and finally combine them the method has been applied to a practical off-line Japanese character recognizer with the result that the coarse classification time is reduced to 56% and the whole recognition time is reduced to 52% while keeping its recognition rate as the original.

A robust microphone array for speech enhancement and noise suppression is studied in this paper. To overcome target signal cancellation problem of conventional beamformer caused by array imperfections or reverberation effects of acoustic enclosure, the proposed microphone array adopts an arbitrary model of channel transfer function (TF) relating microphone and speech source. Since the estimation of channel TF itself is often intractable, herein, transfer function ratio (TFR) is estimated instead and used to form a suboptimal beamformer. A robust TFR estimation method is proposed based on signal subspace analysis technique against stationary or slowly varying noise. Experiments using simulated signal and actual signal recorded in a real room illustrate that the proposed method has high performance in adverse environment.

In a CDMA non-linear interference canceller, a generated replica of an interference signal is multiplied by a positive number smaller than unity, which is called cancellation moderating factor (CMF), to prevent interference enhancement due to inaccurate replica subtraction. In this paper, two CMF controlling schemes applicable to a multistage parallel interference canceller with multi-antenna (spatial diversity) reception are proposed. They control CMF by using the mean square error of the complex channel gain or by using the ratio of the estimated power of each interference signal to remaining interference signals' power, in order to mitigate the replica subtraction error due to inaccurate channel estimation. The performance of the proposed schemes are evaluated by computer simulations assuming an asynchronous uplink single chip-rate variable spreading factor DS-CDMA system. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes with higher order diversity reception improve the bit error rate (BER) performance compared with a conventional scheme considering the tentative decision error or fixed CMF settings. Their performance improvement is by 0.1-0.9 dB in terms of the required Eb/N0 at an average BER of 10-5 over exponentially decaying 5-path Rayleigh distributed channels when the number of receiving antennas is 6.

This paper proposes a novel boundary scan test scheme for intellectual property (IP) core identification via watermarking. The core concept is embedding a watermark identification circuit (WIC) and a test circuit into the IP core at the behavior design level. The procedure depends on current IP-based design flow. This scheme can detect the identification of the IP provider without the need to examine the microphotograph after the chip has been manufactured and packaged. This scheme can successfully survive synthesis, placement, and routing and identify the IP core at various design levels. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach has the potential to solve the IP identification problem.

Recently, automatic speech recognition in a car has practical uses for applications like car-navigation and hands-free telephone dialers. For noise robustness, the current successes are based on the assumption that there is only a stationary cruising noise. Therefore, the recognition rate is greatly reduced when there is music or news coming from a radio or a CD player in the car. Since reference signals are available from such in-vehicle units, there is great hope that echo cancellers can eliminate the echo component in the observed noisy signals. However, previous research reported that the performance of an echo canceller is degraded in very noisy conditions. This implies it is desirable to combine the processes of echo cancellation and noise reduction. In this paper, we propose a system that uses echo cancellation and spectral subtraction simultaneously. A stationary noise component for spectral subtraction is estimated through the adaptation of an echo canceller. In our experiments, this system significantly reduced the errors in automatic speech recognition compared with the conventional combination of echo cancellation and spectral subtraction.

This letter proposes a novel nonlinear distortion for the unique identification of receiving room impulses in stereo acoustic echo cancellation when applying the frequency-domain adaptive filtering technique. This nonlinear distortion is effective in reducing the coherence between the two incoming audio channels and its influence on audio quality is inaudible.

We propose a modified Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with a view to improve gesture recognition using a moving camera. The conventional HMM is formulated so as to deal with only one feature candidate per frame. However, for a mobile robot, the background and the lighting conditions are always changing, and the feature extraction problem becomes difficult. It is almost impossible to extract a reliable feature vector under such conditions. In this paper, we define a new gesture recognition framework in which multiple candidates of feature vectors are generated with confidence measures and the HMM is extended to deal with these multiple feature vectors. Experimental results comparing the proposed system with feature vectors based on DCT and the method of selecting only one candidate feature point verifies the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

A series-fed beam-scanning array employing a MUlti-Stage Configured microstrip Antenna with Tunable reactance devices (MUSCAT) is proposed. The proposed antenna significantly expands the beam scanning range and achieves high efficiency. This antenna comprises unit element groups, whose elements are placed close to each other and employ tunable reactance devices. Analyses and experiments on the unit element groups show that their multi-stage configuration extends the phase shift range and increases the radiation efficiency, e.g., a 120phase shift and the radiation efficiency of more than 50% are achieved, when three stages are employed. The radiation pattern of the fabricated MUSCAT array antenna comprising eight unit element groups is measured. A beam scanning range of 27, which is greater than twice the beam scanning range of a non-multi-stage configuration, is achieved.

High-Speed High-Resolution Comparators are integral parts of very high-speed high-resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC). Parallel successive-approximation and flash ADCS can boost conversion rates while providing high resolution, provided that accurate and fast offset-cancelled comparators could be implemented. Moreover, accurate offset cancellation is needed in accurate gain stages of other types of high speed ADCs as well. This has never been easy and creates a bottle neck for high-speed high-resolution ADCs. The reason is that conventional offset cancellation methods, suffer either from inaccurate cancellation or from slow operation. Hence, either speed or accuracy is compromised. This is due to the trade off of gain (accuracy) for bandwidth (speed) in conventional methods. Here, we introduce a new offset cancellation method which satisfies the need for both high-speed and accurate offset cancellation simultaneously.

A feedforward-based active shielding technique for digital noise suppression is more preferred for its capability of reducing the noise on the entire area inside the guard ring. In order to compensate for the variation of substrate parameters, an automatic control scheme to tune the gain of the active shield circuit is proposed. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed system in reducing the digital noise regardless of circuit layout. Simulation results also show that noise suppression improvement from passive guard ring to active shield with tuning is 20 dB or one tenth while that from active shield without tuning to active shield with tuning is 12 dB.

Packet-recognition/code-acquisition (PR/CA) is one of the most important issues in packet communication systems. In a CDMA Unslotted ALOHA system, Multiple Access Interference (MAI) may bring about errors in PR/CA. The MAI mainly stems from already recognized packets and newly arriving packets under the execution of PR/CA. This characteristic of asynchronous transmission in CDMA U-ALOHA systems implies that only one or a few packets arrive at the receiver within a short interval of a execution. Furthermore, newly arriving packets are recognized and code-acquired by using a short preamble part. Consequently, the MAI from the packets under the execution of the PR/CA will be small. Focusing on that point, this paper proposes applying the IC scheme in order to suppress the MAI from the already recognized and code-acquired packets. A performance evaluation demonstrates that such an application is valid due to the small amount of MAI from the packets under the execution of PR/CA. In addition, we demonstrates that the scheme reduces false recognition rather than mis-recognition. Such a scheme improves the performance of not only PR/CA, but also the throughput.

This paper aims to improve the performance of the soft canceller followed by simplified minimum mean-square error (SC/S-MMSE) turbo receiver for multiple-input and multiple-output space-division multiplexing/orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-SDM/OFDM) transmission; it performs iterative parallel soft interference cancellation and MMSE filtering, and stream-wise soft-input and soft-output decoding. For this aim, we newly introduce two detection techniques: 1) serial interference cancellation, and 2) cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-assisted interference cancellation and MMSE filter tap computation. Various computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance enhancement obtained via the use of the two detection techniques. The computer simulation results show that this paper's proposed serial SC/S-MMSE turbo receiver with CRC achieves frame error rate (FER) performance gain over existing MIMO receivers (MMSE receiver, V-BLAST receiver, parallel SC/MMSE-matched filter (MF) turbo receiver, and parallel SC/S-MMSE turbo receiver) for QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM modulation while keeping the comparable complexity order.

As a blind linear-interference-canceller for DS-CDMA mobile communications, the orthogonal matched filter (OMF) minimizes the power of the output while maintaining constant power of the desired signal in the output. This paper studies the extension of OMF to an RAKE receiver (OMF-RAKE), which adaptively controls the steering vectors that determine the constraint. It also applies the QR-RLS algorithm to estimate the OMF-RAKE parameters and investigates a hardware implementation that employs a systolic array. Computer simulations show that OMF-RAKE with the QR-RLS algorithm and the systolic array structure can reduce the computational complexity to about a half that of the conventional RLS-type algorithm without degrading the BER.

This paper focuses on the fatigue characteristics of the single crystal silicon (SC-Si) cantilever in relation with the critical design of micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Development of MEMS actuators for optical communication usage is carried out successfully, for example, in optical switches and variable optical attenuators (VOA). In those devices, fatigue characteristics of the MEMS structure are crucial to its practical application. However, fatigue tests using real structures have not been carried out well. In this research, the fatigue life has been inspected at the actual device, under actual usage conditions for the first time. We obtained fracture rate λ from experimental results, and the value of Failure in Time (FIT) λ was about 0.3 FIT. This result indicates that these MEMS devices having enough reliability for practical usage.

In this paper, an adaptive microphone array system with a two-stage adaptation mode controller (AMC) is proposed for high-quality speech acquisition in real environments. The proposed system includes an adaptive array algorithm, a time-delay estimator and a newly proposed AMC. To ensure proper adaptation of the adaptive array algorithm, the proposed AMC uses not only temporal information, but also spatial information. The proposed AMC is constructed with two processing stages: an initialization stage and a running stage. In the initialization stage, a sound source localization technique is adopted, and a signal correlation characteristic is used in the running stage. For the adaptive array algorithm, a generalized sidelobe canceller with an adaptive blocking matrix is used. The proposed algorithm is implemented as a real-time man-machine interface module of a home-agent robot. Simulation results show 13 dB SINR improvement with the speaker sitting 2 m distance from the home-agent robot. The speech recognition rate is also enhanced by 32% when compared to the single channel acquisition system.