In the design of an active matrix LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), the ratio of the pixel voltage to the video voltage (RPV) of a pixel is an important factor of the performance of the LCD, since the pixel voltage of each pixel determines its transmitted luminance. Thus, of practical importance is the issue of how to maintain the admissible allowance of RPV of each pixel within a prescribed narrow range. This constraint on RPV is analyzed in terms of circuit parameters associated with the sampling switch and sampling pulse of a column driver in the LCD. With the use of a minimal set of such circuit parameters, a design procedure is described dedicatedly for the sampling switch, which intends to seek an optimal sampling switch as well as an optimal sampling pulse waveform. A number of experimental results show that an optimal sampling switch attained by the proposed procedure yields a source driver with almost 18% less power consumption than the one by manual design. Moreover, the percentage of the RPVs within 1001% among 270 cases of fluctuations is 88.1% for the optimal sampling switch, but 46.7% for the manual design.

An InGaP/GaAs HBT MMIC amplifier with an active balun has been developed for ultra-wideband radio systems (UWB). The MMIC was designed to drive a self-complementary antenna with a balanced mode, where an input impedance is 60π ohms. The MMIC consists of a common mode negative feed back ultra-wideband amplifier circuit, an active balun circuit, and a high impedance drive circuit. The developed amplifier provides a 3-dB gain roll-off bandwidth from 2.4 GHz to 10.8 GHz with a 14.1-dB linear power gain, and a linear power output up to 3 dBm. The developed amplifier with the active balun provides a 3-dB gain roll-off bandwidth from 2.3 GHz to 8.6 GHz with a 21.3-dB power gain in a balanced mode, and a linear power output up to 0.6 dBm. The measured total group delay is less than 32 psec. Output signals at the balanced output terminals of the MMIC were kept inverted with a steep pulse shape for an impulse input signal of 57-psec pulse width.

In situ observation of the adsorption process and reduction behavior of hemoglobin adsorbed on a bare glass surface was studied using slab optical waveguide (SOWG) spectroscopy. The peak position of the absorption band of hemoglobin adsorbed on the glass surface was almost the same as that of hemoglobin in solution. This result agrees with results previously reported by our group. The adsorbed hemoglobin molecules were also reduced by sodium dithionite solution. The adsorbed hemoglobin molecules still maintained their function in this experimental condition.

In this article, we considered the asymptotic expectations of the prediction error and the fitting error of a regression model, in which the component functions are chosen from a finite set of orthogonal functions. Under the least squares estimation, we showed that the asymptotic bias in estimating the prediction error based on the fitting error includes the true number of components, which is essentially unknown in practical applications. On the other hand, under a suitable shrinkage method, we showed that an asymptotically unbiased estimate of the prediction error is given by the fitting error plus a known term except the noise variance.

In the design of an active integrated antenna, it is necessary to analyze problems such as unwanted emissions or mutual coupling between elements. In this paper, we clarify the problems in implementing S-parameters for an FDTD analysis. Cubic spline interpolation is suitable for the construction of the S-parameter data. The implementation methods of terminal resistors and vias are examined. The proposed FDTD analysis becomes stable after correcting the discrete time lag in the formation of the incident wave. The validity of the proposed method is verified in its application to the low pass filter and the frequency tunable band pass filter.

This paper presents a family of rate-one quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QO-STBCs) for any number of transmit antennas. Full diversity of the proposed QO-STBCs is achieved via the use of constellation rotation. When the number of transmit antennas is even, these codes are delay "optimal." This property along with the quasi-orthogonality one allows the codes to have low decoding complexity. Besides, by applying lookup tables into the detection methods presented in [1] and generalizing them, two low-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) decoders for the proposed QO-STBCs and for other existing QO-STBCs, called PMLD and QMLD, are obtained. Simulation results are provided to verify the bit error rate (BER) performances and complexities of both the proposed QO-STBCs and the proposed decoders.

We propose a shot reduction technique of character projection (CP) Electron Beam Direct Writing (EBDW) using combined cell stencil (CCS) or the advanced process technology. CP EBDW is expected both to reduce mask costs and to realize quick turn around time. One of major issue of the conventional CP EBDW, however, is a throughput of lithography. The throughput is determined by numbers of shots, which are proportional to numbers of cell instances in LSIs. The conventional shot reduction techniques focus on optimization of cell stencil extraction, without any modifications on designed LSI mask patterns. The proposed technique employs the proposed combined cell stencil, with proposed modified design flow, for further shot reduction. We demonstrate 22.4% shot reduction within 4.3% area increase for a microprocessor and 28.6% shot reduction for IWLS benchmarks compared with the conventional technique.

This paper presents a scheme for accurately detecting the number of incident waves arriving at array antennas. The array antenna and MIMO techniques are developing as 4th generation mobile communication systems and wireless LAN technologies, and the accurate estimation of the propagation environment is becoming more important. This paper emphasizes the accurate detection of the number of incident waves; one of the important characteristics in multidirectional communication. There are some recent papers on accurate detection but they have problems of estimation accuracy or computational cost in severe environment like low SNR, small number of snapshots or waves with close angles. Hence, AIC and MDL methods based on statistics and information theory are still often used. In this paper, we propose an accurate estimation method of the number of arrival signals using the orthogonality of subspaces derived from preliminary estimation of signal subspace. The proposed method accurately estimates the number of signals also in severe environments where AIC and MDL methods can hardly estimate. We evaluate the performance of these methods through some computer simulation and experiments in anechoic chamber.

The purpose of this study is to maintain efficient backup routes for reconstructing overlay trees quickly. In most conventional methods, after a node leaves the trees, its child nodes start searching for the new parents. In this reactive approach, it takes a lot of time to find a new parent. In this paper, we propose a proactive approach to finding a next parent as the backup route node over the overlay tree before the current parent leaves. A proactive approach allows a node to find its new parent node immediately and switch to the backup route node smoothly. In our proposal, the structure of the overlay tree using a redundant degree can decide a backup route node without so much overhead. Simulations demonstrate our proactive approach can recover from node departures 2 times faster than reactive approaches, and can construct overlay trees with lower overheads than another proactive method. Additionally we carried out experiments over actual networks and their results support the effectiveness of our approach. We confirmed that our proposal achieved better streaming quality than conventional approaches.

Digital watermarking techniques were developed for regular raster data such as images or video, but little research addressed irregular vector data, such as the shapes of cartoons or elevation contours. Vector graphic images, such as those in SVG format, are popular on the WWW, and provide the advantage of permitting affine transformations without aliasing. The creation of cartoon images or the acquisition of GIS geometry data involves much work, so the copyright and ownership of vector data must be protected. Common components in vector graphic images are polygonal lines or polylines. This work develops a normal multi-resolution representation of a polygonal line, and embeds a copyright notice or serial number in this representation. Previous studies on polyline watermarking have the non-transparent problems, including self-intersection of line segments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking approach is perceptually transparent, and solves the self-intersection problem. It is also resistant to similarity transformation, traversal reordering, point insertion/deletion and random noise attacks.

We give the necessary and sufficient conditions for a one-dimensional discrete-time autonomous binary cellular neural networks to be stable in the case of fixed boundary. The results are complete generalization of our previous one [16] in which the symmetrical connections were assumed. The conditions are compared with some stability conditions so far known.

We succeeded to fabricate p-n heterojunction and bulkheterojunction small-molecular-weight organic thin-film solar cells by combination of dry (p-type = zinc phthalocyanine, n-type = fullerene) and wet (p-type = tetra-tert-butyl zinc phthalocyanine, n-type = [6,6]-phenyl-C61-buteric acid methyl ester) processes. Relationship between morphologies of semiconducting layers and photovoltaic properties was investigated. The p-n heterojunction organic thin-film solar cells based on dry process, where surface roughness was approximately 2 nm, showed the highest power conversion efficiency of 1.3% in this paper.

Writing/non-writing of composite conducting polymer (polypyrrole/poly(3-hexylthiophene)) have been investigated using composite conducting polymer. Writing has been made in two processes: pretreatment and dropping ethanol. The unipolar signal (10 Vp-p, 10 Hz+5 VDC) has worked as a circuit signal. The conductivity at the path of the composite conducting polymer network has depended on the passed signal. It was confirmed using the Y-type and H-type composite conducting polymer. It has been confirmed that rewriting of composite conducting polymer is possible to develop a memory or a neural network device of conducting polymer.

We investigate selection transmit multi-input multi-output systems where only a single transmit antenna is selected for the transmission and multiple receive antennas are employed for maximal ratio combining. Antenna selection is performed by a generalized selection criterion based on the ordinal number of the strength of the received signal-to-noise ratio.

This letter presents an extended Pawula F-function for computing the error rate of generalized M-ary phase shift keying (MPSK) system in the presence of phase error, quadrature error, and I-Q gain mismatch over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels. The extended Pawula F-function conditioned on an instantaneous fading carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) is derived in the form of the Craig representation.

Adaptive voltage management (AVM) scheme is proposed for worst-caseless lower voltage SoC design. The AVM scheme detects the temperature accurately by using two oscillators with different temperature characteristics, and sets supply voltage most suitable with a table look-up method corresponding to the process variation. Also, the AVM can supply the stable voltage with a local shift type regulator even at lower voltage. Thereby, this supply-voltage control system considering PVT variations can control the internal voltage corresponding to process and temperature variations and can realize a wide-operating-margin, DFM function for low voltage SoC. The experimental chip is fabricated on a 90 nm CMOS process, and it was confirmed that the proposed architecture controls the voltage accurately and has a wide operating margin at a lower voltage.

In this paper, an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) double-directional channel sounding measurement and spatio-temporal analysis of UWB propagation based on the clusterization approach were reported. After separating the propagation paths and diffuse components both on the transmitter (Tx) antenna and receiver (Rx) antenna positions, the propagation paths both on Tx and Rx positions were observed for clusters separately, while coupling the clusters between Tx and Rx position based on similar time of arrivals, and ray tracing by utilizing high temporal and spatial resolution, respectively. The relation between direction of departure and direction of arrival will then be investigated. For cluster properties, parameters of model characteristics are discussed and compared to other earlier works.

Several active queue management schemes have been proposed to provide fairness among flows. In particular, BLACK has the best performance among them with respect to simplicity and fairness. However, it can provoke the UDP throughput to fluctuate and worsen the fairness. In this paper, we propose a new active queue management scheme to modify BLACK for better performance. Simulation results illustrate that the performance of our proposal is better than that of BLACK in terms of the fairness and the smooth UDP throughput.

Pneumatic pressure, which is easy enough to be handled in comparison with hydraulic pressure and is endowed with high safety, is available for a power source of a robot arm to be utilized in concert with human beings to do various types of work. But pneumatic pressure is so low in comparison with hydraulic pressure that an air cylinder having a diameter long enough and stroke wide enough is required to obtain great output power. In this study, therefore, the investigation was made with layout of air cylinders and transmission mechanisms of the motion power directed toward the driving joints to be followed by development of a new humanoid robot arm with seven degrees of freedom in which air cylinders are compactly incorporated. To be concrete with this, contrivance was made with an endoskeleton structure allowing almost all of the structure materials of the individual arm joints to be shared by the air cylinder with incorporation of the air cylinder in the axes of the upper arm joint and forearm joints by paying attention to the fact that the cylinder itself has high strength. The evaluation experiments driving the robot arm referred to above were conducted by means of I-PD control. The results suggested that the mechanism of the robot with seven degrees of freedom having pneumatic actuators proposed in this study is useful as the humanoid robot arm. The quick and accurate motions were accomplished with I-PD control which is relatively easy to be dealt with but not suitable for non-linear actuator system.

An analytic approach for the generation of non-periodic and periodic complementary sequences is advanced for lengths that are powers of two. The periodic complementary sequences can be obtained using symmetric or anti-symmetric extensions. The properties of their autocorrelation functions are studied. The non-periodic complementary sequences are the intersection between anti-symmetric and symmetric periodic sequences. These non-periodic and periodic complementary sequences are identified to be special cases of non-periodic and periodic (or cyclic) orthogonal wavelet transforms. This relationship leads to the novel approach.