We have developed an easily-assembled optical coupling device that consists of two multifiber array connectors and a single-mode planar waveguide chip whose ends are passively positioned in novel plastic plug components compatible with the multi-fiber array connectors. The assembled 18 splitter devices are connected and disconnected easily and exhibit excellent levels of optical performance.

In this paper, we discuss noise reduction approaches to improving range images using a nonlinear 2D Kalman filter. First, we propose the nonlinear 2D Kalman filter, which can reduce noise in the range image using an estimated edge vector and a nonlinear function that does not distort sharp edges. Second, we evaluate reduction of the additive noise in a test range image using the mean square error (MSE). Third, we discuss the detection rate and the number of false detections in the estimated range image. Fourth, a simulation example demonstrating the performance of the proposed 2D Kalman filter for a real range image having abrupt changes is presented. Finally, simulation results are presented which show that the estimated image of the nonlinear 2D Kalman filter is effective in reducing the amount of noise, while causing minimal smoothing of the abrupt changes.

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.

Services that operate normally, independently, will behave differently when simultaneously initiated with another service. This behavior is called a feature interaction. A feature interaction, where the next state can not be determined uniquely for one event, is called a non-determinacy feature interaction. To detect the interaction, judgment has to be made as to whether the state, where the non-determinacy occurs, is reachable from the initial state or not. For the judgment, many methods have been proposed. But, still now, it is required huge computation time to judge the reachability. This paper proposes a new method to test the reachability using a little knowledge elicited beforehand. By using the proposed method computation time was reduced drastically. Besides, by applying the proposed method to a benchmark, the proposed method was confirmed to be effective and reasonable.

The main objective of vehicle suspensions is to improve ride comfort and road holding ability. Though passive suspensions consist of spring and damper, active suspensions adopt an actuator in addition to passive suspensions. In this paper, a quarter car model with an asymmetric hydraulic actuator is used. Moreover, the damping coefficient of the damper, which is changed according to the actuator velocity, is considered. The LPV (Linear Parameter Varying) model is obtained by applying feedback linearization technique. Next, a gain-scheduled controller, based on LQ regulator with different weighting factor, is designed according to the actuator velocity and the stability of the proposed controller is also proved. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is shown by numerical simulations.

In this paper, we study loop pipeline scheduling problem under given resource assignment (operation to functional unit assignments and data to register assignments), which is one of the key tasks in data-path synthesis based on the assignment solution space exploration. We show an approach using a precedence constraint graph with parametric disjunctive arcs generated from the specified assignment information, and derive a scheduling method using branch-and-bound exploration of the parameter space. As an application of the proposed scheduling method, it is incorporated with Simulated-Annealing (SA) based exploration of assignment solution space, and it is demonstrated that data-paths of the fifth-order elliptic wave filter are successfully synthesized.

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.

We fabricated ramp-edge junctions with barriers by modifying surface and integrating ground-planes. The fabricated junctions had current-voltage characteristics consistent with the resistive shunted-junction model. We also obtained a 1-sigma spread in the critical current of 7.9% for 100 junctions at 4.2 K. The ground-plane reduced the sheet inductance of a stripline by a factor of 3. The quality of the ground-plane was improved by using an anneal in oxygen atmosphere after fabrication. The sheet inductance of a counter-electrode with a ground-plane was 1.0 pH per square at 4.2 K.

Iterative schemes for demodulating M-ary orthogonal signaling formats in direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems are proposed and compared with the standard noncoherent matched filter receiver. Interference cancellation, i.e., (approximative) removal of the multiple access interference (MAI) by means of subtraction is studied. The considered system is similar to the uplink (reverse link) of an IS-95 system. Hence, the received signals from the concurrent users are asynchronous, and no pilot signals are available for channel estimation. A decision-directed algorithm is proposed for estimating the time-varying complex channel gains of a multipath channel. The receivers are evaluated on Rayleigh-fading channels and are shown to provide large capacity gains compared with the conventional receiver.

The measurement sensitivity of microwave surface resistance, Rs, of high temperature superconducting (HTS) thin films using half-wavelength microstrip resonator with copper and HTS ground plane is analyzed for fundamental and higher order modes of the resonator. The estimated sensitivity of Rs-measurement is at least an order of magnitude greater at fundamental resonant frequency compared to when measured using higher order harmonic modes.

We report our studies on the spectral sensitivity of superconducting NbN thin-film single-photon detectors (SPD's) capable of GHz counting rates of visible and near-infrared photons. In particular, it has been shown that a NbN SPD is sensitive to 1.55-µm wavelength radiation and can be used for quantum communication. Our SPD's exhibit experimentally measured intrinsic quantum efficiencies from 20% at 800 nm up to 1% at 1.55-µm wavelength. The devices demonstrate picosecond response time (<100 ps, limited by our readout system) and negligibly low dark counts. Spectral dependencies of photon counting of continuous-wave, 0.4-µm to 3.5-µm radiation, and 0.63-µm, 1.33-µm, and 1.55-µm laser-pulsed radiations are presented for the single-stripe-type and meander-type devices.

In this paper, we propose a turbo equalization scheme for GMSK signals with frequency detection. Although the channel is AWGN, there exists severe ISI (Inter-Symbol Interference) in the received signal due to the premodulation Gaussian baseband filter in the transmitter as well as the narrowband IF filter in the receiver. We regard these two filters as a real number inner convolutional encoder. The ISI equalizer for this inner encoder and the outer decoder for a RSC (Recursive Systematic Convolutional) code, are connected through a random (de-)interleaver. These inner and outer decoders generate the reliability values in terms of LLR (Log Likelihood Ratio), using MAP or SOVA algorithm with SISO (soft input and soft output). Moreover iterative decoding with the limitation of LLR values are employed between two decoders to achieve a turbo equalization for GMSK frequency detection. Through computer simulations, the proposed system shows the BER=10-5 at Eb/N0=8.8 dB, when we take BT=0.6 (IF filter bandwidth multiplied by symbol duration) with the iteration number of 3. This means 3.1 dB improvement compared with the conventional scheme where the inner ISI equalizer is concatenated with the outer hard decision Viterbi decoder.

As a new type of a linear decorrelating receiver, the Pseudo-Decorrelator was presented for asynchronous code division multiple access systems in [6]. In this paper, the concept of the Pseudo-Decorrelator is extended to derive a suboptimal receiver for WCDMA uplink systems in a Rayleigh fading environment. Starting with the analysis of the multiple access components of the decision statistics, a non-square cross-correlation matrix for each bit is obtained. This cross-correlation matrix is then inverted and the inverted matrix is applied to the decision statistics obtained from a conventional receiver. Simulation results are presented for K-user systems over a Rayleigh fading channel. The effects of the synchronization errors, such as time delays and carrier phase errors, are also examined through simulations in this paper.

This paper presents some new protocols for (M+1)st-price auction, a style of auction in which the highest M bidders win and pay a uniform price, determined by the (M+1)st price. A set of distributed servers collaborates to resolve the (M+1)st price without revealing any information in terms of bids including the winners' bids. A new trick to jointly and securely compute the highest value as a degree of distributed polynomials is introduced. The building block requires just one round for bidders to cast bids and one round for auctioneers to determine the winners.

This paper presents an improved spectral subtraction method for speech enhancement. A new noise estimation method is derived in which the noise is assumed to be white. By using the property that a white noise spectrum is flat, high frequency components of a noisy speech spectrum are averaged and the standard deviation of the noise is estimated. This operation is performed in the analysis segment, thus the spectral subtraction method combined with the new noise estimation method does not need non-speech segments and as a result can adapt to non-stationary noise conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed spectral subtraction method is confirmed by experiments.

An approach to the enhancement of speech signals corrupted by additive colored noise is proposed and the system architecture to implement the proposed idea in real-time communication is introduced in this paper. A combination of a bandpass FIR filtering technique with wiener filtering is used to improve the SNR for speech signals. The average SNR improvement (between input and output SNR) is 22.48 dB. The additive noises are the sound from a turbo prop aircraft. The system, which shows excellent performance, is designed based on a 16 bits fixed point DSP (ADSP-2181) from Analog Devices. Experiment results demonstrate that the FIR filter leads to a significant gain in SNR, thus visibly improvement for the quality and the intelligibility of the speech.

We are developing a superconducting analog-to-digital converter (ADC) as a readout for high-resolution X-ray detectors based on a superconducting tunnel junction (STJ). The ADC has a sensitive front end which consists of a DC superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). A signal current is digitized by this front end without using any preamplifiers. A single-flux-quantum (SFQ) pulse train whose frequency is proportional to the input current is launched by the front end, and integrated by a digital counter. The counter has a 10-bit resolution, and the integrated value is scanned and transferred to room-temperature processing modules with a frequency of 40 MHz. In this paper, the design of the ADC is described, and the preliminary results of the ADC performance test are shown. The performance of the STJ accompanied by the ADC is discussed in terms of the X-ray energy resolution.

This paper describes the circuit design procedure of the zero-current soft switching (ZCS) high frequency inverter for induction heating uses. Its output power can be regulated from its maximum to minimum by the instantaneous current vector control scheme using phase shift control between switching units at a fixed frequency. In addition, it can be safely operated since no extraordinarily high voltage or current results even at a short-circuit period at the load. Also, its overall efficiency reaches 90%. The detailed load and frequency characteristics of the inverter are elucidated by the computer-aided simulation. Then, the circuit design procedure is presented, and practical numerical examples are obtained according to this procedure which reveal that the inverter is highly practical and the design procedure is effective. The trial inverters yielding 2 kW or 4 kW were actually prepared. The observed values of the voltages and currents of the inverters were found to be in good agreement with the calculated ones. These facts certificate the validity of the proposed design procedure.

This paper presents novel flooding schemes for wireless mobile ad hoc networks. Clustering of nodes is assumed as a basic ad hoc network structure. GWF (Gateway Forwarding) and SGF (Selected Gateway Forwarding) are presented based on clustering. A new protocol, termed FGS (Flooding Gateway Selection) protocol, between a cluster head and its gateways to realize SGF is presented. It is shown that SGF significantly improves the packet delivery performance in ad hoc networks by reducing flooding traffic.