In the Semantic Web, metadata and ontology for representing semantics and conceptual relationships of information resources are essential factors. RDF and RDF Schema are the W3C standard models for describing metadata and ontology. In this paper, we focus on a result of analyzing available query patterns considering both RDF and RDF Schema. And we propose a structure to store and query using path information in graph models of RDF and RDF Schema. The proposed structure supports whole query patterns fairly. We can retrieve entities that are reached from a certain class, property, resource, or literal in RDF and RDF Schema without a loss of performance because of multiple joins with tables. And, through encoding schemes, we determine easily hierarchical relationships between classes or properties.

Decode-and-forward cooperative communications protocol (DFP) allows single-antenna users in wireless medium to obtain the powerful benefits of multi-antenna systems without physical antenna arrays. So far, only signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or square amplitude of path gain has been used to evaluate the reliability of received signals for relays to decide whether to forward the decoded data so as to prevent unsuccessful detection at the relays. In this paper, we propose using log-likelihood ratio (LLR) as an alternative to SNR in the conventional DFP. Closed-form BER expressions for different versions of DFP are also derived and verified by Monte-Carlo simulations. A variety of numerical results reveal the significant superiority of LLR-based DFP to SNR-based DFP regardless of threshold level and relay position under flat Rayleigh fading channel plus additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN).

This paper proposes the new radix-24 FFT algorithm and an efficient pipeline FFT architecture based on the algorithm for wideband OFDM systems. The proposed pipeline architecture has the same number of multipliers as that of the radix-22 algorithm. However, the multiplication complexity is reduced more than 30% by using the newly proposed CSD constant multipliers instead of the programmable multipliers. From the synthesis simulations of a standard 0.35 µm CMOS SAMSUNG process, the proposed CSD constant complex multiplier achieved a reduction of more than 60% of the power consumption/area when compared with the conventional programmable complex multiplier.

We propose a tool to manage several sorts of relationships among RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RDFS (RDF Schema). Our tool consists of three main functions: graphical editing of RDF descriptions, graphical editing of RDFS descriptions, and meta-model management facilities. In this paper, we focus on the meta-model management, a key concept which is defined as the appropriate management of the correspondence between a model and its meta-model: especially, the class and property in the meta-model, and the type of RDF resource and property in the model. The above facilities are implemented based on the plug-in system. We provide basic plug-in modules for checking the consistency of RDFS classes and properties. The prototyping tool, called MR3 (Meta-Model Management based on RDFs Revision Reflection), is implemented by Java language. Through an experiment using MR3, we show how MR3 contributes to the Semantic Web paradigm from the standpoint of RDFs description management.

The speech noise reduction system based on the frequency domain adaptive line enhancer using a windowed modified DFT (MDFT) pair is presented. The adaptive line enhancer (ALE) is effective for extracting sinusoidal signals blurred by a broadband noise. In addition, it utilizes only one microphone. Therefore, it is suitable for the realization of speech noise reduction in portable electronic devices. In the ALE, an input signal is generated by delaying a desired signal using the decorrelation parameter, which makes the noise in the input signal decorrelated with that in the desired one. In the present paper, we propose to set decorrelation parameters in the frequency domain and adjust them to optimal values according to the relationship between speech and noise. Such frequency domain decorrelation parameters enable the reduction of the computational complexity of the proposed system. Also, we introduce the window function into MDFT for suppressing spectral leakage. The performance of the proposed noise reduction system is examined through computer simulations.

We present a novel trigger-based language model adaptation method oriented to the transcription of meetings. In meetings, the topic is focused and consistent throughout the whole session, therefore keywords can be correlated over long distances. The trigger-based language model is designed to capture such long-distance dependencies, but it is typically constructed from a large corpus, which is usually too general to derive task-dependent trigger pairs. In the proposed method, we make use of the initial speech recognition results to extract task-dependent trigger pairs and to estimate their statistics. Moreover, we introduce a back-off scheme that also exploits the statistics estimated from a large corpus. The proposed model reduced the test-set perplexity considerably more than the typical trigger-based language model constructed from a large corpus, and achieved a remarkable perplexity reduction of 44% over the baseline when combined with an adapted trigram language model. In addition, a reduction in word error rate was obtained when using the proposed language model to rescore word graphs.

This paper demonstrates a feedforward active substrate noise cancelling technique using a power supply di/dt detector. Since the substrate is usually tied with the ground line with a low impedance, the substrate noise is closely related to the ground bounce which is proportional to the di/dt when inductance is dominant on the ground line impedance. Our active cancelling detects the di/dt of the power supply, and injects an anti-phase current into the substrate so that the di/dt-proportional substrate noise is cancelled out. Our first trial shows that 34% substrate noise reduction is achieved on our test circuit, and the theoretical analysis shows that the optimized canceller design will enhance the substrate noise suppression ratio up to 56%.

In the move toward higher clock rates and advanced process technologies, designers of the latest electronic products are finding increasing silicon failure with respect to noise. On the other hand, the minimum dimension of patterns on LSIs is much smaller than the wavelength of exposure, making it difficult for LSI manufacturers to obtain high yield. In this paper, we present a solution to reduce power-supply noise in LSI microchips. The proposed design methodology also considers design for manufacturability (DFM) at the same time as power integrity. The method was successfully applied to the design of a system-on-chip (SOC), achieving a 13.1-13.2% noise reduction in power-supply voltage and uniformity of pattern density for chemical mechanical polishing (CMP).

This paper presents a standard cell-based frequency synthesizer with dynamic frequency counting (DFC) for multiplying input reference frequency by N times. The dynamic frequency counting loop uses variable time period to estimate and tune the frequency of digitally-controlled oscillator (DCO) which enhances frequency detection's resolution and loop stability. Two ripple counters serve as frequency estimator. Conventional phase-frequency detector (PFD) thus is replaced with a digital arithmetic comparator to yield a divider-free circuit structure. Additionally, a 15 bits DCO with the least significant bit (LSB) resolution 1.55 ps is designed by using the gate capacitance difference of 2-input NOR gate in fine-tuning stage. A modified incremental data weighted averaging (IDWA) circuit is also designed to achieve improved linearity of DCO by dynamic element matching (DEM) skill. Based on the proposed standard cell-based frequency synthesizer, a test chip is designed and verified on 0.35-µm complementary metal oxide silicon (CMOS) process, and has a frequency range of (18-214) MHz at 3.3 V with peak-to-peak (Pk-Pk) jitter of less than 70 ps at 192 MHz/3.3 V.

We developed material and process technologies concerned to DDF, which is formed on MgO surface around the inter-pixel gap to prevent vertical crosstalk discharge in stripe rib structure. First we tried with thin film deposition and lift-off patterning to find Al2O3 and TiO2 are both available for DDF material. Next we tried with thick film printing in favor of mass productivity for large size PDPs. In case DDF included PbO glass, we met serious hardship in generating discharge. The problem was perfectly solved by having thick film DDF composed of 100 nm sized Al2O3 grains without glass component. Its γi was about 1/5 that of MgO, suggesting that the thick film DDF is almost compatible with thin film Al2O3 in electron emission characteristics. Such very small grain size contributes to DDF transparency, which is excellently high. In addition to it, such DDF is equipped with cushioning effect to prevent dot defects caused by rib breakage. Furthermore the DDF functions as getter during panel exhaustion to bring deep blue color by promoting deoxidization of blue phosphor provided that its volume is small enough. Transparent DDF may be rather better than black one with respect to bright room contrast ratio, not to mention to avoiding terrible sparking discharge. Thus material and process technologies for DDF have been almost fixed in success.

This paper presents a low-complexity equalization for M-ary biorthogonal keying based direct sequence ultra wideband (MBOK DS-UWB) systems. We focus on a Viterbi equalizer, which is based on maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE). To reduce the computational complexity of MLSE-based equalizer, we use two strategies. One is the use of delayed-decision feedback sequence estimation (DDFSE), which is a hybrid estimation between MLSE and decision feedback estimation (DFE). And the other is the truncation of state transition in MLSE by considering MBOK pulse mapping. The reduced complexity sequence estimation is named as reduced state (RS)-DDFSE. By the use of RS-DDFSE, the complexity of Viterbi equalizer for MBOK DS-UWB is significantly reduced, by comparison with that of MLSE. The performance of RS-DDFSE based equalizer is evaluated on multipath fading channel models provided by IEEE802.15.3a. An analysis on trellis diagram of RS-DDFSE and simulation results show that the impact on error rate performance generated by the complexity lower is slight.

This paper proposes a new modified radix-24 FFT algorithm and an efficient pipeline FFT architecture based on this algorithm for OFDM systems. This pipeline FFT architecture has the same number of multipliers as that of the radix-22 algorithm. However, the multiplication complexity could be reduced by more than 30% by replacing one half of the programmable multipliers by the newly proposed CSD constant multipliers. From the synthesis simulations of a standard 0.35 µm CMOS SAMSUNG process, a proposed CSD constant complex multiplier achieved more than 60% area efficiency when compared to the conventional programmable complex multiplier. This promoted efficiency could be used to the design of a long length FFT processor in wireless OFDM applications, which needs more power and area efficiency.

This paper describes a method of extending the signal frequency bandwidth while increasing the stability of a CMOS transimpedance amplifier (TIA). The TIA consists of three inverting amplifiers in a series, and a high-pass filter plus a non-inverting amplifier that are connected to the last two inverting amplifiers stated above in parallel. The TIA is fabricated using a 0.35 µm CMOS process and realizes stable conversion of 60-dBΩ from the photodiode current to the output voltage with more than 500 MHz of signal frequency bandwidth and 60 mW of power consumption from a 3.3 V supply voltage.

This paper describes 40-Gbit/s operation of 1.55-µm electro-absorption (EA) modulators applicable to compact and low-cost transmitters for very-short-reach (VSR) applications. We start by identifying factors that make a multi-quantum-well (MQW) design suitable for high levels of output power and for uncooled operation. From the basic experimental results, we determine that a valence-band discontinuity ΔEv at around 80 meV is optimal in terms of combining high-output-power operation and a good extinction ratio. We then apply the above findings in an InGaAsP-MQW EA modulator that is monolithically integrated with a distributed feedback (DFB) laser, and thus obtain operation with high output power (+1.2 dBm), a high ER (10.5 dB), and a low power penalty (0.4 dB after transmission over 2.6 km of single-mode-fiber). These results confirm the applicability of our EA modulator/DFB laser to VSR applications. After that, we theoretically demonstrate the superiority in terms of ER characteristics of the InGaAlAs-MQW over the conventional InGaAsP-MQW. InGaAlAs-MQW EA modulators are fabricated and demonstrate, for the first time, 40-Gbit/s operation over a wide temperature range (0 to 85).

A 1.3-µm InGaAlAs-MQW RWG DFB laser with low-resistance notch-free grating during operations of up to 12.5 Gb/s at 115 was fully investigated. This performance was achieved by combining the high differential gain of the InGaAlAs MQW active layer, high characteristic temperature of RWG structures, and low-resistance notch-free grating. In addition, transmission over 30-km was achieved with the laser running at up to 115. These results confirm the suitability of this type of laser for use as a cost-effective light source in 10-Gb/s datacom applications.

This paper presents high-speed low-power small-area accumulator designs to be used in DDFS systems. To reduce the Numerically Controlled Oscillator (NCO) design complexity and size, only the most significant bits of the accumulator drive the phase to amplitude mapping block. Those bits need to be updated on every sampling clock, while the least significant bits of the accumulator are not visible to the rest of the DDFS design and can be updated less frequently, which motivated the development of new accumulator designs. Without performance degradation, the proposed designs relieve constraints in implementation, and hence they can be employed for GHz-range DDFS, reduce power consumption up to 82% compared to standard accumulator design, and minimize chip area. For further power reduction, the proposed designs place the phase modulation adder at the front of the accumulator.

The supertask approach was proposed by Moir and Ramamthy as a means of supporting non-migratory tasks in Pfair-scheduled systems. In this approach, tasks bound to the same processor are combined into a single server task, called a supertask, which is scheduled as an ordinary Pfair task. When a supertask is scheduled, one of its component tasks is selected for execution. In previous work, Holman et al. showed that component-task deadlines can be guaranteed by inflating each supertask's utilization. In addition, their experimental results showed that the required inflation factors should be small in practice. Consequently, the average inflation produced by their rules is much greater than that actually required by the supertasks. In this paper, we first propose a notion of Transient Behavior Prediction for supertasks, which predicts the latest possible finish time of subtasks that belong to supertasks. On the basis of the notion, we present an efficient schedulability algorithm for Pfair supertasks in which the deadlines of all component tasks can be guaranteed. In addition, we propose a task merging process which combines the unschedulable supertasks with some Pfair tasks; hence, a newly supertask can be scheduled in the system. Finally, we propose the new reweighting functions that can be used when the previous two methods fail. Our reweighting functions produce smaller inflation factor than the previous work does. To demonstrate the efficacy of the supertasking approach, we present the experimental evaluations of our algorithm, which decreases substantially a number of reweights and the size of inflation when there are many supertasks in the Pfair-scheduled systems.

This study was designed to evaluate localized muscular fatigue induced during mouse operation in a VDT task. Ten male undergraduates from 19 to 23 years old participated in the experiment. The subject performed a pointing task with a PC mouse for about 4 hours. The EMG measurements and psychological rating of fatigue were conducted before the experimental task and after each 30-minutes block during the experimental task. The changes in the Mean Power Frequency (MPF) and Percentage Maximum Voluntary Contraction (%MVC)-shift for the constant cumulative probability in the Amplitude Probability Distribution Function (APDF) with time were explored. The correspondence between the index (MPF or APDF) and the subjective rating of localized muscular fatigue was also examined. The performance was nearly constant across all blocks. The psychological rating of fatigue tended to increase with time. The MPF tended to increase with time, although the main effect of block (time) was not statistically significant. The %MVC-shift tended to increase with time. The correspondence with the perceived sensation of localized muscular fatigue was higher when using the %MVC-shift than when using the MPF. Based on the results, the effectiveness of the indexes used for evaluating localized muscular fatigue was discussed. The %MVC-shift obtained from the APDF was found to be a sensitive index of localized muscular fatigue and corresponded well with the subjective rating of localized muscular fatigue.

This paper analyzes the immediate cause of the ICI in OFDM systems due to the Doppler spread and carrier frequency offset. As shown, ICI occurs because of the using DFT (FFT) and IDFT (IFFT) for signal conversion from time domain into frequency domain, and vice versa, when the sampled signal has limited duration. Proposed method refines the spectral density function of subcarriers, when applied in the transmission side, and improves the characteristics of the DFT as a digital filter, when applied in the receiver side. Simulation includes, working under the same conditions, models of conventional OFDM, PCC-OFDM and proposed method. Results of the simulation show that proposed method provides up to the 10 times less BER than PCC-OFDM and up to the 100 times less BER than conventional OFDM, which allows using of the OFDM in the mobile communication for vehicle speed up to the 500 km/hr.

Electron emission from PVDF (polyvinylidene-fluoride) ferroelectric substance (thickness: 40 µm) by polarization inversion was realized experimentally with using about 1nm thick C-Au-S semiconductive layer on the surface of a tooth-type electrode. After polarization of the PVDF, a negative impulse voltage (-2400 V with 1-10 ns of wave front and 10-100 ms of wave tail) with a voltage higher than a coercive voltage was applied to the flat-type electrode on the reverse side of the PVDF surface in a vacuum. Then the emitted electrons were detected with using a probe in front of the tooth-type electrode. The detected charge was 6.110-12C.