Many devices are expected to be networked with wireless appliances such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and wireless sensors, and the number of such appliances will greatly exceed the number of PCs and mobile telephones. This may lead to an essential change in the network architecture. This paper proposes a new network architecture called the appliance defined ubiquitous network (ADUN), in which wireless appliances will be networked without network protocol standards. Radio space information rather than individual appliance signals is carried over the ADUN in the form of a stream with strong privacy/security control. It should be noted that this is different from the architectural principles of the Internet. We discuss a network-appliance interface that is sustainable over a long period, and show that the ADUN overhead will be within the scope of the broadband network in the near future.

A complementary cross-coupled differential Colpitts voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is reported. The combination of gm-boosting and the complementary transistors allows record low power integrated VCO implementation. The proposed VCO and the corresponding parallel quadrature VCO (P-QVCO) are implemented using 0.25-µm CMOS technology for 1.8 GHz operation. Measurements for the VCO and P-QVCO show phase noise of -116.8 and -117.7 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, while dissipating only 0.4 and 1.1 mA from a 0.9-V supply, respectively.

A metallic waveguide with dual in-line dielectric rods can propagate electromagnetic waves more than two times higher than the cutoff frequency region and without higher modes [1]. If the straight portion in the waveguide has even symmetry, then dielectric rods are only required in the bent portion. Connection losses between the portions are improved by adding other dielectric rods.

Design automation of LCD driver circuits is not sophisticatedly established. Display fineness of an LCD panel depends on a performance metric, ratio of pixel voltage to video voltage (RPV). However, there are several other important metrics, such as area, and the best circuit cannot be decided uniquely. This paper proposes a design automation technique for a LCD column driver to provide several circuit design results with different performance so that designers can select an appropriate design among them. The proposed technique is evaluated with an actual design data, and experimental results show that the proposed method successfully performs technology migration by transistor sizing. Also, the proposed technique is experimentally verified from points of solution quality and computational time.

The power reduction of display devices has become an important issue for extending battery life and running time when they are used in digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) mobile phones. DMB mobile phones generally use 16-bit data per pixel to reduce power consumption even though a liquid crystal display (LCD) graphic controller can support 16-, 18-, and 24-bit data per pixel. Also, the total transmission time of 16-bit data per pixel is only half that for 18- and 24-bit data per pixel. Decoded 24-bit image data in the frame memory of a DMB decoder are asymmetrically truncated to 16-bit image data. This results in a lack of smoothness such as blocking effects and/or pseudo edge artifacts. To solve these problems, the author proposes and implements a new asymmetric pixel data truncation error compensation algorithm using 1-bit least significant bit (LSB) data expansion with correlated color information for the purpose of ensuring smoothness. In the experimental results, the proposed algorithm is able to correct various artifacts.

We demonstrate a novel display structure for color electronic paper for the first time. Fully transparent amorphous oxide TFT array is directly deposited onto color filter array and combined with E Ink Imaging Film. Taking advantage of the transparent property of the oxide TFT, the color filter and TFT array are positioned at the viewing side of the display. This novel "Front Drive" display structure facilitates the alignment of the color filter and TFT dramatically.

Yamada, Harashima, and Miyakawa proposed to use a trellis constructed based on a syndrome former for the purpose of Viterbi decoding of rate-(n-1)/n convolutional codes. In this paper, we extend their code-trellis construction to general rate-k/n convolutional codes. We show that the extended construction is equivalent to the one proposed by Sidorenko and Zyablov. Moreover, we show that the proposed method can also be applied to an error-trellis construction with minor modification.

This paper tries to answer the following question: What type of support should be given to an automobile driver when it is determined, via some method to monitor the driver's behavior and the traffic environment, that the driver's intent may not be appropriate to a traffic condition? With a medium fidelity, moving-base driving simulator, three conditions were compared: (a) Warning type support in which an auditory warning is given to the driver to enhance his/her situation recognition, (b) action type support in which an autonomous safety control action is executed to avoid an accident, and (c) the baseline condition in which no driver support is given. Results were as follows: (1) Either type of driver support was effective in accident prevention. (2) Acceptance of driver support functions varied context dependently. (3) Participants accepted a system-initiated automation invocation as long as no automation surprises were possible to occur.

In this letter, we derive an analytical expression for computing the symbol error probability (SEP) of the M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) in the joint presence of phase/quadrature error and I/Q gain imbalance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The derived expression containing only the two-dimensional Gaussian Q-function can be used to compute the SEP of M-QAM in various fading channels by making use of the moment-generating function (MGF) approach.

Service differentiation is one of the key issues in the current Internet. In this paper, we focus on a recent proposal for proportional loss rate differentiation which employs a single FIFO queue, an AQM algorithm for computing the packet drop probability, and a counter-based packet dropping routine for achieving the intended proportional loss rate differentiation among classes. It is first shown that, when the target dropping probability of a class is large, the counter-based packet dropping routine may yield a significant amount of error between the target and measured drop probabilities for the class, and subsequently, fails to maintain the loss rate ratios between classes as intended. To avoid this problem, a new compensatory packet dropping routine is developed in this paper. Then, a series of simulation experiments are conducted using the ns-2 simulator to assess the performances of the two dropping routines under various congestion conditions and quality spacings between classes. The simulation results show that, unlike the counter-based dropping routine, the proposed compensatory dropping routine is effective in keeping the loss rate ratios between classes closely on target regardless of the degree of congestion and quality spacing between classes, while the two dropping routines perform similarly in terms of throughput and queueing delay in the bottleneck link. In addition, such robustness of the proposed routine is achieved without any additional control parameter or computational effort compared to the counter-based routine.

It has been shown that the output information produced by the soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) is too optimistic. To compensate for this, the output information should be normalized. This letter proposes a simple normalization technique that extends the existing sign difference ratio (SDR) criterion. The new normalization technique counts the sign differences between the a-priori information and the extrinsic information, and then adaptively determines the corresponding normalization factor for each data block. Simulations comparing the new technique with other well-known normalization techniques show that the proposed normalization technique can achieve about 0.2 dB coding gain improvement on average while reducing up to about 1/2 iteration for decoding.

In this paper, we present a novel force-directed method for automatically drawing intersecting compound mixed graphs (ICMGs) that can express complicated relations among elements such as adjacency, inclusion, and intersection. For this purpose, we take a strategy called unified simplification that can transform layout problem for an ICMG into that for an undirected graph. This method is useful for various information visualizations. We describe definitions, aesthetics, force model, algorithm, evaluation, and applications.

Apart from magnetic random access memories (MRAM), nonvolatile memories cannot be used without causing fatigue. As the use of MRAMs can solve fatigue problems, MRAMs have a large potential to open up large new markets. The manufacturing cost of LSIs cannot be reduced while they have not been produced massively. To increase the size of the MRAM market, new applications, in which MRAMs create added value, are needed. A demo system that models a drive recorder was developed to introduce the novel features of MRAMs, and a 4-Mb MRAM was developed to be used in the demo system.

Drivability-improved MOSFETs were successfully fabricated by using nano-grating silicon wafers. There was almost no additional process change in device fabrication when the height of the gratings was less than the conventional macroscopic wafer surface roughness. The MOSFETs with the grating height of 35 nm showed 21% improvement in current drivability compared to the conventional one with the same device occupancy area. And the roll-off characteristic of threshold voltage of nano-grating device held the line of conventional one in despite of the 3-D channel structure. The technology provides great advantages for drivability improvement without paying much tradeoff of process cost. This proposal will be useful to CMOS-LSIs with high performance in general.

High power dissipation can occur when the response to a test vector is captured by flip-flops in scan testing, resulting in excessive IR drop, which may cause significant capture-induced yield loss in the DSM era. This paper addresses this serious problem with a novel test generation method, featuring a unique algorithm that deterministically generates test cubes not only for fault detection but also for capture power reduction. Compared with previous methods that passively conduct X-filling for unspecified bits in test cubes generated only for fault detection, the new method achieves more capture power reduction with less test set inflation. Experimental results show its effectiveness.

Due to the discontinuity of packet based traffic, the user terminals in next generation mobile telecommunications systems will be equipped with sleep mode operation functions for power saving purpose. The sleep mode parameters should be appropriately configured so that power consumption can be sufficiently decreased while packet queue length and packet delay are restricted within a demanded level. This paper proposes an adaptive sleep mode parameter configuration scheme which is able to jointly optimize the inactivity timer and sleep period in response to the variation of user traffic arrival pattern. The optimization target of this scheme is to minimize mobile terminal power consumption while ensuring that the mean downlink packet queue length do not exceed a certain threshold. Results of computer simulations prove that, the presented approach perfectly manages packet queue length restriction, packet delay control and power saving in a wide range of user packet inter-arrival rates both in single- and dual-service scenarios.

Based on the mutuality between arrival moments of uplink and downlink messages, this paper proposes a scheme that assigns different time-out thresholds for mobile terminal sleep mode operation according to the direction of the message just processed. Simulation results prove that, this approach can increase the power saving factor of a mobile terminal without degrading QoS.

In statistical pattern recognition, it is important to estimate the distribution of patterns precisely to achieve high recognition accuracy. In general, precise estimation of the parameters of the distribution requires a great number of sample patterns, especially when the feature vector obtained from the pattern is high-dimensional. For some pattern recognition problems, such as face recognition or character recognition, very high-dimensional feature vectors are necessary and there are always not enough sample patterns for estimating the parameters. In this paper, we focus on estimating the distribution of high-dimensional feature vectors with small number of sample patterns. First, we define a function, called simplified quadratic discriminant function (SQDF). SQDF can be estimated with small number of sample patterns and approximates the quadratic discriminant function (QDF). SQDF has fewer parameters and requires less computational time than QDF. The effectiveness of SQDF is confirmed by three types of experiments. Next, as an application of SQDF, we propose an algorithm for estimating the parameters of the normal mixture. The proposed algorithm is applied to face recognition and character recognition problems which require high-dimensional feature vectors.

We propose a new label recognition system for photonic label switching using self-routing of labels. Binary-coded labels in on-off keying format are considered. The system consists of an all-optical demultiplexer (DeMUX) and an address recognition unit (ARU) consisting of tree-structured switches. The system uses self-routing propagation of an indication bit controlled with address bits. The indication bit is placed in advance of the address bits in the label. In DeMUX, all-optical switches in a configuration of Mach-Zehnder interferometer with semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA-MZI) are controlled by the indication bit pulse to separate each of the label bits. The indication bit pulse is routed to the destination output port corresponding to the code of the address in ARU. It is shown that all the binary number codes can be recognized with this system. The operation principle is verified by numerical simulation using coupled-mode theory and a rate equation. Moreover, the switching crosstalk is also evaluated.

We propose an N-channel power-compensated reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) based on using fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). Both tunable FBGs and wavelength-fixed FBGs are used in this ROADM. By using the dual-pass amplification scheme with two pieces of erbium doped fibers, an 8.0 dB optical net gain has been achieved with a gain variation less than 0.5 dB for each add/drop/pass-through channel. System performance was studied for a four-WDM-channel 10 Gb/s100-km lightwave transmission trial network and bit error rate of 10-9 is observed for the 50 km added signal, 100 km pass-through signal and 50 km dropped signal at -18.3, -19.4 and -18.9 dBm received power, respectively. Only 1.1 dB of power penalty was observed compared to the back-to-back transmission.