The onboard antenna beam forming network (BFN) of the next-generation communication satellites must offer multiple beam forming and beam steering. The conventional BFN, which directly controls the array elements, is not suitable for a large-scale array antenna because of the difficulty of BFN control. This paper proposes a new BFN configuration that consists of three/four-way variable power dividers and a Butler matrix (FFT circuit). This BFN can offer continuous beam steering with fewer variable components. By introducing new techniques based upon excluding FFT periods and power evaluations by definite integration, the deviation in beamwidth is reduced by 75% or more and the maximum sidelobe level is improved by 10 dB or more.

This paper presents the radiation characteristics of a circularly polarized conical beam spherical slot array antenna for applying to the mobile satellite communication subscriber. The structure of the antenna is easy to fabricate i. e. , a ring of perpendicular slot pairs cut on an outer surface of a concentric conducting spherical cavity enclosed by the conducting conical surface with the simple feeding structure, and a linear electric probe excited at the center of the inner surface of the cavity. Radiation fields of a spherical slot array antenna are calculated by superposing the patterns of all the slots. From the numerical results of the radiation pattern, in both elevational and azimuthal planes, it is obvious that the conical beam is realized. The elevational beam direction is low, which is suitable for installing in the land mobile subscriber unit located far from the equator. The tracking system is not necessary because the azimuthal pattern is omnidirectional. Directivity of the antenna for various spherical radii and angles of slot positions are illustrated as the guidelines for the design. Experimental results are in good agreement with the predictions.

Active frequency-tuning beam-scanning leaky-mode antenna arrays have been demonstrated in this paper. These antennas integrated one or several microstrip leaky-wave antenna elements with a single varactor-tuned HEMT VCO as an active source. Noted that the measured scan angles of the 11 and 14 antennas were approximately 24 and the scanning range of the 12 antenna was 20. Furthermore, reflected wave due to the open end of each leaky-wave antenna element has been suppressed by the symmetric configuration of this antenna array and the antenna efficiency increases. When comparing with the measured radiation pattern of the single element antenna, we found that the 12 and 14 antenna arrays can effectively suppress the reflected power by more than 5.5 dB and 10.5 dB, respectively, at 10.2 GHz. The power gain are more than 2 dB and 3.16 dB higher than the single element antenna with a measured EIRP of 18.67 dBm.

60 GHz band conical beam radial line slot antennas (RLSA's) are designed and fabricated. Antennas are made of PTFE substrate with copper for high accuracy and mass producibility in millimeter wave frequency. The radiation pattern such as directivity and beam direction can be controlled by changing the excitation of slots. The measured radiation pattern is in reasonable agreement with the predicted one in main beam direction. The measured gain is about 2.5 dB smaller than the predicted gain.

This paper presents a novel four-sector shaped-beam antenna suitable for base station antennas in 60-GHz wireless local area networks (LANs). The antenna has a plateau configuration, whose four side walls have four linearly arranged microstrip antennas. Each trapezoidal facet excites a shaped beam in the elevation plane in order to meet link-budget requirement between base station and remote terminal, taking account of directional patters of remote terminal antennas. Low-loss curved microstrip-line is applied to connect the three-dimensional antennas with active circuits mounted on a flat carrier plate. This antenna has been adopted as the base station antenna in 60-GHz wireless LANs. The first-stage transmission experiment confirms the usefulness of shaped-beam antennas in the 60-GHz band.

In coupled oscillator arrays, it is possible to control the inter-element phase shift up to 180 by free-running frequency distribution based on injection-locking phenomenon. In this paper, a new technique to control the inter-element phase shift electronically up to the maximum extent of 360 is reported. Oscillators are unilaterally coupled to the preceding oscillator through one of the two paths, which differ from each other 180 in electrical length and each includes an amplifier. Turning on the desired amplifier one can control the phase shift either -180 to 0 or 0 to 180. The technique was applied in a three-element oscillator array each coupled to a patch antenna via a round aperture. The radiation beam of the array could be scanned 47 in total.

In this paper, a new multicast routing method for layered streams is proposed. This method is an extension of the weighted greedy algorithm (WGA) and uses two kinds of weight values to refine the link distance. It can cope with dynamic change in the group members without multicast tree re-construction. The method is compatible with the RSVP and can be utilized in existing shared tree type routing protocols such as CBT and PIM sparse mode. The network resources can be utilized efficiently; furthermore, the loss rate of member's requests to receive more layers can be reduced by this routing method when a sufficient number of nodes have the packet filtering function and a sufficient number of hops is permitted.

A new method of designing a microphone array with two outputs preserving binaural information is proposed in this paper. This system employs adaptive beamforming using multiple constraints. The binaural cues may be preserved in the two outputs by use of these multiple constraints with simultaneous beamforming to enhance target signals is also available. A computer simulation was conducted to examine the performance of the beamforming. The results showed that the proposed array can perform both the generation of the binaural cues and the beamforming as intended. In particular, beamforming with double-constraints exhibits the best performance; DI is around 7 dB and good interchannel (interaural) time/phase and level differences are generated within a target region in front. With triple-constraints, however, the performance of the beamforming becomes poorer while the binaural information is better realized. Setting of the desired responses to give proper binaural information seems to become critical as the number of the constraints increases.

This paper proposes a newly developed dual-frequency antenna for 800 MHz and 1500 MHz band use. A uniformly spaced array configuration, originally designed for a 800 MHz analog system, is extended to yield dual frequencies operations. An important characteristic of a base station antenna is low sidelobe level in order to suppress inter-cell interference. In the case of a uniformly spaced array configuration, sidelobe levels are increased by the emergence of grating lobes at higher frequencies. Electrical beam tilt also degrades the sidelobe level. As does the change in the excitation coefficients of the array elements at higher frequencies. These three factors are studied theoretically to yield practical sidelobe levels. One more important beam characteristic is the sector beam in the horizontal plane. The same beam width in two frequency bands is achieved by designing the novel reflector shape and determining the proper array element positions in front of the reflector. Practical antenna characteristics are confirmed by designing, manufacturing, and testing a base station antenna.

In order that the speech recognition system might have a high performance in the noisy environment, the directional microphone arrays at the input of the system have been broadly investigated. The purpose of this study is to develop a new wide-band directional microphone system in view of advancing to an adaptive one afterwards. In the proposed system, three microphones are arranged on a straight line and the beamforming is accomplished in such a way that the output value of the middle microphone is added to the integrated value of the difference between two microphones at both sides. In this study, the signal processing of microphone outputs is implemented by using active RC circuits. Finally, the objective directivity can be experimentally obtained in wide frequency ranges required for the speech recognition.

IP telephony systems are expected to be deployed worldwide in the near future because of their potential for integrating the multimedia communication infrastructure over IP networks. Phone-to-phone connection over an IP network via IP telephony gateways (IP-GWs) is a key feature of the system. In an IP telephony system, a low-bit-rate voice codec is used to improve bandwidth efficiency. However, due to the packet transfer method over the IP network, it is necessary to add packet headers, including IP, UDP, and RTP headers, which increases the header overhead and thus decreases transfer efficiency. Moreover, because there will be large numbers of short voice packets flowing into the IP network, the load on the Internet will increase. We propose voice stream multiplexing between IP-GWs to solve these problems. In this scheme, multiple voice streams are connected between a pair of IP-GWs, enabling multiplexed voice stream transfer. The voice stream multiplexing mechanism can reduce the header overhead as well as decrease the number of voice packets. The voice stream multiplexing we propose is to concatenate RTP packets destined for the same IP-GW at a multiplexing interval period into a single UDP packet. The advantage of this method is that no new additional header is required and the current well-defined H. 323 and RTP standards can be applied with minimum changes. We implemented and tested the system. The results show that the proposed method is effective at reducing both the header overhead and the number of packets. In a typical case, the bandwidth is cut by 40% for eight G. 723.1-encoded voice streams through header overhead reduction and the number of voice packets is also decreased to 1/8. Furthermore, this method can easily be enhanced to a general RTP packet multiplexing method that is applicable not only to an IP-GW but also to other RTP multiplexing and de-multiplexing applications.

This paper proposes a new robust adaptive beamformer applicable to microphone arrays. The proposed beamformer is a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) with a variable blocking matrix using coefficient-constrained adaptive filters (CCAFs). The CCAFs, whose common input signal is the output of a fixed beamformer, minimize leakage of the target signal into the interference path of the GSC. Each coefficient of the CCAFs is constrained to avoid mistracking. In the multiple-input canceller, leaky adaptive filters are used to decrease undesirable target-signal cancellation. The proposed beamformer can allow large look-direction error with almost no degradation in interference-reduction performance and can be implemented with a small number of microphones. The maximum allowable look-direction error can be specified by the user. Simulation results show that the proposed beamformer, when designed to allow about 20of look-direction error, can suppress interference by more than 17 dB.

This report describes AlGaAs/GaAs HBT ICs for 20-Gb/s optical transmission, the preamplifier and optical modulator driver circuits, and those ICs for 10-Gb/s clock extraction circuits, the rectifier and phase shifter circuits. These ICs were fabricated using our developed hetero guard-ring fully self-aligned HBT (HG-FST) fabrication process. The Pt-Ti-Pt-Au multimetal system was also used as a base ohmic metal to reduce base contact resistance, and a high fmax of 105 GHz was obtained. Good results in the HBT IC microwave performances were achieved from the on-wafer measurements. The preamplifiers exhibited the broad bandwidth of 20. 9 GHz. The optical modulator driver performed a sufficiently large output-voltage swing of 4-VP-P at a 20-Gb/s data rate. The rectifier and the phase shifter circuits achieved good operations at 10-Gb/s. These results suggest that these HBT ICs can be applied to 20-Gb/s optical transmission and 10-Gb/s clock extraction systems.

This paper proposes a novel sequential coherent preambleless demodulator that uses phase signals instead of complex signals in the automatic frequency control (AFC) and carrier recovery circuits. The proposed demodulator employs a phase-combined frequency error detection circuit and dual loop AFC circuit to achieve fast frequency acquisition and low frequency jitter. It also adopts an open loop carrier recovery scheme with a sample hold circuit after the carrier filter to ensure carrier signal stability within a packet. It is shown that the frame error rate performance of the proposed demodulator is superior, by 30%, to that offered by differential detection in a frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel. The hardware size of the proposed demodulator is about only 1/10 that of a conventional coherent demodulator employing complex signals.

Optical frontend and distributed amplifier IC modules, both containing GaAs heterojunction-bipolar-transistors (HBT), have been developed for 40 Gb/s optical receiver. To achieve high-speed operations, the elements in the modules including the IC and signal lines, were designed to achieve a wider bandwidth with lower electrical reflection. The influence of a bonding-wire inductance was taken into particular account in optimizing the parameters of the ICs. The optical frontend, consisting of a waveguide pin-photodiode and an HBT preamplifier IC, exhibits a transimpedance gain of 43 dBΩ and a bandwidth of 31 GHz. The distributed amplifier IC module achieves a gain of 9 dB and a bandwidth of 39 GHz. A 40-Gb/s optical receiver constructed with these modules exhibited a high receiver sensitivity of -28. 2 dBm for a 40-Gb/s optical return-to-zero signal.

A novel testing-pad placement method has been developed to greatly improve E-beam observability for multi-level wiring LSIs. In the method, testing pads connecting a lower-metal-layer wire with a top-metal-layer electrode are positioned in the design layout, making removal of the insulator unnecessary. The method features i) pad placement in unoccupied areas in mask patterns to avoid increases in chip size, ii) minimized pad size through the use of stacked vias so that the pads can be placed on as many wire nodes as possible, iii) placement as far as possible from the nearby wires to avoid local field effects, and iv) allocation of one testing pad to one circuit node to minimize the number of testing pads. These measures give us a practical pad-placement method, that has little influence on LSI design. It was shown that the proposed method yielded a dramatic improvement of observability from 13-33% to 88-99% in actual layouts of 0.25-µm ASICs with 20k, 120k, and 390k gates. It was also found that local field effects from nearby wires are negligible for almost all the testing pads. This approach will enable the use of E-beam testing on LSIs made with 0.25-µm technology and the even more sophisticated process technologies to come.

We propose novel all-optical functional devices using waveguide X-junctions with localized third order optical nonlinearity, where one branch is made from a Kerr-like nonlinear material and the rest are made from linear ones. All-optical switching operations can be obtained because of bistable like nonlinear dispersion characteristics in linear and nonlinear coupled guided-wave systems. The performances of the devices are analyzed by the Beam Propagation Method (BPM) modified for nonlinear waveguides combined with the nonlinear normal mode analysis. The methods to construct the waveguides with localized nonlinearity are also discussed by utilizing the technologies for the selective control of a band-gap energy of semiconductor Multi Quantum Well (MQW) structures and the performances of the designed devices are presented.

We propose novel all-optical functional devices using waveguide X-junctions with localized third order optical nonlinearity, where one branch is made from a Kerr-like nonlinear material and the rest are made from linear ones. All-optical switching operations can be obtained because of bistable like nonlinear dispersion characteristics in linear and nonlinear coupled guided-wave systems. The performances of the devices are analyzed by the Beam Propagation Method (BPM) modified for nonlinear waveguides combined with the nonlinear normal mode analysis. The methods to construct the waveguides with localized nonlinearity are also discussed by utilizing the technologies for the selective control of a band-gap energy of semiconductor Multi Quantum Well (MQW) structures and the performances of the designed devices are presented.

We examine crossing waveguides with three channels consisting of nonlinear material by means of FD-BPM (Finite Difference Beam Propagation Method). Specifically, we investigate how the insertion of a multimode waveguide into the crossing section of both 13 and 23 structures influences the switching characteristics of output power. We then confirm that these structures can be favorably applied to a wide variety of all-optical devices for integrated optics such as intensity-dependent optical switches, optical power distributors and so on.

A novel family of keystream generators is proposed employing a linear cellular automata over GF (q) with time-varying transition rule. The analysis indicates that the generator, which is the general member of the family, reaches standard minimal security conditions (large period and good statistical properties) and that it is secure against all known attacks. An important feature of the proposed generators is that they are compact and suitable for high speed applications.