An optimized Built-In Self-Test technology is proposed in this paper. A simplified algebraic model is developed to represent the configurations of single input change circuits. A novel single input change sequence generation technique is designed. It consists of a modified scan shift register, a seed storage array and a series of XOR gates. This circuitry can automatically generate single input change sequences of more unique vectors. Experimental results based on the ISCAS-89 benchmark show that the proposed method can achieve high stuck-at fault coverage with low switching activity during test applications.

The heterogeneous integration of GaAs HEMTs on a polyimide-covered AlN ceramic substrate was demonstrated using a fluidic self-assembly (FSA) technique. We used thin device blocks for the FSA, which have various advantages. In particular, they can reduce the drain-source capacitance Cds of the assembled HEMTs if the substrate has a low dielectric constant. This is a novel kind of semiconductor-on-insulator (SOI) technology. The dc and RF properties of the GaAs HEMTs on the polyimide/AlN substrate were studied and the reduction of Cds was confirmed. This technique was successfully applied to the SPDT switch, where a low Cds is essential for good isolation.

A variant of the self-shrinking generator (SSG) proposed at ICISC 2006, which we call SSG-XOR, was claimed to have better cryptographic properties than SSG in a practical setting. It was also claimed that SSG-XOR will be more secure than SSG. But we show that SSG-XOR has no advantage over SSG from the viewpoint of practical cryptanalysis, especially the guess-and-determine attack.

In the real world, it is not always true that neighboring houses are physically adjacent or close to each other. in other words, "neighbors" are not always "true neighbors." In this study, we propose a new Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm, SOM with False-Neighbor degree between neurons (called FN-SOM). The behavior of FN-SOM is investigated with learning for various input data. We confirm that FN-SOM can obtain a more effective map reflecting the distribution state of input data than the conventional SOM and Growing Grid.

We propose an Adjustable Parallel TCP (AP-TCP) which is a new scheme to control the aggregate throughput of parallel TCP flows. The AP-TCP can adjust the aggregate throughput to be any desired level irrespective of the parallel size (the number of parallel TCP flows). To adjust the aggregate throughput, we modify the increment factor of each parallel TCP flow to K2/N2 where N is the number of parallel TCP flows and K is a value equivalent to any desired level for the aggregate throughput. Once K is given, the AP-TCP attempts to have K times more bandwidth than a single TCP flow when they are competing on the same network path. Another feature of the AP-TCP is its self-adjustment scheme. There is no central coordination or control overhead for parallel TCP flows. We analyze the model of the AP-TCP theoretically and evaluate it by using NS-2 simulation.

This paper presents an asynchronous design technique, an enabler for the emerging technology of flexible microelectronics that feature low-temperature processed polysilicon (LTPS) thin-film transistors (TFT) and surface-free technology by laser annealing/ablation (SUFTLA®). The first design instance chosen is an 8-bit microprocessor. LTPS TFTs are good for realizing displays having integrated VLSI circuit at lower costs. However, LTPS TFTs have drawbacks, including substantial deviations in characteristics and the self-heating phenomenon. To solve these problems, the authors adopted the asynchronous circuit design technique and developed an asynchronous design language called Verilog+, which is based on a subset of Verilog HDL® and includes minimal primitives used for describing the communications between modules, and the dedicated tools including a translator called xlator and a synthesizer called ctrlsyn. The flexible 8-bit microprocessor stably operates at 500 kHz, drawing 180 µA from a 5 V power source. The microprocessor's electromagnetic emissions are 21 dB less than those of the synchronous counterpart.

This paper presents a new low power BIST TPG scheme for reducing scan transitions. It uses a transition freezing and melting method which is implemented of the transition freezing block and a MUX. When random test patterns are generated from an LFSR, transitions of those patterns satisfy pseudo-random Gaussian distribution. The proposed technique freezes transitions of patterns using a freezing value. Experimental results show that the proposed BIST TPG schemes can reduce average power reduction by about 60% without performance loss and peak power by about 30% in ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits.

This paper proposes a self-test method of coarse grain dynamically reconfigurable processors (DRPs) without hardware overhead. In the method, processor elements (PEs) compose a test frame, which consists of test pattern generators (TPGs), processor elements under test (PEUTs) and response analyzers (RAs), while testing themselves one another by changing test frames appropriately. We design several test frames with different structures, and discuss the relationship of the structures to the numbers of contexts and test frames for testing all the functions of PEs. A case study shows that there exists an optimal test frame which minimizes the test application time under a constraint.

In this paper, we propose a design for testability method for test programs of software-based self-test using test program templates. Software-based self-test using templates has a problem of error masking where some faults detected in a test generation for a module are not detected by the test program synthesized from the test. The proposed method achieves 100% template level fault efficiency, that is, it completely avoids the error masking. Moreover, the proposed method has no performance degradation (adds only observation points) and enables at-speed testing.

This paper describes novel CMOS level-conversion flip-flops for use in low-power SoCs with clustered voltage scaling. These flip-flops feed outputs directly into the front stage to support self-resetting and conditional operations. They thus have simple structures to avoid clock level shifting and redundant transitions, leading to substantial improvements in terms of power and area. The comparison results indicate that the proposed level-conversion flip-flops achieve power and area savings up to 50% and 31%, respectively, with no speed degradation as compared to conventional level-conversion flip-flops.

Self embedding watermarking is a technique used for tamper detection, localization and recovery. This letter proposes a novel self embedding scheme, in which the halftone version of the host image is exploited as a watermark, instead of a JPEG-compressed version used in most existing methods. Our scheme employs a pixel-wise permuted and embedded mechanism and thus overcomes some common drawbacks of the previous methods. Experimental results demonstrate our technique is effective and practical.

In this letter, a semi-automatic method for road network extraction from high-resolution satellite images is proposed. First, we focus on detecting the seed points in candidate road regions using a method of self-organizing map (SOM). Then, an approach to road tracking is presented, searching for connected points in the direction and candidate domain of a road. A study of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) using high-resolution satellite images is presented in this letter. Experimental results verified the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach.

We propose a new label recognition system for photonic label routing network. Binary-coded labels in binary phase-shift-keying format are considered. The system consists of an optical waveguide circuit with tree-structure passive asymmetric X-junctions and time gates. The system uses self-routing propagation of an identifying bit by performing interference with address bits. The identifying bit is placed in advance of the address bits in the label. The identifying bit pulse is routed to the destination output port corresponding to the code of the address. The operation principle is described. It is shown that all the binary number codes can be recognized with this system. We discuss the feasibility of the system by evaluating its crosstalk. To reduce the crosstalk, an improved scheme is also presented. The label recognition operation with the optical waveguide device is verified by numerical simulation using the finite-difference beam propagation method.

This paper presents a self-reconfigurable adaptive FIR filter system design using dynamic partial reconfiguration, which has flexibility, power efficiency, advantages of configuration time allowing dynamically inserting or removing adaptive FIR filter modules. This self-reconfigurable adaptive FIR filter is responsible for providing the best solution for realization and autonomous adaptation of FIR filters, and processes the optimal digital signal processing algorithms, which are the low-pass, band-pass and high-pass filter algorithms with various frequencies, for noise removal operations. The proposed stand-alone self-reconfigurable system using Xilinx Virtex4 FPGA and Compact-Flash memory shows the improvement of configuration time and flexibility by using the dynamic partial reconfiguration techniques.

This paper presents an efficient diagnosis scheme for RAMs. Three March-based algorithms are proposed to diagnose simple functional faults of RAMs. A March-15N algorithm is used for locating and partially diagnosing faults of bit-oriented or word-oriented memories, where N represents the address number. Then a 3N March-like algorithm is used for locating the aggressor words (bits) of coupling faults (CFs) in word-oriented (bit-oriented) memories. It also can distinguish the faults which cannot be identified by the March-15N algorithm. Thus, the proposed diagnosis scheme can achieve full diagnosis and locate aggressors with (15N + 3mN) Read/Write operations for a bit-oriented RAM with m CFs. For word-oriented RAMs, a March-like algorithm is also proposed to locate the aggressor bit in the aggressor word with 4 log2B Read/Write operations, where B is the word width. Analysis results show that the proposed diagnosis scheme has higher diagnostic resolution and lower time complexity than the previous fault location and fault diagnosis approaches. A programmable built-in self-diagnosis (BISD) design is also implemented to perform the proposed diagnosis algorithms. Experimental results show that the area overhead of the BISD is small--only about 2.17% and 0.42% for 16 K8-bit and 16 K128-bit SRAMs, respectively.

A new BIST (Built-in Self-test) method for static ADC testing is proposed. The proposed method detects offset, gain, INL (Integral Non-linearity) and DNL (Differential Non-linearity) errors with a low hardware overhead. Moreover, it can solve a transient zone problem which is derived from the ADC noise in real test environments.

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), a large number of sensor nodes are deployed over a wide area and multi-hop communications are required between the nodes. Managing numerous sensor nodes is a very complicated task, especially when the energy issue is involved. Even though a number of ad-hoc management and network structuring approaches for WSNs have been proposed, a management framework covering the entire network management infrastructure from the messaging protocol to the network structuring algorithm has not yet been proposed. In this paper we introduce a management framework for WSNs called SNOWMAN (SeNsOr netWork MANagement) framework. It employs the policy-based management approach for letting the sensor nodes autonomously organize and manage themselves. Moreover, a new light-weight policy distribution protocol called TinyCOPS-PR and policy information base (PIB) are also developed. To facilitate scalable and localized management of sensor networks, the proposed SNOWMAN constructs a 3-tier hierarchy of regions, clusters, and sensor nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through actual implementation and simulation using ns-2. The simulation results reveal that the proposed framework allows smaller energy consumption for network management and longer network lifetime than the existing schemes such as LEACH and LEACH-C for practical size networks.

This paper presents a middleware system for multi-agents on a distributed system as a general test-bed for bio-inspired approaches. The middleware is unique to other approaches, including distributed object systems, because it can maintain and migrate a dynamic federation of multiple agents on different computers. It enables each agent to explicitly define its own deployment policy as a relocation between the agent and another agent. This paper describes a prototype implementation of the middleware built on a Java-based mobile agent system and its practical applications that illustrates the utility and effectiveness of the approach in real distributed systems.

Since we can accumulate a large amount of data including useless information in recent years, it is important to investigate various extraction method of clusters from data including much noises. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) has attracted attention for clustering nowadays. In this study, we propose a method of using plural SOMs (TSOM: Tentacled SOM) for effective data extraction. TSOM consists of two kinds of SOM whose features are different, namely, one self-organizes the area where input data are concentrated, and the other self-organizes the whole of the input space. Each SOM of TSOM can catch the information of other SOMs existing in its neighborhood and self-organizes with the competing and accommodating behaviors. We apply TSOM to data extraction from input data including much noise, and can confirm that TSOM successfully extracts only clusters even in the case that we do not know the number of clusters in advance.

In mobile ad hoc networks, as the communications have to be achieved autonomously and via third parties, a variety of risks against stable communication and session completion can be predicted. Many researchers have been studying these issues, i.e., mobility, broadcast storm, selfish behavior on data forwarding, security, and so forth. However, availability of routes against selfish power off is still to be addressed. This paper defines a new, realistic and practical problem beyond the scope of malicious program modification, called selfish power off, and evaluates the influence of it. Here, a selfish user turns his terminal on only when it has some data to send or receive and decline to work as an intermediate user by turning its terminal power off. In addition, this paper proposes a solution, called Proactive COoperation Mechanism (PCOM) against selfish power off in order to eliminate the influence of selfish power off. In PCOM, each user holds the cooperation records of its adjacent users, and forwards only those packets that are generated by users with good cooperation records. PCOM thus prevents SUs from joining the network. Extensive simulation shows the efficiency of our proposal in maintaining network connectivity and fairness in resource consumption.