In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal equalizer for the space-time block coded transmission over the frequency selective fading channels with the presence of co-channel interference (CCI). The proposed equalizer, based on the tapped delay line adaptive array (TDLAA), performs signal equalization and CCI suppression simultaneously using the minimum mean square error (MMSE) method. It is to show that our scheme outperforms the previous two-stage combined adaptive antenna and delayed decision feedback sequence estimator (DDFSE) approach. We also show that performance can be further improved if the synchronization between the preceding and delayed paths is achieved.

We have fabricated a multilayer structure for single flux quantum (SFQ) circuit application using a high-temperature superconductor (HTS). La0.2-Y0.9Ba1.9Cu3Ox (La-YBCO) base electrode layers were prepared by a dc or rf magnetron sputtering method. The reproducibility of film quality for dc-sputtered La-YBCO films was better than that for rf-sputtered films, and the dc sputtered films exhibited the average surface roughness Ra less than 1.0 nm and a Tc zero value of 88 K. By using the dc-sputtered La-YBCO films, a multilayer structure of SrSnO3/La-YBCO/SrSnO3/La-YBCO on MgO substrate with Ra below 2.0 nm was obtained. Interface-modified ramp-edge junctions with La0.2-Yb0.9Ba1.9Cu3Ox (La-YbBCO) counter electrodes have been fabricated by using this multilayer structure with dc-sputtered films. The fabricated junctions exhibited RSJ-type I-V characteristics with IcRn products of about 3 mV at 4.2 K. We also obtained a 1-σ Ic spread of 8% for a 1000-junction series-array. The sheet inductance values at 4.2 K for the base and counter electrodes on La-YBCO ground planes were 0.8 pH and 0.7 pH per square, respectively. Operation of several types of elementary SFQ circuits has been successfully demonstrated by using this multilayer structure.

A CMOS voltage reference circuit based on a voltage at the zero-temperature-coefficient point of drain current is proposed. The output voltage of the proposed circuit is variable by a substrate bias. The proposed circuit is simulated with a standard 0.8-µm CMOS technology. The output voltage keeps 800 mV, and its fractional temperature coefficient is 9.94 ppm/ over the temperature range from -100 to 150 at a zero-bias. The PSRR of the output voltage is -42.55 dB at 100 Hz. The minimum power-supply voltage is 2.1 V. The output voltage can be shifted down to 670 mV while maintaining its temperature-insensitivity.

A high temperature superconductor (HTS) filter is designed and measured at 1.93 GHz, using microstrip half-wavelength spiral resonators. Resonant and coupling characteristics of miniaturized microstrip spiral resonators are investigated first. Then a 4-pole Chebyshev bandpass filter with a very narrow passband (4.1 MHz) is designed and realized using microstrip spiral resonators. The filter is fabricated using HTS YBCO films deposited on a LaAlO3 substrate. The measured frequency response of the filter agrees reasonably with the specifications, and shows that the filter owns excellent property of spurious resonance rejection over a wide frequency range.

At frequencies currently used by mobile communications, many of the microstrip half-wavelength resonators are too large to realize miniaturized filters. For this reason, very small-sized microstrip spiral resonators and filters, using high-temperature superconductors (HTS), have been studied recently. In this paper, the resonant and coupling characteristics of microstrip G-type and S-type spiral resonators are investigated first by using an electromagnetic simulator. Then small-sized 4-pole, 8-pole, and 16-pole Chebyshev bandpass filters using S-type spirals are designed, respectively, with a midband frequency f0 = 1.93 GHz. The frequency responses of the filters satisfy well the desired specifications, and the measured frequency response of the 8-pole HTS filter agrees well with the theoretical prediction.

We regard the events of a Markov decision process as the outputs from a Markov information source in order to analyze the randomness of an empirical sequence by the codeword length of the sequence. The randomness is an important viewpoint in reinforcement learning since the learning is to eliminate the randomness and to find an optimal policy. The occurrence of optimal empirical sequence also depends on the randomness. We then introduce the Lempel-Ziv coding for measuring the randomness which consists of the domain size and the stochastic complexity. In experimental results, we confirm that the learning and the occurrence of optimal empirical sequence depend on the randomness and show the fact that in early stages the randomness is mainly characterized by the domain size and as the number of time steps increases the randomness depends greatly on the complexity of Markov decision processes.

This paper presents a method for improving the performance of syntactic analysis by using accurate temporal expression processing. Temporal expression causes parsing errors due to its syntactic duality, but its resolution is not trivial since the syntactic role of temporal expression is understandable in the context. In our work, syntactic functions of temporal words are decisively identified based on local contexts of individual temporal words acquired from a large corpus, which are represented by a finite state method. Experimental results show how the proposed method, incorporated with parsing, improves the accuracy and efficiency of the syntactic analysis.

The effects of air-intake format of forced-air-cooled equipment on the efficiency of air conditioning systems are studied. A modern data center features a large number of information-processing devices to provide telecommunication services. These devices generate considerable heat, and the equipment that houses these devices often employs "forced air cooling" in which a cooling effect is achieved by sucking in large amounts of room air. An air conditioning system used for a machine room filled with such equipment therefore requires high fan driving power resulting in significantly low air conditioning efficiency. In this study, we first performed mockup-based experiments to obtain a quantitative understanding of how different air-intake formats for equipment affect the temperature at various room locations such as equipment intake. We then created a model for predicting the temperature at various locations, and on the basis of this model, we analyzed the factors affecting intake temperature and examined how intake temperature affects air conditioning efficiency. It was found that placing air inlets in the lower 1/3 portion of forced-air-cooled equipment could prevent the equipment from reabsorbing the hot air that it blows out and therefore improve air conditioning efficiency.

We propose an ultra low power watch-dog circuit with the use of MOSFETs operation under subthreshold characteristics. The circuit monitors the amount of the product degradation because the subthreshold current of MOSFET emulates the rate of the general chemical reaction. Its operation was verified with both SPICE simulation and the measurement of the prototype chip. The new circuit embedded in a tag attached to any product could dynamically monitor the degradation regardless of storage conditions.

This paper presents a new template matching method based on marker-controlled watershed segmentation (TMCWS). It is applied to recognize numbers on special metal plates in production lines where traditional image recognition methods do not work well. TMCWS is a shape based matching method that uses different pattern images and their corresponding marker images as probes to explore a gradient space of an unknown image to determine which pattern best matches a target object in it. Different from other matching algorithms, TMCWS firstly creates a marker image for each pattern, and then takes both the pattern image and its corresponding marker image as a template window and shifts this window across a gradient space pixel by pixel to do a search. At each position, the marker image is used to try to extract the contour of the target object with the help of marker-controlled watershed segmentation, and the pattern image is employed to evaluate the extracted shape in each trial. All of the pattern images and their corresponding marker images are tried and the pattern that best matches the target object is the recognition result. TMCWS contains shape extraction procedures and it is a high-level template matching method. Experiments are performed with this method on nearly 400 images of metal plates and the test results show its effectiveness in recognizing numbers in noisy images.

In this paper, an experimental result of complex refractive index of soda-lime glass at 30-GHz obtained by transmission method is presented at first. Secondly, a simple empirical formula of complex refractive index of soda-lime glass over frequency range from 0.1-GHz to 1000-GHz is derived using the present experimental result together with data previously reported in literatures by various researchers.

The DAPDNA®-2 is the world's first general purpose dynamically reconfigurable processor for commercial usage. It is a dual-core processor consisting of a custom RISC core called the Digital Application Processor (DAP), and a two dimensional array of dynamically reconfigurable processing elements referred to as the Distributed Network Architecture (DNA). The DAP has a 32 bit instruction set architecture with an 8 KB instruction cache and 8 KB data cache that can be accessed in one clock cycle. It has an interrupt control function to detect data processing completion in the DNA-Matrix. The DNA-Matrix has different types of data processing elements such as ALU, delay, and memory elements to process fully parallel computations. The DNA-Matrix includes 32 independent 16 KB high speed SRAM elements (in total 512 KB). The DNA-Matrix, even with its parallel computational capability, can be synchronized and co-work at the same clock frequency as the DAP. The processor operates at a 166 MHz working frequency and fabricated with a 0.11 µm CMOS process. The DAPDNA-2 device can be connected directly with up to 16 units with linear scalability in processing performance, provided the bandwidth requirement is within the maximum communication speed between DNAs, which is 32 Gbps. The DAPDNA-2 performs at a level that is two orders of magnitude higher than conventional high performance processors.

This paper provides a novel signal processing for detecting defects based on the spatio-temporal gradient analysis over the Lamb-wave field. The proposed processing classifies the wave field through the rank of the covariance matrix which is defined by the four-dimensional vector with following components: a vertical displacement, its vertical velocity, and a pair of out-of-plane shearing strains. The covariance matrix provides the information about defects. Its determinant, therefore, is proposed as the inhomogeneity-index of the object surface. In this study, the physical meanings of the proposed index are shown, the computational process in the Lamb-wave field near the defects is discussed and their behaviors are investigated through FDTD-simulations and acoustic experiments.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the opening speed on a breaking arc. The opening speeds are 10, 20 and 30 mm/s. The breaking arc is generated in a D.C. 42 V/10.5 A circuit, and the arc voltage, the arc current, the gap length and the arc spectrum intensity are measured. Arc temperature is calculated by using a Boltzmann plot. Even if the opening speed is changed, the arc temperature starts from a high temperature, and falls gradually to 4650-4750 K with time. Namely, the opening speed has no influence on the arc temperature.

In this presentation the authors consider in detail the problems relating to parameters like contact normal force, the effective contact areas and the surface plating, which have significant influence onto the surge current strength of electrical power contacts. Obtaining the behaviour of machine turned pin and socket contacts with different pin diameters the parameters of the active contact area radius, the constriction resistance and the constriction temperature are calculated by using FEM for elastic/plastic surface deformation. With the knowledge of the constriction radius the temperature curve of the contact area was determined by coupled electrical/thermal FE calculation. Laboratory tests were carried out in order to verify the FE-calculation.

The unpredictable behavior of cache memory makes it difficult to statically analyze the worst-case performance of real-time systems. This problem is further exacerbated in the case of preemptive multitask systems because of inter-task cache interference, called Cache-Related Preemption Delay (CRPD). This paper proposes an approach to analyzing the tight upper bound on CRPD which a task might impose on lower-priority tasks. Our method finds the program execution path which requires the maximum number of cache blocks using an integer linear programming technique. Experimental results show that our approach provides up to 69% tighter bounds on CRPD than a conservative approach.

Virtual reality system is one of the most useful tools for investigating the characteristics of human perception in dynamic visual environment because we can easily and appropriately manipulate parameters of three-dimensional stimuli of vision in accordance with our purpose. In the present study we examined how the brain processes local stimuli during the global sensation of self-motion (vection) in view of temporal information processing -- perceptual latency -- with temporal order judgment task. In Experiment 1 we demonstrated that the targets in the left visual field were perceived prior to those in the right visual field when an observer stared at rightward optokinetic stimuli or perceived self-motion leftward, and vice versa. Especially at 16.0 deg of target eccentricity the biases were much larger with the continuous exposure of optokinetic stimuli than with their intermittent exposure; the former compelled observers to perceive self-motion and the latter hardly did. In Experiment 2 we examined the relationship between the occurrence of vection and temporal order judgments as the exposure duration of optokinetic stimuli was fixed between conditions, and showed that the biases were larger when vection occurred than when it did not. In Experiment 3 we showed that the biases were not modulated by the speed of optokinetic stimuli and not related with the speed of perceived self-motion. This phenomenon can be explained based on exogenous components of attention, the shift of the reference frame for determining the order in which objects come into awareness and imbalance between hemispheric activities. The mechanism is ecologically reasonable in that it allows us to be aware of the incoming events as soon as possible and to avoid any dangerous situations.

The present state of IEC and JIS standards is reviewed on measurement methods of low-loss dielectric and high-tempera-ture superconductor (HTS) materials in the microwave and millimeter wave range. Four resonance methods are discussed actually, that is, a two-dielectric resonator method for dielectric rod measurements, a two-sapphire resonator method for HTS film measurements, a cavity resonator method for microwave measurements of dielectric plates and a cutoff circular waveguide method for millimeter wave measurements of dielectric plates. These methods realize the high accuracy sufficient for measurements of temperature dependence of material properties.

An important barrier to the application of high-temperature superconducting microwave filters is their power-handling capability. To clarify the key parameters for improving the power-handling capability of rf filters based on high-temperature superconductors with microstrip structures, we synthesize bandpass filters with different layouts using several kinds of thin film high-temperature superconductors, and subject them to third-order intermodulation measurements. By improving the sensitivity of the measurement set-up through the selective reduction of the fundamental output signals, we succeed in measuring the intermodulation signals of the superconducting filters. The experimental results indicate that increasing the film thickness and utilizing MBE-grown films of NdBa2Cu3O7 films are effective in obtaining high-power handling microstrip filters.

In this era of System-On-a-Chip (SOC) technology, a designable initial state is required. Thus, embedding low voltage and low power Power-On-Reset (POR) circuit on the SOC chip is important for the portable device. This paper proposes a new POR circuit with process and temperature compensations. A band-gap reference is used in this circuit to reduce the effect of the temperature and process variations. With 200 mV hysteretic design provides robust noise immunity against voltage fluctuations on the power supply. The POR circuit has been designed, simulated, and implemented. A test chip has been fabricated by using 0.18 µm single-poly triple-metal CMOS logical process. Measurement results show the rise threshold voltage Vrr has only a 3% variation under the temperature range from -40 to 125. The power consumption is 39 mW at the 1.8 V power supply. The chip size of the POR is 62 mm280 mm. Thus, this POR circuit has a great potential to apply to a low power supply system.