To realize the hardware object which facilitates the application development in the reconfigurable computing system, a hardware module (HwModule) is proposed and implemented. To access the circuit in the HwModule from the standard PC without detailed knowledge of the hardware, an object manager (ObjectManager) is also implemented. With the help of the ObjectManager, the programmers can use the hardware objects like the usual software objects. The HwModule is applied to the image matching, and the easiness of the application development for the HwModule is confirmed.

In this paper, we propose a preemptive test scheduling technique (a test can be interrupted and later resumed) for core-based systems with the objective to minimize the test application time. We make use of reconfigurable core test wrappers in order to increase the flexibility in the scheduling process. The advantage with such a wrapper is that it is not limited to a single TAM (test access mechanism) bandwidth (wrapper chain configuration) at each core. We model the scheduling problem as a Bin-packing problem, and we discuss the transformation: number of TAM wires (wrapper-chains) versus test time in combination with preemption, as well as the possibilities and the limitations to achieve an optimal solution in respect to test application time. We have implemented the proposed preemptive test scheduling algorithm, and we have through experiments demonstrated its efficiency.

We propose Optimal Temporal Decomposition (OTD) of speech for voice morphing preserving Δ cepstrum. OTD is an optimal modification of the original Temporal Decomposition (TD) by B. Atal. It is theoretically shown that OTD can achieve minimal spectral distortion for the TD-based approximation of time-varying LPC parameters. Moreover, by applying OTD to preserving Δ cepstrum, it is also theoretically shown that Δ cepstrum of a target speaker can be reflected to that of a source speaker. In frequency domain interpolation, the Laplacian Spectral Distortion (LSD) measure is introduced to improve the Inverse Function of Integrated Spectrum (IFIS) based non-uniform frequency warping. Experimental results indicate that Δ cepstrum of the OTD-based morphing spectra of a source speaker is mostly equal to that of a target speaker except for a piecewise constant factor and subjective listening tests show that the speech intelligibility of the proposed morphing method is superior to the conventional method.

Indium tin oxide (ITO) films were deposited at a temperature below 50 by a low-voltage sputtering system. The sputtering voltage was fixed at 100 V and Ar, Kr, and Xe were used as the sputtering gases. Compared with the sputtering in Ar gas, the sputtering in Kr or Xe gas caused a significant suppression of crystallization of the deposited film and resulted in the formation of amorphous films. These films had much lower resistivities than the films deposited using Ar gas, since the Hall mobility of the films had a larger value. Typical Hall mobility and carrier density are 50 cm2/Vsec, and 51020 cm-3, respectively. This improvement was attributable to the reduction of high-energy particle bombardment to the film surface in the sputtering. These films are stable at a temperature below 150, and crystallization occurs at a temperature above 150.

Temperature dependence of drain current is analyzed in detail in terms of mobility and threshold voltage. From the analyses, it is proved that a point exists that the drain current is fixed without depending on temperature when the MOSFET operates in strong inversion. Applying this characteristic, a CMOS temperature-voltage converter operating in strong inversion with high linearity is proposed. SPICE simulation and experimental results are shown, and the corresponding performances are discussed.

Thermal stability of stacked high-κ dielectrics, especially ZrO2, HfO2 and ZrSiO4 /SiO2 layered structures, on silicon has been investigated in terms of ultrahigh vacuum (UHV), 1 Torr N2 and helium (He) gas annealing with controlled oxygen partial pressure (PO2) at 920. Comparison of 2 nm and 20 nm ZrO2 films under UHV annealing revealed that the trigger of silicidation is the contact of ZrO2, SiO and Si accompanying disappearance of interfacial SiO2 layer due to SiO desorption. In the contact position, a small amount of SiO gas can easily change ZrO2 to ZrSi2. This reaction model is also applicable to the silicidation of HfO2 and ZrSiO4, at not only stacked high-κ film/Si substrate interface, but also at gate poly-Si/high-κ film interface. Moreover, comparison of UHV, N2 and He annealing with controlled PO2 revealed that the optimal PO2 ranges in He at which the thermal stability of layered structure can be achieved are wider than those in UHV and N2. This result suggests that He gas physically may obstruct SiO creation due to the quenching of atomic vibration at degradation-prone sites in the SiO2 /Si interface, thus reducing probability of bond breaking process, which is the first step of silicidation.

Data compression is popularly applied to computer systems and communication systems. Especially, lossless compression is applied to text compression. Since compressed data are very sensitive to errors, several error control methods for data compression using probability model, such as for arithmetic coding, have been proposed. This paper proposes to apply an unequal error protection, or a UEP, scheme to LZ77 coding and LZW coding. This investigates a structure of the compressed data and clarifies a part which is more sensitive to errors than the other by using theoretical analysis and computer simulation. The UEP scheme protects the error-sensitive part from errors more strongly than the others. Computer simulation says that the proposed scheme can recover from errors in the compressed data more effectively than the conventional methods.

Recently, millimeter-wave energy has attracted much attention as a new and novel energy source for materials processing. In the present paper, several unique features of millimeter-wave heating in materials processing are reviewed briefly and development of materials processing machines by mm-wave radiation is also described. In the application of mm-wave heating, sintering of high quality alumina ceramics having a high bending strength of about 800 MPa are first demonstrated and followed by preparation of aluminum nitride with a high thermal conductivity over 200 W/(mK) at a sintering temperature lower by 473-573 K than the conventional method, by which this processing can be expected to be one of the environment-conscious energy saving processes. A newly developed post-annealing process with mm-wave radiation is described, in which crystallization of amorphous perovskite oxide films prepared by plasma sputtering was attained at temperatures lower than that by the conventional heating and the dielectric constant of post-annealed SrTiO3 (STO) films by mm-wave radiation were drastically improved.

A simple circuit scheme, able to generate square/triangular wave, is proposed. Its advantages are that oscillation frequency and amplitudes of the proposed circuit do have a small range of temperature drift. Electronic adjustments of them can be obtained with a wide sweep range and DC offset adjustment available. In addition, the proposed scheme can produce frequency-constant derivative of PWM signal without an additional device requirement. It is very appropriate for, with simple circuit details, not only circuit implementation but also monolithic fabrication. The PSPICE simulation results through bipolar technology are given here, they show good performance of the proposed circuit.

Hyperthermia is one of the modalities for cancer treatment, utilizing the difference of thermal sensitivity between tumor and normal tissue. In this treatment, the tumor or target cancer cell is heated up to the therapeutic temperature between 42 and 45 without overheating the surrounding normal tissues. Particularly, the authors have been studying the coaxial-slot antenna for interstitial microwave hyperthermia. At that time, we analyzed the heating characteristics of the coaxial-slot antenna under the assumption that the human body is a homogeneous medium. In this paper, we analyzed the heating characteristics of the coaxial-slot antenna inside an actual neck tumor by using numerical calculations. The models of calculations consist of MRI tomograms of an actual patient. As a result of the calculations, we observed almost uniform temperature distributions inside the human body including the actual neck tumor, which are similar to the results obtained for a homogeneous medium.

Temporal locality in IP destination address sequences can be captured by the addresses' reuse distance distribution. Based on measurements from data for a wide range of networks, we propose an accurate empirical model in contrast to results derived from the stationarity assumption of address generation processes.

A low energy plasma based on an electron discharge was investigated for the pre-epi clean of silicon wafers and for plasma enhanced homo and hetero epitaxial growth of Si and SiGe layers. VS were produced in a short, completely dry process sequence consisting of LEPC and LEPECVD only. The wafer/epilayer interface obtained in this process sequence was suitable to grow high quality VS with low surface roughness and dislocation densities. Based on this process and its implementation in a 200/300 mm single wafer cluster tool, a high volume and economical production of VS seems possible.

High-temperature stability of copper (Cu) gate AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) was investigated. Samples were annealed at various temperatures to monitor the changes on device performances. Current-voltage performance such as drain-source current, transconductance, threshold voltage and gate leakage current has no obvious degradation up to annealing temperature of 500 and time of 5 minutes. Also up to this temperature, no copper diffusion was found at the Cu and AlGaN interface by secondary ion mass spectrometry determination. At annealing temperature of 700 and time of 5 minutes, device performance was found to have degraded. Gate voltage swing increased and threshold voltage shifted due to Cu diffusion into AlGaN. These results indicate that the Schottky contact and device performance of Cu-gate AlGaN/GaN HEMT is stable up to annealing temperature of 500. Cu is a promising candidate as gate metallization for high-performance power AlGaN/GaN HEMTs.

We have demonstrated AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) grown on epitaxial AlN/sapphire templates. The crystal qualities and fabricated device performances between AlGaN/GaN HEMTs on epitaxial AlN/sapphire templates and conventional AlGaN/GaN HEMTs on sapphire substrates with low-temperature buffer layer (LT-BLs) are compared with each other. By using epitaxial AlN/sapphire templates instead of LT-BLs, higher mobility was exhibited and superior crystal qualities were observed, as confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM) images and capacitance-voltage measurements. In addition, the dc characteristics of the fabricated devices on epitaxial AlN/sapphire templates were enhanced. AlGaN/GaN HEMTs on epitaxial AlN/sapphire templates are promising candidates for practical applications of nitride-based electronic devices.

Nishiara and Morita defined an i.i.d. word-valued source which is defined as a pair of an i.i.d. source with a countable alphabet and a function which transforms each symbol into a word over finite alphabet. They showed the asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) of the i.i.d. word-valued source and discussed the relation with source coding algorithm based on a string parsing approach. However, their model is restricted in the i.i.d. case and any universal code for a class of word-valued sources isn't discussed. In this paper, we generalize the i.i.d. word-valued source to the ergodic word-valued source which is defined by an ergodic source with a countable alphabet and a function from each symbol to a word. We show existence of entropy rate of the ergodic word-valued source and its formula. Moreover, we show the recurrence time theorem for the ergodic word-valued source with a finite alphabet. This result clarifies that Ziv-Lempel code (ZL77 code) is universal for the ergodic word-valued source.

Cochannel interference and multipath propagation reduce the performance of mobile communication systems. Multi-input MLSE with whitening processing can mitigate the influence of the interference and provide path diversity gain. In conventional considerations, however, the required complexity rapidly rises with the number of array elements. In this paper, we propose multi-input MLSE that whitens error signals in the signal space by using a multibeam adaptive array. This scheme can reduce the computational load of multi-input MLSE than the conventional type when using a large-element array. The results of an analysis show that the proposed type is equivalent to conventional one in the sense of the metric and provides less computational complexity.

A compact high-temperature superconducting (HTS) bandpass filter (BPF) using coplanar waveguide (CPW) meander-line parallel-circuited resonators is proposed for microwave receiver applications. The design theory is presented based on a conventional filter theory with J-inverters. Also, analytical and numerical studies of the meander-line resonator are carried out in terms of equivalent circuit values, the resonant frequency, and the unloaded Q. Two- and four-stage 0.05 dB ripple Chebyshev BPFs at 2 GHz with relative bandwidth 60 MHz are fabricated with the metalorganic deposition (MOD)-derived YBCO films on LaAlO3 substrates and their performance are demonstrated. The measured frequency characteristics and the unloaded quality factors agree well with the theoretical and numerical results and the validity of the design theory is confirmed.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing animated agents for tasks that are typically performed by humans. They serve as communicative partners in a variety of applications, such as tutoring systems, sales, or entertainment. This paper first discusses design principles for animated agents to enhance their effectiveness as tutors, sales persons, or actors, among other roles. It is argued that agents should support their perception as social actors by displaying human-like social cues such as affect and gestures. An architecture for emotion-based agents will be described and a simplified version of the model will be illustrated by two interaction scenarios that feature cartoon-style characters and can be run in a web browser. The second focus of this paper is an empirical evaluation of the effect of an affective agent on users' emotional state which is derived from physiological signals of the user. Our findings suggest that an agent with affective behavior may significantly decrease user frustration.

We report in this paper, the performance of AlGaN/GaN HFETs in the context of high power, low noise and high temperature operations, along with a comparison of their characteristics with other conventional technologies. Finally, a single stage modulator driver for long haul optical communications is presented as an example of application of the GaN-based devices high power handling capabilities.

This paper presents a modified microwave radio-thermometer (MRTM) with material characteristic estimator and multiple temperature conversion tables to measure subcutaneous temperature of a living body. This estimator provides a temperature retrieval unit with material characteristics such as permittivity, conductivity, thickness and geometry of the living body. The temperature retrieval unit with multiple temperature conversion tables can select one of the tables and compute temperature value corresponding to measured radiation power. In the experiments, it was shown that the radio-thermometer could reduce measurement errors of about 0.82 to 7.68 for the cases of distilled water and mixed liquid # 5 with thickness of 29.5 cm and 9.5 cm at the temperature of 37.