Novel thermopiles based on modulation doped AlGaAs/InGaAs and AlGaN/GaN heterostructures are proposed and developed for the first time, for uncooled infrared FPA (Focal Plane Array) image sensor application. The high responsivity with the high speed response time are designed to 4,900 V/W with 110 µs for AlGaAs/InGaAs, and to 460 V/W with 9 µs for AlGaN/GaN thermopiles, respectively. Based on integrated HEMT-MEMS technology, the AlGaAs/InGaAs 3232 matrix FPAs are fabricated to demonstrate its enhanced performances by black body measurement. The technology presented here demonstrates the potential of this approach for low-cost uncooled infrared FPA image sensor application.

This paper proposes a new three-mode resonator, which consists of a parallel-coupled microstrip line resonator embedded with a slotline resonator, and develops a compact low-loss bandpass filter (BPF) with a sharp roll-off response because of four transmission zeros (TZ) located very near the passband. Resonance mechanism and properties of the three modes are first analyzed by using an eigen-mode analysis, and then an equivalent circuit model is established for expressing a novel coupling scheme of the developed BPF. It is made clear from the results of circuit analysis that the four TZs are produced because of multiple paths between the input/output stub lines formed by the three resonant modes and the direct source/load coupling. The validity of the proposed resonator and filter is supported by the comparison between simulated and measured results.

To meet the demand for light sources for on-chip optical interconnections, we demonstrate the continuous-wave (CW) operation of photonic-crystal (PhC) nanocavity lasers at up to 89.8 by using InP buried heterostructures (BH). The wavelength of a PhC laser can be precisely designed over a wide range exceeding 100 nm by controlling the lattice constant of the PhC. The dynamic responses of the PhC laser are also demonstrated with a 3-dB bandwidth of over 7.0 GHz at 66.2. These results reveal the laser's availability for application to wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical interconnection on CMOS chips. We discuss the total bandwidths of future on-chip optical interconnections, and report the capabilities of PhC lasers.

We propose a novel method for measuring the matched total radiated power (TRP) and matched total radiated sensitivity (TRS) of small radio terminals, called over-the-air (OTA) measurement, using a spheroidal coupler (SC). To measure these parameters accurately in a multiple-reflection environment, such as in an SC, we developed two key techniques, i.e. displacement method and reflection compensation method, and verified their effectiveness by several simulations and fundamental experiments on a test transmitter. We also describe an absolute method for measuring antenna radiation efficiency using the displacement method. Furthermore, we describe TRP and TRS measurements for actual UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) terminals, and verify that the proposed method achieves quick measurements with good accuracy. The SC provides a compact, low-cost OTA measurement system with high sensitivity and high speed.

In this paper, we report the reduction in the base-collector capacitance (CBC) of InP/InGaAs double heterojunction bipolar transistors with buried SiO2 wires (BG-HBT). In a previous trial, we could not confirm a clear difference between the CBC of the conventional HBT and that of the BG-HBT because the subcollector layer was thicker than expected. In this study, the interface between the collector and the subcollector was shifted to the middle of the SiO2 wires by adjusting the growth temperature, and a reduction in CBC with buried SiO2 wires was confirmed. The estimated CBC of the BG-HBT was 7.6 fF, while that of the conventional HBT was 8.6 fF. This 12% reduction was in agreement with the 10% reduction calculated according to the designed size.

In heterogeneous cellular networks (HCN), which consists of macrocells and numerous femtocells, efficient interference management schemes between macrocells and femtocells are so crucial to the overall system performance. To mitigate intercell interference in HCN, we propose a new rate-split transmission scheme which has the following characteristics. First, it supports user quality of service (QoS) with the least intercell interference. Second, it is a low complexity and distributed scheme using only Interference to Signal and Noise Ratio (ISNR). An evaluation confirms that the proposed scheme offers better performance than legacy schemes which are not considering user QoS.

This paper proposes a wide-band noise reduction method using a zero phase (ZP) signal which is defined as the IDFT of a spectral amplitude. When a speech signal has periodicity in a short observation, the corresponding ZP signal becomes also periodic. On the other hand, when a noise spectral amplitude is approximately flat, its ZP signal takes nonzero values only around the origin. Hence, when a periodic speech signal is embedded in a flat spectral noise in an analysis frame, its ZP signal becomes a periodic signal except around the origin. In the proposed noise reduction method, we replace the ZP signal around the origin with the ZP signal in the second or latter period. Then, we get an estimated speech ZP signal. The major advantages of this method are that it can reduce not only stationary wide-band noises but also non-stationary wide-band noises and does not require a prior estimation of the noise spectral amplitude. Simulation results show that the proposed noise reduction method improves the SNR more than 5 dB for a tunnel noise and 13 dB for a clap noise in a low SNR environment.

A Fourier domain optical coherence tomography system for obtaining a two-dimensional image is constructed. Imaging characteristics of the OCT system in a transverse direction are experimentally investigated. Angle dependence of reflection intensity from a smooth surface is clearly observed and analyzed with consideration of spatial mode coupling to a fiber.

This paper presents a new common-mode stabilization method for a CMOS differential cascode Class-E power amplifier with LC-tank based driver stage. The stabilization method is based on the identification of the poles and zeros of the closed-loop transfer function at a critical node. By adding a series resistor at the common-gate node of the cascode transistor, the right-half-plane poles are moved to the left half plane, improving the common-mode stability. The simulation results show that the new method is an effective way to stabilize the PA.

This paper proposes a heterogeneous wireless network with handover in the application layer. The proposed network requires no upgrade of wireless infrastructure and mobile terminals to convert the present homogeneous networks to the proposed heterogeneous network. Only installing application programs on the content server side and the mobile terminal side is required. The performance of the proposed network has been evaluated in a field trial using a mobile broadband wireless access (MBWA) air interface with wide coverage and a wireless local area network (WLAN) air interface with high throughput. The field trial results show that the maximum value of the handover outage time is only 170 ms. The proposed heterogeneous wireless network is promising since both high throughput and wide coverage area are attained by a combination of the proposed handover scheme with the present homogeneous wireless networks.

This paper investigates the application of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) in heterogeneous networks for the LTE-Advanced downlink where picocells are overlaid onto macrocells. In LTE-Advanced, in order to perform ICIC, almost blank subframes (ABSs) are employed, where only the cell-specific reference signal (CRS) is transmitted to protect the subframes in the picocells from severe interference from the macrocells. Furthermore, multicast/broadcast over single-frequency network (MBSFN) subframes are employed to reduce the interference of the CRS on the data channel, although the control channel still suffers from interference from the CRS. When the cell range expansion (CRE), which offload the UEs from macrocells to picocells, is used to improve the system performance, the influence from the CRS increases. In order to assess the influence, the required CRE bias to improve the data channel is investigated based on a system-level simulation under various conditions such as the number of picocells, the protected subframe ratio, and the user distribution. The simulation results show that the cell-edge user throughput is improved with the CRE bias of more than 8 dB, employing ABSs. Furthermore, simulation results show that one dominant source of interference is observed for the sets of user equipment (UEs) connected to the picocells via CRE with such a bias value. Based on observation, the influence that the CRS has on the control channel, i.e., physical control format indicator channel (PCFICH), and physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) is investigated based on a link-level simulation combined with a system-level simulation. The simulation results show that protecting the PCFICH is very important compared to protecting the PDCCH, since the block error rate (BLER) performance of the PCFICH becomes worse than the required BLER of 10-3 to support various conditions, although the BLER performance of the PDCCH can exceed the required BLER of 10-2 by spanning the PDCCH over three OFDM symbols.

Allowing WLANs to exploit opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) is a promising approach to alleviate spectrum congestion problems in overcrowded unlicensed ISM bands, especially in highly dense WLAN deployments. In this context, novel channel assignment mechanisms jointly considering available channels in both unlicensed ISM and OSA-enabled licensed bands are needed. Unlike classical schemes proposed for legacy WLANs, channel assignment mechanisms for OSA-enabled WLAN should face two distinguishing issues: channel prioritization and spectrum heterogeneity. The first refers to the fact that additional prioritization criteria other than interference conditions should be considered when choosing between ISM or licensed band channels. The second refers to the fact that channel availability might not be the same for all WLAN Access Points because of primary users' activity in the OSA-enabled bands. This paper firstly formulates the channel assignment problem for OSA-enabled WLANs as a Binary Linear Programming (BLP) problem. The resulting BLP problem is optimally solved by means of branch and bound algorithms and used as a benchmark to develop more computationally efficient heuristics. Upon such a basis, a novel channel assignment algorithm based on weighted graph coloring heuristics and able to exploit both channel prioritization and spectrum heterogeneity is proposed. The algorithm is evaluated under different conditions of AP density and primary band availability.

An adaptive rate controller (ARC) based on an adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is designed to autonomously adjust the data rate of a mobile heterogeneous network to adapt to the changing traffic load and the user speed for multimedia call services. The effect of user speed on the handoff rate is considered. Through simulations, it has been demonstrated that the ANFIS-ARC is able to maintain new call blocking probability and handoff failure probability of the mobile heterogeneous network below a prescribed low level over different user speeds and new call origination rates while optimizing the average throughput. It has also been shown that the mobile cognitive wireless network with the proposed CS-ANFIS-ARC protocol can support more traffic load than neural fuzzy call-admission and rate controller (NFCRC) protocol.

This work studies the benefits of heterogeneous cellular networks with overlapping picocells in a large macrocell. We consider three different strategies for resource allocation and cell association. The first model employs a spectrum overlapping strategy with an SINR-based cell association. The second model avoids the interference between macrocell and picocell through a spectrum splitting strategy. Furthermore, picocell range expansion is also considered in this strategy to enable a load balancing between the macrocell and picocells. The last model is a hybrid one, called as fractional spectrum splitting strategy, where spectrum splitting strategy is only applied at the picocell-edge, while the picocell-inner reuses the spectrum of the macrocell. We constructs resource allocation optimization problem for these strategies to maximize the system rate. Our results show that in terms of system rate, all the three strategies outperform the performance of macrocell-only case, which shows the benefit of heterogeneous networks. Moreover, fractional spectrum splitting strategy provides highest system rate at the expense of outage user rate degradation due to inter-macro-pico interference. Spectrum overlapping model provides the second highest system rate gain and also improves outage user rate owing to full spectrum reuse and the benefit of macro diversity, while spectrum splitting model achieves a moderate system rate gain.

It is important to optimize aggregation schemes for heterogeneous wireless networks for maximizing communication throughput utilizing any available radio access networks. In the heterogeneous networks, differences of the quality of service (QoS), such as throughput, delay and packet loss rate, of the networks makes difficult to maximize the aggregation throughput. In this paper, we firstly analyze influences of such differences in QoS to the aggregation throughput, and show that it is possible to improve the throughput by adjusting the parameters of an aggregation system. Since manual parameter optimization is difficult and takes much time, we propose an autonomous parameter tuning scheme using a machine learning algorithm for the heterogeneous wireless network aggregation. We implement the proposed scheme on a heterogeneous cognitive radio network system. The results on our experimental network with network emulators show that the proposed scheme can improve the aggregation throughput better than the conventional schemes. We also evaluate the performance using public wireless network services, such as HSDPA, WiMAX and W-CDMA, and verify that the proposed scheme can improve the aggregation throughput by iterating the learning cycle even for the public wireless networks. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves twice better aggregation throughput than the conventional schemes.

In Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, heterogeneous networks where femtocells and picocells are overlaid onto macrocells are extensively discussed in addition to traditional well-planned macrocell deployment to improve further the system throughput. In heterogeneous network deployment, combined usage of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) and cell range expansion (CRE) is very effective in improving the system and cell-edge throughput. In this combined usage, the fraction of the sets of user equipment (UEs) connected to the picocells, which are controlled through CRE, and that connected to macrocells affect the gain from the ICIC. Therefore, this paper evaluates the throughput performance of different offset values for CRE and different amounts of protected resources for ICIC in picocell deployments in LTE-Advanced downlink. Simulation results (2–10 picocells and 30 UEs are located within 1 macrocell) assuming a full buffer traffic model show that when the CRE offset value is set between 8 to 20 dB, almost the same user throughput performance is obtained by allocating the appropriate resources to protect UEs that connect to the picocells. Furthermore, the appropriate resource ratio is derived based on the fraction of UEs connected to the picocells through CRE, the fraction of UEs connected to the macrocell, and the number of picocells under the simulation conditions.

Zero-knowledge arguments allows one party to prove that a statement is true, without leaking any other information than the truth of the statement. In many applications such as verifiable shuffle (as a practical application) and circuit satisfiability (as a theoretical application), zero-knowledge arguments for mathematical statements related to linear algebra are essentially used. Groth proposed (at CRYPTO 2009) an elegant methodology for zero-knowledge arguments for linear algebraic relations over finite fields. He obtained zero-knowledge arguments of the sub-linear size for linear algebra using reductions from linear algebraic relations to equations of the form z=x*'y, where x, y ∈ Fnp are committed vectors, z ∈ Fp is a committed element, and *': FnpFnpFp is a bilinear map. These reductions impose additional rounds on zero-knowledge arguments of the sub-linear size. The round complexity of interactive zero-knowledge arguments is an important measure along with communication and computational complexities. We focus on minimizing the round complexity of sub-linear zero-knowledge arguments for linear algebra. To reduce round complexity, we propose a general transformation from a t-round zero-knowledge argument, satisfying mild conditions, to a (t-2)-round zero-knowledge argument; this transformation is of independent interest.

We have developed a process for the fabrication of high-quality Nb/AlOx/Nb tunnel junctions with small area and high current densities for the heterodyne mixers at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. Their dc I-V curves are numerically studied, including the broadening of quasiparticle density of states resulting from the existence of an imaginary part of the gap energy of Nb. We have found both experimentally and numerically that the subgap current is strongly dependent on bias voltage at temperatures below 4.2 K unlike the prediction of the BCS tunneling theory. It is shown that calculated dc I-V curves taking into account the complex number of the gap energy agree well with those of Nb/AlOx/Nb junctions measured at temperatures from 0.4 to 4.2 K. We have successfully built receivers at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths with the noise temperature as low as 4 times the quantum photon noise, employing those high-quality Nb/AlOx/Nb junctions. Those low-noise receivers are to be installed in the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) telescope and they are going into series production now.

Ultra wideband (UWB) radar is considered a promising technology to complement existing camera-based surveillance systems because, unlike cameras, it provides excellent range resolution. Many of the UWB radar imaging algorithms are based on large-scale antenna arrays that are not necessarily practical because of their complexity and high cost. To resolve this issue, we previously developed a two-dimensional radar imaging algorithm that estimates unknown target shapes and motion using only three antennas. In this paper, we extend this method to obtain three-dimensional images by estimating three-dimensional motions from the outputs of five antennas. Numerical simulations confirm that the proposed method can estimate accurately the target shape under various conditions.

We have developed two modulator driver ICs that are based on the functional distributed circuit (FDC) topology for over 40-Gb/s optical transmission systems using InP HBT technology. The FDC topology enables both a wide bandwidth amplifier and high-speed digital functions. The none-return-to-zero (NRZ) driver IC, which is integrated with a D-type flip-flop, exhibits 2.6-Vp-p (differential output: 5.2 Vp-p) output-voltage swings with a high signal quality at 43 and 50 Gb/s. The return-to-zero (RZ) driver IC, which is integrated with a NRZ to RZ converter, produces 2.4-Vp-p (differential output: 4.8 Vp-p) output-voltage swings and excellent eye openings at 43 and 50 Gb/s. Furthermore, we conducted electro-optical modulation experiments using the developed modulator driver ICs and a dual drive LiNbO3 Mach-Zehnder modulator. We were able to obtain NRZ and RZ clear optical eye openings with low jitters and sufficient extinction ratios of more than 12 dB, at 43 and 50 Gb/s. These results indicate that the FDC has the potential to achieve a large output voltage and create high-speed functional ICs for over-40-Gb/s transmission systems.