Step-edge vertical channel organic field-effect transistors (SVC-OFETs) with a very short channel have been fabricated by a novel selective electrospray deposition (SESD) method. We propose the SESD method for the fabrication of SVC-OFETs based on a 6,13-bis(triisopropyl-silylethynyl) pentacene (TIPS-pentacene) semiconductor layer formed by SESD. In the SESD method, an electric field is applied between the nozzle and selective patterned electrodes on a substrate. We demonstrated that the solution accumulates on the selected electrode pattern by controlling the voltage applied to the electrode.

A transmission ellipsometric method without an aperture was recently developed to characterize the electro-optic (EO) performance of EO polymers. The method permits much simpler optical setup compared to the reflection method, and allows easy performance of the incident angle dependence measurements using a conventional glass substrate and uncollimated beam. This paper shows the usefulness of this method for a simple and reliable evaluation of the EO coefficient both for organic and inorganic EO materials, as well as analysis for uniaxial anisotropic materials.

This paper studies an adaptive high gain observer design for nonlinear systems which have lower triangular nonlinearity with Lipschitz coefficient, depending on the control input. Because the gain of the proposed observer is tuned automatically by a simple update law, our design approach doesn't need any information about the Lipschitz constant. Also, it is shown that under some assumptions, the dynamic gain of the proposed observer is bounded and its estimation error converges to zero asymptotically. Finally, a numerical example is given to verify the effectiveness of our design approach.

Ultra-wide band (UWB) radar has a great advantage for range resolution, and is suitable for 3-dimensional (3-D) imaging sensor, such as for rescue robots or surveillance systems, where an accurate 3-dimensional measurement, impervious to optical environments, is indispensable. However, in indoor sensing situations, an available aperture size is severely limited by obstacles such as collapsed furniture or rubles. Thus, an estimated region of target image often becomes too small to identify whether it is a human body or other object. To address this issue, we previously proposed the image expansion method based on the ellipse extrapolation, where the fitting space is converted from real space to data space defined by range points to enhance the extrapolation accuracy. Although this method achieves an accurate image expansion for some cases, by exploiting the feature of the efficient imaging method as range points migration (RPM), there are still many cases, where it cannot maintain sufficient extrapolation accuracy because it only employs the single scattered component for imaging. For more accurate extrapolation, this paper extends the above image expansion method by exploiting double-scattered signals between the target and the wall in an indoor environment. The results from numerical simulation validate that the proposed method significantly expands the extrapolated region for multiple elliptical objects, compared with that obtained using only single scattered signal.

Two types of low-coherence millimeter-wave sources for photonic millimeter-wave ellipsometry are compared. A broadband signal (125-GHz bandwidth) or a narrowband one (0.5-GHz bandwidth) is used to measure the complex relative dielectric constants of purified water, and the narrowband signal is revealed to be suitable for accurate measurement.

Software programs often include many defects that are not easy to detect because of the developers' mistakes, misunderstandings caused by the inadequate definition of requirements, and the complexity of the implementation. Due to the different skill levels of the testers, the significant increase in testing person-hours interferes with the progress of development projects. Therefore, it is desireable for any inexperienced developer to identify the cause of the defects. Model checking has been favored as a technique to improve the reliability earlier in the software development process. In this paper, we propose a verification method in which a Java source code control sequence is converted into finite automata in order to detect the cause of defects by using the model-checking tool UPPAAL, which has an exhaustive checking mechanism. We also propose a tool implemented by an Eclipse plug-in to assist general developers who have little knowledge of the model-checking tool. Because source code is generally complicated and large, the tool provides a step-wise verification mechanism based on the functional structure of the code and makes it easy to verify the business rules in the specification documents by adding a user-defined specification-based model to the source code model.

A modern system-on-chip (SoC) includes many heterogeneous IP components. Generally, a few embedded processors are integrated into SoCs. An asynchronous circuit design technique is employed to achieve low power/energy consumption. In this paper, we design an asynchronous embedded processor on FPGAs and analyze its possible benefits on commercial FPGAs. We use commercially available 65nm high-performance Virtex-5 and 45nm low-power Spartan-6 Xilinx FPGAs to show the impact on power consumption for the two different extreme cases. For the high performance Virtex-5, our asynchronous processor shows 36.8% lower power consumption when compared with its synchronous counterpart. On the other hand, the asynchronous processor consumes 25.6% more power in a low power Spartan-6 FPGA. However, through simple analysis and power simulation, we show that the event-driven nature of asynchronous circuits can further save power/energy even in the Spartan-6 FPGA.

How do global warming and agriculture influence each other? It is possible to answer the question by searching knowledge about the relationship between global warming and agriculture. As exemplified by this question, strong demands exist for searching relationships between objects. Mining knowledge about relationships on Wikipedia has been studied. However, it is desired to search more diverse knowledge about relationships on the Web. By utilizing the objects constituting relationships mined from Wikipedia, we propose a new method to search images with surrounding text that include knowledge about relationships on the Web. Experimental results show that our method is effective and applicable in searching knowledge about relationships. We also construct a relationship search system named “Enishi” based on the proposed new method. Enishi supplies a wealth of diverse knowledge including images with surrounding text to help users to understand relationships deeply, by complementarily utilizing knowledge from Wikipedia and the Web.

Developing a complex network accelerator like an IPsec processor is a great challenge. To this end, we propose a Network Virtual Platform ( NetVP ) that consists of one or more virtual host (vHOST) modules and virtual local area network (vLAN) modules to support electronic system level (ESL) top-down design flow as well as provide the on-line verification throughout the entire development process. The on-line verification capability of NetVP enables the designed target to communicate with a real network for system validation. For ESL top-down design flow, we also propose untimed and timed interfaces to support hardware/software co-simulation. In addition, the NetVP can be used in conjunction with any ESL development platform through the untimed/timed interface. System development that uses this NetVP is efficient and flexible since it allows the designer to explore design spaces such as the network bandwidth and system architecture easily. The NetVP can also be applied to the development of other kinds of network accelerators.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse radars have a definite advantage in high-range resolution imaging, and are suitable for short-range measurements, particularly at disaster sites or security scenes where optical sensors are rarely suitable because of dust or strong backlighting. Although we have already proposed an accurate imaging algorithm called Range Points Migration (RPM), its reconstructible area is too small to identify the shape of an object if it is far from the radar and the size of the aperture is inadequate. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes a novel image expansion method based on ellipse extrapolation; it enhances extrapolation accuracy by deriving direct estimates of the observed range points distributed in the data space. Numerical validation shows that the proposed method accurately extrapolates part of the target boundary, even if an extremely small region of the target boundary is obtained by RPM.

Superconducting integrated circuits should be operated at low temperature below a half of their critical temperatures. Thermal heat from a bias resistor could rise the temperature in Josephson junctions, and would reduce their critical currents. In this study, we estimate the temperature in a Josephson junction heated by a bias resistor at the bath temperature of 4.2 K, and introduce a parameter β that connects the thermal heat from a bias resistor and the temperature elevation of a Josephson junction. By using β, the temperature in the Josephson junction can be estimated as functions of the current through the resistor.

Detecting distributed anomalies rapidly and accurately is critical for efficient backbone network management. In this letter, we propose a novel anomaly detection method that uses router connection relationships to detect distributed anomalies in the backbone Internet. The proposed method unveils the underlying relationships among abnormal traffic behavior through closed frequent graph mining, which makes the detection effective and scalable.

Thus far, there have been many reports and publications on the algorithm for the efficient generation of a circle or an ellipse by the parametric method. In this parametric method, we compute a trigonometric function only at the time of setting the initial condition for generating graphics incrementally using the recurrence formula consisting of the arithmetical operations of addition, subtraction, and multiplication in the main loop. This means that the key to the faster generation of a circle or an ellipse is to reduce the number of multiplication operations. In the conventional methods, the numbers of multiplication operations required to generate a single point each for a circle and an ellipse are three and four, respectively. However, in this paper, we propose a method that makes it possible to generate a slanted ellipse by performing only two multiplication operations per point. The key to this is to use simultaneous recurrences. The proposed method allows a simpler initial setup than any of the conventional methods, thus performing the computation more efficiently. In addition, the new method proposed here causes no theoretical errors, with the rounding error being similar to or less than that of any conventional method.

The robust reduced order observer for a class of discrete-time Lipschitz nonlinear systems with external disturbance is proposed. It is shown that the proposed observer design can suppress the effect on the estimation error of external disturbance up to the prescribed level. Also, linear matrix inequalities are used to represent sufficient conditions on the existence of the proposed observer. Moreover, the maximum admissible Lipschitz constant of the proposed design is obtained for a given disturbance attenuation level. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed design.

This paper proposes a method for detecting ellipses from an image despite (1) multiple colors within the ellipses, (2) partially occluded ellipses' boundaries, (3) noisy, locally deformed boundaries of ellipses, (4) presence of multiple objects other than the ellipses in the image, and (5) combinations of (1) through (4). After boundary curves are obtained by edge detection, by utilizing the first-order difference curves of the edge orientation of each pixel in the boundary curves, a segment-reconnect method obtains boundary clusters. Then, a modified RANSAC detects ellipses by choosing five pixels randomly from the boundary clusters, where overlapped ellipses are merged. Experimental results using synthesized images and real images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method together with comparison with the Randomized Hough Transform, a well-known conventional method.

Machine recognition of mathematical expressions on printed documents is not trivial even when all the individual characters and symbols in an expression can be recognized correctly. In this paper, an automatic classification method of spatial relationships between the adjacent symbols in a pair is presented. This classification is important to realize an accurate structure analysis module of math OCR. Experimental results on very large databases showed that this classification worked well with an accuracy of 99.525% by using distribution maps which are defined by two geometric features, relative size and relative position, with careful treatment on document-dependent characteristics.

Code density is often a critical issue in embedded computers, since the memory size of embedded systems is strictly limited. Echo instructions have been proposed as a method for reducing code size. This paper presents a new type of echo instruction, split echo, and evaluates an implementation of both split echo and traditional echo instructions on a MIPS R3000 based processor. Evaluation results show that memory requirement is reduced by 12% on average with small additional hardware cost.

This paper presents a robust reduced order observer for a class of Lipschitz nonlinear systems with external disturbance. Sufficient conditions on the existence of the proposed observer are characterized by linear matrix inequalities. It is also shown that the proposed observer design can reduce the effect on the estimation error of external disturbance up to the prescribed level. Finally, a numerical example is provided to verify the proposed design method.

Several hardware-based pattern matching engines for network intrusion/prevention detection systems (NIDS/NIPSs) can achieve high throughput with less hardware resources. However, their flexibility to update new patterns is limited and still challenging. This paper describes a PAttern Matching Engine with Limited-time updAte (PAMELA) engine using a recently proposed hashing algorithm called Cuckoo Hashing. PAMELA features on-the-fly pattern updates without reconfiguration, more efficient hardware utilization, and higher performance compared with other works. First, we implement the improved parallel exact pattern matching with arbitrary length based on Cuckoo Hashing and linked-list technique. Second, while PAMELA is being updated with new attack patterns, both stack and FIFO are utilized to bound insertion time due to the drawback of Cuckoo Hashing and to avoid interruption of input data stream. Third, we extend the system for multi-character processing to achieve higher throughput. Our engine can accommodate the latest Snort rule-set, an open source NIDS/NIPS, and achieve the throughput up to 8.8 Gigabit per second while consuming the lowest amount of hardware. Compared to other approaches, ours is far more efficient than any other implemented on Xilinx FPGA architectures.

Point Pattern Matching (PPM) is an essential problem in many image analysis and computer vision tasks. This paper presents a two-stage algorithm for PPM problem using ellipse fitting and dual Hilbert scans. In the first matching stage, transformation parameters are coarsely estimated by using four node points of ellipses which are fitted by Weighted Least Square Fitting (WLSF). Then, Hilbert scans are used in two aspects of the second matching stage: it is applied to the similarity measure and it is also used for search space reduction. The similarity measure named Hilbert Scanning Distance (HSD) can be computed fast by converting the 2-D coordinates of 2-D points into 1-D space information using Hilbert scan. On the other hand, the N-D search space can be converted to a 1-D search space sequence by N-D Hilbert Scan and an efficient search strategy is proposed on the 1-D search space sequence. In the experiments, we use both simulated point set data and real fingerprint images to evaluate the performance of our algorithm, and our algorithm gives satisfying results both in accuracy and efficiency.