The effect of lot size change and test processing logistics on VLSI manufacturing final test process efficiency and cost due to the transition of from conventional 5 or 6 inches to 300 mm (12 inches) in wafer size is evaluated through simulation analysis. Simulated results show that a high test efficiency and a low test cost are maintained regardless of arrival lot size in the range of the number of 300 mm wafers per lot from 1 to 25 and the content of express lots in the range of up to 50% by using WEIGHT+RPM rule and the right final test processing logistics. WEIGHT+RPM rule is the rule that considers the jig and temperature exchanging time, the lot waiting time in queue and also the remaining processing time of the machine in use. The logistics has a small processing and moving lot size equal to the batch size of testing equipment.

This paper surveys the results of various studies on 3-D image coding. Themes are focused on efficient compression and display-independent representation of 3-D images. Most of the works on 3-D image coding have been concentrated on the compression methods tuned for each of the 3-D image formats (stereo pairs, multi-view images, volumetric images, holograms and so on). For the compression of stereo images, several techniques concerned with the concept of disparity compensation have been developed. For the compression of multi-view images, the concepts of disparity compensation and epipolar plane image (EPI) are the efficient ways of exploiting redundancies between multiple views. These techniques, however, heavily depend on the limited camera configurations. In order to consider many other multi-view configurations and other types of 3-D images comprehensively, more general platform for the 3-D image representation is introduced, aiming to outgrow the framework of 3-D "image" communication and to open up a novel field of technology, which should be called the "spatial" communication. Especially, the light ray based method has a wide range of application, including efficient transmission of the physical world, as well as integration of the virtual and physical worlds.

Wavelength Division Multiplex (WDM) photonic networks are expected as key for global communication infrastructure. The accurate measurement methods for AWG-MUX/DMUX are desirable for WDM network design. We measured a transfer function matrix of an AWG-MUX to find that polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization dependent loss (PDL) shows the bandpass characteristics, which may limit the maximum size and the bit rate of the system. These bandpass characteristics of PMD and PDL are reproduced by a simple AWG-MUX model: The phase constant difference of 0.5% between orthogonal modes in arrayed waveguides is sufficient to obtain the measured passband characteristics of PMD and PDL. We find phase distribution difference between two orthogonal modes in the arrayed waveguide grating gives arise to complex PMD.

Wavelength Division Multiplex (WDM) photonic networks are expected as key for global communication infrastructure. The accurate measurement methods for AWG-MUX/DMUX are desirable for WDM network design. We measured a transfer function matrix of an AWG-MUX to find that polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization dependent loss (PDL) shows the bandpass characteristics, which may limit the maximum size and the bit rate of the system. These bandpass characteristics of PMD and PDL are reproduced by a simple AWG-MUX model: The phase constant difference of 0.5% between orthogonal modes in arrayed waveguides is sufficient to obtain the measured passband characteristics of PMD and PDL. We find phase distribution difference between two orthogonal modes in the arrayed waveguide grating gives arise to complex PMD.

we evaluate the effect of express lots on production dispatching rule scheduling and cost in VLSI manufacturing final test process. In the assignment of express lots, we make comparisons of two rules, First In First Out (FIFO) rule which is widely used and WEIGHT+RPM rule which considers the time required for jig and temperature exchanges, the remaining processing time of the machine in use and the lot waiting time in queue. When using FIFO rule, the test efficiency begins to deteriorate and the test cost per chip begins to increase, if the content of express lots exceeds 15%. Furthermore, for 30% of express lots' content, the number of total processed lots decreases by 19% and the test cost per chip increases by 22% in comparison to the cases including no express lots. For WEIGHT+RPM rule, however, the test efficiency does not deteriorate and the test cost per chip does not increase even if the content of express lots is increased up to 50%. When we use WEIGHT+RPM rule, Express Lots Tolerances (ELTs), defined as the maximum content of express lots which permits the deterioration of the system characteristics by 5%, are about three times as high as ones when using FIFO rule. It is also found that WEIGHT+RPM rule maintains higher ELTs against the changes in the numbers of planned chips and prepared jigs as compared with FIFO rule.

A 14. 4-in. diagonal EL display with 640128 pixels has been developed in red/green multicolor structures by using a new phosphor layer consisting of Zn1-xMgxS:Mn and ZnS:Mn. The display is designed for 240 Hz-frame rate, enabling the luminance to be improved by a factor of two. In addition, the contrast ratio is strongly enhanced by optimizing the black background structure and color filters. Improved characteristics make it possible for the EL panel to meet the requirements for the public information display taking advantages of high-reliability, crisp image and wide-viewing angle. Furthermore, the possibility of full-color EL displays will be described on the basis of "color by white" approach.

Differences in the behavior of dispenser cathodes and oxide cathodes in laminar-flow type and crossover type electron guns were investigated by experiments and simulations under high-current-density conditions. When an oxide cathode is operated under such conditions, the heating effect due to Joule heat in the oxide layer exceeds the cooling effect, depending on the product of the work function and the cathode current, resulting in a rise in the cathode temperature. This rise in cathode temperature aggravates deterioration of emission characteristics during the life of an oxide cathode. In the case of the dispenser cathode, however, the cathode temperature decreases under high-current-density conditions. When an oxide cathode in a crossover type electron gun is operated, equipotential surfaces are formed in the curved surface in the oxide layer. The formation of an equipotential surface leads to relaxation of the loading. It is considered that this is the reason for the longer life of an oxide cathode in a crossover type electron gun than that of an oxide cathode in a laminar-flow type electron gun.

The coming information society will require images at the high end of the quality range. By using a new method which focuses on the assessment words of the high order sensation, we are investigating the important physical factors for the difficult reproduction of high level, high quality sensation in the electronic capture and display of images. We have found a key assessment word "image depth" that describes appropriately the high order subjective sensation that is indispensable for the display of extra high quality images. Related to the depth of images, we have discovered a new physical factor and the degree of precision required of already known physical factors for the display of extra high quality images. The cross modulation among R, G and B signals is the newly discovered important physical factor affecting the quality of an electronic display. In addition, we have found that very strict control of distortion in the gamma and the step response and the strict suppression of the halation in a CRT display are necessary. We note that aliasing of the displayed images also destroys the sensation of depth. This paper first outlines the overall objective of our work, second considers the important physical factors as important for extra high quality imaging, and then describes the specific effects of cross modulation distortion, gamma, step response, halation and aliasing as they relate to image depth. Finally, the relation of the discussed physical factors with the high order sensation are discussed broadly.

A homeotropic liquid crystal display utilizing a liquid crystal with positive dielectric anisotropy, 13. 3" XGA TFT-LCD, has been fabricated. The rubbing-free device, appears black in the absence of electric field. When an electric field generated by interdigital electrodes is applied, a bend deformation of molecular director to the direction of the field occurs and thus the cell transmits light, showing brightness uniformity in all directions owing to the dual domainlike director configuration. With an addition of negative-birefringent film, this device shows excellent viewing angle characteristics.

We have studied the electro-optical properties in Polymer Network Liquid Crystal Displays which are composed of a three-dimensional polymer network formed in continuous liquid crystal layers prepared by photo-polymerization induced phase separation processes. In view of the behavior in the orientation of the liquid crystal molecule at the polymers surface, it can be clarified that the electro-optical properties are strongly governed by the polymer. By a combination of two different characteristics of the polymers with respect to a temperature dependence, a variation in the driving voltage for a temperature change can be improved.

The performance of AC plasma displays has been improved in the area of brightness and contrast, while significant advances in image quality are still required for the HDTV quality. In particular, in full color motion video, motion artifacts and lack of color depth are still visible in some situations. These motional artifacts are mitigated as the number of the subfields increases, usually at the cost of losing brightness or increasing driving circuitry. Therefore, it is still one of our great concerns to find out the optimized subfield configuration through weighting and order of each subfield, and their coding of combination. For evaluation and improvement of motion picture disturbance, we have established a procedure that fully simulates the image quality of displays which utilize the subfield driving scheme. The simulation features virtually located sensor pixels on human retina, eye-tracking sensor windows, and a built-in spatial low pass filter. The model pixelizes the observers retina like a sensor chip in a CCD camera. An eye-tracking sensor window is assigned to every light emission from the display, to calculate the emissions from one to four adjoining pixels along the trajectory of motion. Through this model, a scene from original motion picture without disturbance is transformed into the still image with simulated disturbance. The integration of the light emission from adjoining pixels through the window, also functions as a built-in spatial low pass filter to secure the robust output, considering the MTF of the human eye. Both simulation and actual 42-in-diagonal PDPs showed close results under various conditions, showing that the model is simple, but reasonable. Through the simulation, general properties of the subfield driving scheme for gray scale have been elucidated. For example, a PWM-like coding offers a better performance than an MSB-split coding in many cases. The simulation also exemplifies the motion picture disturbance as a non-linear filter process caused by the dislocation of bit weightings, suggesting that tradeoffs between disturbance and resolution in motion area are mandatory.

A method to improve the reflection efficiency of holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) is proposed and its effectiveness is confirmed. Controlling the alignment of liquid crystal (LC) in tiny droplets of HPDLC can increase the refractive-index difference between the LC droplet layer and the polymer layer, causing the peak reflectance and reflective spectral width to expand. We observed experimentally that 96% of the light components excluding the scattering loss can be diffracted in a transmission HPDLC device by ordering the LC. In a reflection HPDLC, we found that reflection could be improved by ordering through an applied shear force. Our findings should lead to an improvement in the quality of reflective display devices.

This paper proposes an object oriented face region detection and tracking method using range color information. Range segmentation of the objects are obtained from the complicated background using disparity histogram (DH). The facial regions among the range segmented objects are detected using skin-color transform technique that provides a facial region enhanced gray-level image. Computationally efficient matching pixel count (MPC) disparity measure is introduced to enhance the matching accuracy by removing the effect of the unexpected noise in the boundary region. Redundancy operations inherent in the area-based matching operation are removed to enhance the processing speed. For the skin-color transformation, the generalized facial color distribution (GFCD) is modeled by 2D Gaussian function in a normalized color space. Disparity difference histogram (DDH) concept from two consecutive frames is introduced to estimate the range information effectively. Detailed geometrical analysis provides exact variation of range information of moving object. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm works well in various environments, at a rate of 1 frame per second with 512 480 resolution in general purpose workstation.

Dense WDM techniques that exploit the enormous bandwidth of dispersion-shifted fibers (DSFs) while avoiding the impairments due to nonlinear effects are described. First, the nature of four-wave mixing (FWM), the dominant impairment factor in WDM transmission systems, is investigated using DSF installed in the field and laboratory experiments. This provides useful information for the practical design of WDM networks based on DSF. Second, practical techniques to reduce FWM impairment, unequal channel allocation and off-lambda-zero channel allocation (equal channel allocation in the novel 1580 nm band) along with gain-shifted erbium-doped fiber amplifiers for the 1570 to 1600 nm band, is described. Comparisons between off-lambda-zero and unequal channel allocation are provided in terms of the maximum transmission distance for various numbers of channels. Two schemes to immunize WDM systems against group velocity dispersion, span-by-span dispersion compensation and optical duobinary format, are presented. The combination of unequal channel allocation with off-lambda-zero channel allocation as well as the combination of two bands: the conventional 1550 nm band and the novel 1580 nm band are proven to be very useful in expanding the usable bandwidth of DSFs.

The effectiveness of periodic dispersion compensation on single-channel 40 Gbit/s soliton transmission system was experimentally investigated. This technique requires just the dispersion compensation fibers and wideband optical filters in the transmission line, which has no difficulty to be used in the practical system. By using polarization-division-multiplexing together with periodic dispersion compensation, single-channel 40 Gbit/s transmission over 4700 km was demonstrated. Single-polarization 40 Gbit/s transmission experiments, which are more suitable for system implementation and compatible with WDM were also conducted. We investigated the transmission characteristics and pulse dynamics in different dispersion maps and in the optimized dispersion map, single-channel, single-polarization 40 Gbit/s transmission over 6300 km was successfully demonstrated.

Recent progress in neural network research has demonstrated the usefulness of neural networks in a variety of areas. In this work, its application in the spatial resolution improvement of a remotely sensed low resolution thermal infrared image using high spatial resolution of visible and near-infrared images from Landsat TM sensor is described. The same work is done by an algebraic method. The tests developed are explained and examples of the results obtained in each test are shown and compared with each other. The error analysis is also carried out. Future improvements of these methods are evaluated.

This paper describes the wavelength division multiplexing technology for the long-haul optical communication system, especially for the undersea cable system. At first, the present WDM technology for the undersea cable system is reviewed briefly. After that, some experiments using compensation of the dispersion slope of the transmission fiber are discussed as future technical options of undersea systems with over 100 Gbit/s capacity.

Macroscopic method for quantization of the evanescent fields brought about by total reflection is presented. Here, a semi-infinite space is assumed to be filled with a transparent dispersive dielectric with dielectric constant ε(ω) to the left of the plane z = 0, and be empty to the right of the plane. The wave is assumed to be incident from the left, and so the whole field is composed of the triplet of incident, reflected, and transmitted waves labeled by a continuous wave vector index. The transmitted wave in free space may be evanescent. The triplet is shown exactly without using slowly varying field approximation in dispersive medium to form orthogonal mode for different wave vectors, which provides the basis for the quantization of the triplet with taken into account of medium dispersion. The exact orthogonal relation reduces to the well known one if the dielectric is nondispersive, ε/ω = 0. By using the field expansion in terms of the orthogonal triplet modes, the total field energy is found to be the sum of the energies of independent harmonic oscillators. A discussion is also made on the wave momentum of evanescent field.

Low-profile, miniaturized and highly efficient power inverters are required to light up backlights, which include cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs), in color liquid crystal displays (LCDs), replacing conventional power inverters with electromagnetic transformers. The object of this study is to actualize a power inverter to which a novel multilayered piezoelectric ceramic transformer operating in the third order longitudinal mode is applied. The piezoelectric transformer has a symmetrical structure in the lengthwise direction and its generating part operates in a piezoelectric stiffened mode in order to increase both energy conversion efficiency and power density. This transformer has great advantages. Namely, all the electronic terminals in this transformer can be connected at the vibration nodes of the transformer, which contributes to the guarantee of stable transformer performances at high power operation, and this transformer is superior in impedance matching against the backlight load at steady state, because the output impedance of this transformer is much lower than that of conventional Rosen type transformers. Then a power inverter with the transformer was fabricated. In this power inverter, a separately excited oscillation circuit was adopted to drive the transformer with high efficiency, and the transformer drive frequency was controlled by detecting the backlight current in order to adjust the backlight luminance properly. As a result, the fabricated power inverter exhibited more than 90% overall efficiency and 4. 5-W output power, which is enough power to light up a 9. 4 inch color LCD, including the stray capacitance loss resulting from CCFL mounting. The luminance value on a light transmission plate of the backlight was more than 2000 cd/m2.

RZ signal transmission in an anomalous region with periodic dispersion compensation is examined by a straight-line experiment in terms of the compensation ratio, the signal power, and the pulse width. The optimum condition enables single-channel 20-Gbit/s RZ signal and two-WDM-channel 20-Gbit/s signals (40-Gbit/s in total) to be transmitted over 5,520 km and 2,160 km, respectively. Numerical simulations with the assistance of a basic theory enables analysis of the experimental results. It is shown that the balance between the waveform distortion and the remaining Gordon-Haus jitter determines the optimum conditions to achieve the longest transmission distance. Excess dispersion compensation results in waveform distortion, while insufficient compensation causes a greater amount of remaining jitter. Moreover, spectrum deformation during propagation is experimentally and numerically clarified to have a large effect on the transmission performance, especially for WDM transmission.