The field supported by multilayered periodic waveguides is well characterized by only one or two discrete leaky waves, rather than by a more complicated field representation that includes continuous spectra. The rigorous leaky-modes coupled in multilayered geometry can be then treated by relatively simpler and analytic model that describes the operation of practical optoelectronic devices in terms of leakage effects. To complement our modeling, we discuss and emphasize novel mathematical formulations based on the field orthogonality conditions of TE and TM modes coupled in multilayered periodic structures. In addition, to show the validity of our approach we numerically evaluate new physical meanings to illustrate quantitatively and rigorously the coupling efficiency of grating-assisted directional couplers (GADCs). The results reveal that the systematic and effective technique yields phenomenologically useful interpretations.

This paper describes an efficient k-out-of-n threshold digital signature scheme for a smart card based system where a signer uses multiple cards so that the signature can be issued in a dependable manner. The main feature of our method is that it does not require a secret communication path among these cards in the signature issuing protocol, and that it requires low communication and computational complexity. Former is an advantage under the current export control regulation which makes hard to export more than 56-bit cipher techniques, and latter is advantage over so-called robust signature.

In this paper, we propose a realtime concatenation technique between basic skeletal motions obtained by the motion capture technique and etc. to generate a lifelike behavior for a humanoid character (avatar). We execute several experiments to show the advantage and the property of our technique and also report the results. Finally, we describe our applied system called WonderSpace which leads participants to the exciting and attractive virtual worlds with humanoid characters in cyberspace. Our concatenation technique has the following features: (1) based on a blending method between a preceding motion and a succeeding motion by a transition function, (2) realizing "smooth transition," "monotone transition," and "equivalent transition" by the transition function called paste function, (3) generating a connecting interval by making the backward and forward predictions for the preceding and succeeding motions, (4) executing the prediction under the hypothesis of "the smooth stopping state" or "the state of connecting motion", (5) controlling the prediction intervals by the parameter indicating the importance of the motion, and (6) realizing realtime calculation.

We examined the creep properties and hazard rates of plastic split alignment sleeves to ensure the long-term reliablity of optical fiber connections. It required a gauge retention force Fr of more than 200 gf to suppress the fluctuation in the insertion loss of a plastic sleeve. From the fluctuation data, we estimated the time-to-failure tf at which the Fr value became 200 gf. We estimated the acceleration parameters, median lifetimes ξ, and hazard rates λ by using the tf values based on the Weibull statistics. The ξ values decreased rapidly with increasing temperature and relative humidity. Small λ values of < 0.01 FITs and of 1 FITs were expected for 20 years in a normal atmosphere (25C/50%RH) and in a more severe case of 25C/90%RH or 45C/50%RH.

To extract extrinsic resistances, conventional cold-FET methods require additional DC measurements or channel technological parameters. Additionally, the methods need at least two sets of cold-FET S-parameters measured at different cold-FET bias conditions in order to completely determine gate and drain pad capacitance as well as extrinsic gate, source and drain inductance and their resistances. One set of S-parameters handles the extraction of extrinsic inductances, and the other set extracts the gate and drain pad capacitance. To be free from additional DC measurement or channel technological parameters and reduce the number of sets of cold-FET S-parameters, we propose a cold-FET method that can extract all the extrinsic elements including the gate and drain capacitance, using only one set of cold-FET S-parameters. The method has shown excellent agreement between modeled and measured S-parameters up to 62 GHz at 56 different normal operating bias points.

The subject of this study is to propose a new structure that can realize simultaneously high breakdown voltage and high packing density for both Nch low side switch and Pch high side switch in 200 V class rating. As the conventional techniques for the electric field relaxation, the structure of field plate, field ring and RESURF are well known, but these techniques are inadequate for the high packing density because they are the techniques in surface region. In order to conquer this subject, it is necessary to relax the electric field in the deep region. The electric field relaxation was investigated by device simulation. In the Nch low side switch the electric field is relaxed by buried oxide film in SOI structure. However, electric field relaxation cannot be realized only by adapting the SOI structure for Pch high side switch. Then we tried to insert an intrinsic layer between P-drift layer and the buried oxide film in order to spread the depletion layer in the deep region. This spread depletion layer by intrinsic layer and the depletion layer by field plate connect vertically, and the dosage of the ion implantation for drift layer can be set to two times higher than the case without intrinsic layer. As the results, it was revealed that the SOI structure with intrinsic layer is effective to achieve this subject. Furthermore, by fabricating both Nch low side switch and Pch high side switch on intrinsic SOI substrate, breakdown voltage more than 250 V were achieved.

A novel SC (Switched-Capacitor) offset- and gain-compensated sample/hold circuit is presented. It is implemented by a new topology which reduces the effects due to the imperfections of op-amp. Simulation results indicate that the circuit achieves high accuracy without requiring high-quality components.

Several types of coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonator are analyzed by use of the field decay method based on the FDTD algorithm in this paper. Quality (Q) factors of a CPW resonator, including radiation Q, conductor Q, dielectric Q and unloaded Q, are investigated thoroughly. A new procedure to calculate conductor Q is proposed. Some CPW resonators are fabricated and measured in order to validate the analysis method. It is shown that radiation from a CPW resonator can be reduced by means of the stepped impedance technique. It is also seen that miniaturization of CPW resonators can be realized if the stepped impedance structure is adopted.

In this paper we develop a robust control theory to achieve fault-tolerant behaviors of timed discrete event systems (DESs) with model uncertainty represented as a set of some possible models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed theory, we provide a case study of a resistance spot welding process.

The Internet is a heterogeneous and rapidly evolving environment. New information services have been added, modified, and diversified, while legacy services have been abandoned. Users' requirements for services are also changing very quickly. It is becoming very difficult to find required information services from extremely huge amount of information in the Internet. It is necessary to design information service system, which can meet user's heterogeneous requirements for services, adaptability of services to cope with ever-changing situation and to provide assurance. Faded information field architecture and Push/Pull Mobile Agent (MA) technologies are proposed as basic components of autonomous information service system to achieve these goals. The system is proposed from users' and providers' point of view, therefore we present a technique for balancing users' and providers' communication cost based on `through rate' for faded information field realization. On the basis of this technique, autonomous information allocation algorithm is proposed, in which each node may determine information amount based on push/pull cost. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through simulation.

In this study, the shielding effect of high-loss dielectric and magnetic materials themselves and also an oval human model placed behind these material, were investigated by the FDTD method, for near- and far-field exposure, using the half-wave length dipole antenna. According to the results, a high-loss magnetic material showed a large shielding effect (average 20 dB) compared to the high-loss dielectric material, for near- and far-field shields. Also, the reduction of the shielding effect was small (2 dB) for the high-loss magnetic material, while it was large for the high loss dielectric material, on decreasing the distance between the antenna and shield. Moreover, the variation of the shielding effect on a human model placed behind the shield was small (0.2-1.5 dB) for the high-loss magnetic material, but large for the high-loss dielectric material. This is similar to the results of the shield materials themselves, for the close antenna-shield and human-shield distances, respectively.

We have developed a new method to improve cooperation in concurrent systems for distributed control by using multi-agent (MA) functions. Since field terminals (FTs) work concurrently, cooperation among them is essential to the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall system. When FTs are modeled as agents, it is easy to explicitly deal with the interactions among them because those interactions can be modeled naturally as communication among agents with cooperation and negotiation. In conventional central control systems, the host computer supervises and controls all FTs in accordance with a pre-installed control algorithm. Our method instead uses intelligent field terminals (IFTs) that can evaluate the diverse information from devices of other IFTs autonomously. In the work reported here, we have evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of our cooperative control method experimentally and have developed a system using this method to control various kinds of water delivery systems. The IFT providing MA functions that can evaluate the control parameters (CPs) and conditions of the other IFTs. If turn-around time is to be shortened, the conflicts that occur when the data processed by different IFTs is inconsistent or irregular must be resolved autonomously. Each IFT therefore cooperates with diverse functional agents (FA)s of other IFTs by using priority levels, conditions, and evaluation points in order to maintain the continuity of water delivery.

In this paper, the authors derived the distributions of the probability of detection and of false alarm in function of the decision threshold. An Optimized Threshold Decision (OTD) algorithm was proposed to decide the optimal threshold for reaching the best system performance in a given known channel noise. By applying this OTD algorithm, the multiple access capacity can thus be maximized.

This paper describes a Variable Threshold-voltage CMOS technology (VTCMOS) which controls the threshold voltage (VTH) by means of substrate bias control. Circuit techniques to combine a switch circuit for an active mode and a pump circuit for a standby mode are presented. Design considerations, such as latch-up immunity and upper limit of reverse substrate bias, are discussed. Experimental results obtained from chips fabricated in a 0.3 µm VTCMOS technology are reported. VTH controllability including temperature dependence and influence on short channel effect, power penalty caused by the control circuit, substrate current dependence at low VTH, and substrate noise influence on circuit performance are investigated. A scaling theory is also presented for use in the discussion of future possibilities and problems involved in this technology.

Random modulation refers to the changing of the MOSFET threshold voltage cell by cell. This paper claims it is essential in sub-2-V CMOS design because it reduces the sub-threshold leakage current even in the active and sleep modes as well as in the stand-by mode. We found that a gradated modulation scheme, which gradually changes the ratio of low- Vth cells according to the path-delay, is the best approach. To achieve the minimal leakage current, the way of determining the optimum pair of threshold voltages is also described. Experimental results for microprocessor show that gradated modulation reduces sub-threshold leakage current by 75% to 90% compared to conventional single-low-threshold voltage design without degrading the performance of the circuits.

As a preprocessor of the automatic speech recognizer in a noisy environment, a microphone array system has been investigated to reduce the environmental noise. In usual microphone array design, a plane wave is assumed for the sake of simplicity (far-field assumption). However, this far-field assumption does not always hold, resulting in distortion in the array output. In this report, the subspace method, which is one of the high resolution spectrum estimator, is applied to the near-field source localization problem. A high resolution method is necessary especially for the near-field source localization with a small-sized array. By combining the source localization technique with a spatial inverse filter, the signal coming from the multiple sources in the near-field range can be separated. The modified minimum variance beamformer is used to design the spatial inverse filter. As a result of the experiment in a real environment with two sound sources in the near-field range, 60-70% of word recognition rate was achieved.

Voltage holding property of liquid crystal (LC) cell for long period was investigated and the experimantal results were analyzed using a microscopic model considered the movement of ions in LC layer. The time dependent voltage decay curve observed in the experiment, which is not driven by the analysis with the conventional equivalent circuit comprised of the capacitance and the resistance, can be well explained by the microscopic model.

We successfully fabricated split alignment sleeves for single-mode operation with the injection-molding technique using both thermosetting epoxy resin and thermoplastic polyetherimide (PEI) resin. The relationship between the surface smoothness and the connection-loss characteristics of these injection-molded plastic sleeves was investigated. We made two-dimensional contour maps of the outer and inner surfaces of the plastic sleeves using the measured surface roughness. There were many contour lines on both the outer and inner surfaces of the PEI sleeve. In contrast, the epoxy sleeves had very smooth surface profiles. An offset Δr was estimated by using the inner-surface roughness data of the sleeve-ferrule contact regions. The connection loss of the sleeve increased as the Δr value increased. The measured losses agree fairly well with the theoretical losses estimated by using the Δr values. The PEI sleeves exhibited large Δr values, and one-third of them had large connection losses of > 0.5 dB. In contrast, the epoxy sleeves had very small Δr values of < 0.6 µm, and exhibited an average loss of < 0.1 dB.

We present novel semiconductor technologies of ZnO epitaxial films with using laser molecular-beam epitaxy method. Exciting optical properties such as room temperature lasing in ZnO nanocrystalline films and quantum size effects in ZnO/MgxZn1-xO superlattices were observed. By developing crystalline quality with using lattice-matched substrates, we could control resistivity of the doped ZnO films from 10-3 Ωcm to 104 Ωcm. These results would provide us an opportunity to construct a monolithic array consisted of light emitting devices and field effect transistors towards a possible flat panel display.

Aiming at lower cost and further miniaturization, we developed a new optical coupling system for use as an optical interface of a parallel optical interconnect module, called ParaBIT-1. It consists of a new-structure 24-fiber bare fiber (BF) connector whose main parts are made of molded plastic and a 24-channel optical coupling component using new polymeric optical waveguide film. To prevent bare fibers from breaking, the BF connector plug has a fiber protector. This BF connector can be joined by direct physical contact between bare fibers in fiber guide holes with a 250-µm pitch. The buckling forces of the fibers themselves secure the physical contacts. The average measured insertion loss of the 24-fiber BF connector was 0.05 dB, and the return losses were over 35 dB. The optical coupling components are composed of a 24-ch polymeric optical waveguide film with 45 mirrors and the 24-fiber BF connector interface, and can be assembled by passive alignment. The high thermal stability of the film allows soldering, and the film is fabricated by direct photo patterning. The average insertion losses of the components for transmitter and receiver modules were 1.28 and 1.35 dB, respectively.