Since electromagnetic (EM) noise resulting from an arc discharge disturbs other electric devices, parameters on electromagnetic compatibility, as well as lifetime and reliability, are important properties for electrical contacts. To clarify the characteristics and the mechanism of the generation of the EM noise, the arc column and voltage fluctuations generated by slowly breaking contacts with external direct current (DC) magnetic field, up to 20,mT, was investigated experimentally using Ag$_{90.7{ m wt%}}$SnO$_{2,9.3{ m wt}%}$ material. Firstly the motion of the arc column is measured by high-speed camera. Secondary, the distribution of the motion of the arc and contact voltage are discussed. It was revealed that the contact voltage fluctuation in the arc duration is related to the arc column motion.

A novel fabrication approach for the amperometric biosensor composed of carbon nanotubes (CNT), a plasma-polymerized film (PPF), hexamineruthenium(III)chloride (RU), and enzyme glucose oxidase (GOD) is reported. The configuration of the electrochemical electrode is multilayer films which contain sputtered gold, lower acetonitrile PPF, CNT, RU, GOD, and upper acetonitrile PPF, sequentially. First, PPF deposited on Au acts as a permselective membrane and as a scaffold for CNT layer formation. Second, PPF directly deposited on GOD acts as a matrix for enzyme immobilization. To facilitate the electrochemical communication between the CNT layer and GOD, CNT was treated with nitrogen plasma. The electron transfer mediator RU play a role as the mediator, in which the electron caused by enzymatic reaction transports to the electrode. The synergy between the electron transfer mediator and CNT provides benefits in terms of lowering the operational potential and enhancing the sensitivity (current). The optimized glucose biosensor revealed a sensitivity of 3.4µA mM-1 cm-2 at +0.4V vs. Ag/AgCl, linear dynamic range of 2.5-19mM, and a response time of 6s.

Active measurement is an end-to-end measurement technique that can estimate network performance. The active measurement techniques of PASTA-based probing and periodic-probing are widely used. However, for the active measurement of delay and loss, Baccelli et al. reported that there are many other probing policies that can achieve appropriate estimation if we can assume the non-intrusive context (the load of the probe packets is ignored in the non-intrusive context). While the best policy in terms of accuracy is periodic-probing with fixed interval, it suffers from the phase-lock phenomenon created by synchronization with network congestion. The important point in avoiding the phase-lock phenomenon is to shift the cycle of the probe packet injection by adding fluctuations. In this paper, we analyse the optimal magnitude of fluctuations corresponding to the given autocovariance function of the target process. Moreover, we introduce some evaluation examples to provide guidance on designing experiments to network researchers and practitioners. The examples yield insights on the relationships among measurement parameters, network parameters, and the optimal fluctuation magnitude.

This paper deals with reflection and transmission of a TE plane wave from a one-dimensional random slab with slanted fluctuation by means of the stochastic functional approach. By starting with a generalized representation of the random wavefield from a two-dimensional random slab, and by using a manner for slanted anisotropic fluctuation, the corresponding random wavefield representation and its statistical quantities for one-dimensional cases are newly derived. The first-order incoherent scattering cross section is numerically calculated and illustrated in figures.

The circuit switching device by the electrical contact needs the high reliability and long lifetime. The very important factor for the high reliability, long lifetime and electromagnetic noise of the electrical contact is to suppress the duration and electromagnetic noise of arc discharge. Usually, the suppression of arc duration method is applying the external magnetic field. But, this method was not able to suppress the metallic arc duration and increased the voltage fluctuation at arc duration. Therefore, the new method for suppressing the duration and noise for electrical contact is expected. In this paper, a new method for suppressing duration and EM noise of arc discharge by applying housing pressure is proposed. To investigate the availability of proposed method, the measurement and some considerations on arc duration, voltage-fluctuation and current noise up to GHz frequency band generated by breaking contact in the applied pressure relay housing are reported. Firstly, voltage waveform and duration of the arc are measured. The effects of the pressure in the relay housing on the duration of the metallic and gaseous phase arcs are discussed. Secondary, voltage fluctuation, the spectrogram of contact voltage and current noise up to GHz frequency band are discussed. In the results, the proposed method with applying pressure makes shorter both durations of metallic and gaseous phases. The shorter duration of metallic phase is an advantage of the proposed method beyond the applying external magnetic field. As the housing pressure is increase, the voltage fluctuation and current noise becomes smalls. The proposed method can suppress the voltage fluctuation as well as arc duration. Consequently, the proposed method is on of the good solution to suppress the duration and electromagnetic noise of the arc discharge from electrical contact and result of this study indicates the basic considerations necessary to ensure good lifetime and EMC designs for electrical contacts.

The traffic adaptive 2-level active period control has been proposed as a traffic adaptation mechanism to handle temporal and spatial (geographical) traffic fluctuations in cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) employing IEEE802.15.4 medium access control (MAC). This paper proposes a traffic adaptive distributed backoff control mechanism for cluster-based WSNs with the traffic adaptive 2-level active period control to enhance the system performance, especially transmission performance. The proposed mechanism autonomously adjusts the starting time of the backoff procedure for channel accesses in the contention access period (CAP) specified by the IEEE802.15.4 MAC, and then distributes the channel access timing over a wide range within the CAP, which can mitigate channel access congestion. The results of computer simulations show that the proposed mechanism can improve the transmission delay performance while keeping the enhancement in throughput and energy consumption at the cluster-based WSNs under non-uniform traffic environments.

As MOS transistors are scaled down, the impact of randomly placed discrete charge (impurity atoms, traps and surface states) on device characteristics rapidly increases. Significant variability caused by random dopant fluctuation (RDF) is a direct result of this, which urges the adoption of new device architectures (ultra-thin body SOI FETs and FinFETs) which do not use impurity for body doping. Variability caused by traps and surface states, such as random telegraph noise (RTN), though less significant than RDF today, will soon be a major problem. The increased complexity of such residual-charge-induced variability due to non-Gaussian and time-dependent behavior will necessitate new approaches for variation-aware design.

In this paper, a theoretical analysis of current-controlled (CC-) MOS current mode logic (MCML) is reported. Furthermore, the circuit performance of the CC-MCML with the auto-detection of threshold voltage (Vth) fluctuation is evaluated. The proposed CC-MCML with the auto-detection of Vth fluctuation automatically suppresses the degradation of circuit performance induced by the Vth fluctuations of the transistors automatically, by detecting these fluctuations. When a Vth fluctuation of ± 0.1 V occurs on the circuit, the cutoff frequency of the circuit is increased from 0 Hz to 3.5 GHz by using the proposed CC-MCML with the auto-detection of Vth fluctuation.

This paper reports on a theoretical study and modeling of a 1.55 µm quantum dot heterostructure laser using InN as a promising candidate for the first time. Details of design and theoretical analysis of probability distribution of the optical transition energy, threshold current density, modal gain, and differential quantum efficiency are presented considering a single layer of quantum dots. Dependence of threshold current density on the RMS value of quantum dot size fluctuations and the cavity length is studied. A low threshold current density of ∼51 Acm-2 is achieved at room temperature for a cavity length of 640 µm. An external differential efficiency of ∼65% and a modal gain of ∼12.5 cm-1 are obtained for the proposed structure. The results indicate that the InN based quantum dot laser is a promising one for the optical communication system.

This paper deals with reflection and transmission of a TE plane wave from a two-dimensional random slab with slanted fluctuation by means of the stochastic functional approach. Such slanted fluctuation of the random slab is written by a homogeneous random field having a power spectrum with a rotation angle. By starting with the previous paper [IEICE Trans. Electron., Vol. E92-C, no.1, pp.77–84, January 2009], any statistical quantities are immediately obtained even for slanted fluctuation cases. The first-order incoherent scattering cross section is numerically calculated and illustrated in figures. It is then newly found that shift and separation phenomena of the leading or enhanced peaks at four characteristic scattering angles take place in the transmission and reflection sides, respectively.

Thin film glucose biosensors were fabricated with organic/inorganic hybrid films based on glucose oxidase (GOx) and Prussian Blue nano-clusters. The biosensors composed of hybrid films were characterized by the low operating potential and the advantage to interference-free detection. In this research, we employed two kinds of thin films for GOx immobilization: Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) and self-assembled monolayer (SAM). The LB film immobilizes GOx in its inside through the electrostatic force, while the SAM immobilizes GOx with the covalent bond. The sensors with LB film produced a relatively high current signal, while the non-linear behavior and a low stability were recognized. On the other hand, the sensors with SAM presented a good linear relationship and a very stable performance.

This paper proposes a novel hallucination technique for color face image reconstruction in the RGB, YCbCr, HSV and CIELAB color systems. Our hallucination method depends on multilinear principal component analysis (MPCA) with a linear regression model. In the hallucination framework, many color face images are expressed in color spaces. These images can be naturally described as tensors or multilinear arrays. This novel hallucination technique can perform feature extraction by determining a multilinear projection that captures most of the original tensorial input variation. In our experiments, we used facial images from the FERET database to test our hallucination approach which is demonstrated by extensive experiments with high-quality hallucinated color face images. The experimental results show that a correlation between the color channel and the proposed hallucination method can reduce the complexity in the color face hallucination process.

We have succeeded in fabricating 180 nm Current Controlled MOS Current Mode Logic (CC-MCML) and verified the stable circuit operation of 180 nm CC-MCML under threshold voltage fluctuations by measurement. The performance stability of the CC-MCML inverter under the fluctuations of threshold voltage of NMOS and PMOS is evaluated from the viewpoint of diminishing the bias offset voltage ΔVB. The ΔVB, that is defined as (base voltage of output waveform) - (base voltage of input waveform), is a key design parameter for differential circuit. It is shown that when the threshold voltage of NMOS fluctuates in the range of 0.53 V to 0.69 V, and threshold voltage of PMOS fluctuates in the range of -0.47 V to -0.67 V, the CC-MCML technique is able to suppress ΔVB within only 30 mV, where as the conventional MCML technique caused maximum ΔVB of 1.0 V. In this paper, it is verified for the first time that the fabricated CC-MCML is more tolerant against the fluctuations of threshold voltages than the conventional MCML.

In order to realize Integrated Circuits (IC) with operation over the 10 GHz range, conventional CMOS logic faces critical issues, such as increasing power consumption, and difficulty to aggressively scale the device size and so on. To overcome this issue, we have proposed Current Controlled-MOS Current Mode Logic (CC-MCML) to realize the reduction of power consumption and the enhancement of the operation speed in logic circuits without scaling the gate length of the MOSFET, and confirmed the performance of these circuits both theoretically and experimentally. In the CC-MCML it is extremely important to control the input voltage of the MOSFET used as the constant current source in order to make the base voltage of the input signal and the output signal equivalent. In this paper, we propose CC-MCML/MTJ (Magnetic Tunnel Junction) circuit, which is one type of nonvolatile memory hybrid circuit technology. A more stable and precise operation is realized by cutting the range of the input voltage of the constant current source, and it is shown that the operation of CC-MCML/MTJ Hybrid Circuit enables us to suppress the base voltage difference due to the Vth fluctuation in comparison with the conventional CC-MCML. These results imply the high potential of Si-CMOS/Spintronics Hybrid technologies for future IC.

On uniformly convex real Banach spaces, a fixed point theorem in weak topology for successively recurrent system of fuzzy-set-valued nonlinear mapping equations and its application to ring nonlinear network systems are theoretically discussed in detail. An arbitrarily-level likelihood signal estimation is then established.

In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to accurately analyze large-scale power/ground (P/G) networks, where inductive parasitics are modeled with the partial reluctance. The method is based on frequency-domain circuit analysis and the technique of vector fitting, and obtains the time-domain voltage response at given P/G nodes. The frequency-domain circuit equation including partial reluctances is derived, and then solved with the GMRES algorithm with rescaling, preconditioning and recycling techniques. With the merit of sparsified reluctance matrix and iterative solving techniques for the frequency-domain circuit equations, the proposed method is able to handle large-scale P/G networks with complete inductive modeling. Numerical results show that the proposed method is orders of magnitude faster than HSPICE, several times faster than INDUCTWISE, and capable of handling the inductive P/G structures with more than 100,000 wire segments.

A time-slicing ring oscillator (TSRO) which captures time-dependent delay degradation due to periodic transient voltage drop on a power supply network is proposed. An impact of the supply voltage fluctuations, including voltage drop and overshoot, on logic circuit delay is evaluated as a change of oscillation frequency. The TSRO is designed using standard logic cells so that it can be placed almost anywhere in a digital circuit wherein supply voltage fluctuation is concerned. We also propose a new procedure for reconstructing supply voltage waveform. The procedure enables us to accurately monitor time-dependent, effective supply voltages. The -1 dB bandwidth of the TSRO is simulated to be 15.7 GHz, and measured time resolution is 131 ps. Measurement results of a test chip using 90-nm standard CMOS process successfully proved the feasibility of both delay degradation and effective supply voltage fluctuation measurements. Measurement of spatial voltage drop fluctuation is achieved.

This paper presents generating stable and sparse reluctance/inductance matrix from the inductance matrix which is extracted under insufficient discretization. To generate the sparse reluctance matrix with guaranteed stability, the original matrix has to be (strictly) diagonally dominant M matrix. Hence, the repeated inductance extractions with a smaller grid size are necessary in order to obtain the well-defined matrix. Alternatively, this paper provides some ideas for generating the sparse reluctance matrix, even if the extracted reluctance matrix is not diagonally dominant M matrix. These ease the extraction tasks greatly. Furthermore, the sparse inductance matrix is also generated by using double inverse methods. Since reluctance components are not still supported in SPICE-like simulators, generating the sparse inductance matrix is more useful than the sparse reluctance one.

Let us introduce n ( ≥ 2) mappings fi (i=1,,n ≡ 0) defined on reflexive real Banach spaces Xi-1 and let fi:Xi-1 → Yi be completely continuous on bounded convex closed subsets Xi-1(0) ⊂ Xi-1. Moreover, let us introduce n set-valued mappings Fi : Xi-1 Yi → Fc(Xi) (the family of all non-empty compact subsets of Xi), (i=1,,n ≡ 0). Here, we have a fixed point theorem in weak topology on the successively recurrent system of set-valued mapping equations:xi ∈ Fi(xi-1, fi(xi-1)), (i=1,,n ≡ 0). This theorem can be applied immediately to analysis of the availability of system of circular networks of channels undergone by uncertain fluctuations and to evaluation of the tolerability of behaviors of those systems.

Inductive effect becomes important for on-chip global interconnects, like the power/ground (P/G) grid. Because of the locality property of partial reluctance, the inverse of partial inductance, the window-based partial reluctance extraction has been applied for large-scale interconnect structures. In this paper, an efficient method of partial reluctance extraction is proposed for large-scale regular P/G grid structures. With a block reuse technique, the proposed method makes full use of the structural regularity of the P/G grid. Numerical results demonstrate the proposed method is able to efficiently handle a P/G grid with up to one hundred thousands wire segments. It is several tens times faster than the window-based method, while generating accurate frequency-dependent partial reluctance and resistance.