Arc discharge between electrodes of relays and switches often causes contact surface damage through material transfer and arc erosion. Especially, material transfer sometimes occurs and brings serious failure even under lower load that is quite smaller than the minimum arc current value of contact material. In this paper, contact surface configuration, material transfer, and arc erosion characteristics of Ag and AgPd 60 contacts were experimentally studied after 0.5 or 1 million switching operations at various load levels. The followings can be made clear. Firstly, it was confirmed that the arcs and material transfer occurred even under such current that was lower than the minimum arc current. Therefore, the definition of the arc occurrence boundary current was newly determined. Secondly, the relation between load conditions (current and power supply voltage) and contact surface configuration (craters and pips) caused by material transfer was studied. The arc erosion behaviors of tested samples could be classified into two types: material transfer type and wear-out type. As one of the primary factors of transition from the former type to the latter one, contact activation was considered. The influences of load conditions and organic gas emitted from relay structure on arc characteristics was experimentally examined. The results indicated that load current greatly influenced the amount of material transfer and that power supply voltage affected the occurrence of the wear-out type significantly. The activation behavior of the contact surface could be found through observing the bridge voltage waveform.

High-speed pulse propagation, up to several hundred Mbps or higher, will play an important role in telecommunication systems for B-ISDN. High-performance packaging, especially high-speed, high-throughput interconnection, is strongly required. For advanced telecommunication systems, giga-bit signal transmission has been developed at the multi-chip module level, and 300 to 600 Mbps signal transmission has been reached at the printed circuit board level. Electrical inter-cabinet interconnections of 150 to 300 Mbps have been achieved for up to several tens of meters. High-speed, high-throughput connectors are the key to achieving high-performance telecommunication packaging systems. Two technologies are extremely important. One is for high-density, high-pin-count connectors, and the other is for high-speed signal transmission connectors. The requirements for the connectors needed for advanced high-performance telecommunication systems are described. Several high-density, high-bandwidth connectors developed for high-performance packaging system are introduced.

With the arrival of B-ISDN, widespread usage of multicast services such as TV broadcasting and video 900 services will increase the possibility of network congestion unless efficient multiple destination routing (MDR) algorithms are used. Current MDR algorithms using link cost based on bandwidth usage or distance to compute the minimum cost routing tree do not take into account the vast amount of information collected by intelligent network (IN) databases. In this paper, we propose a multicast routing algorithm which modifies the way the cost is calculated by using the predicted traffic statistics collected by IN databases. We also show that the traffic handling characteristics vastly improved over conventional MDR algorithms.

Electromechanical devices such as relays, switches, connectors and printed wiring boards have shown quick growth along with remarkable progress of electronic products in a recent few decades. For the present, outstanding tasks common to these devices are further downsizing, higher density and broading of bandwidth, on the assumption of keeping high performance and high reliability. These tasks are realized by part production improvement for higher precision and automatic assemblies, development of constituent materials and development of breakthrough structural technologies such as a surface mount technology and an active assembly ferrule technology in optical connectors and so on. In this paper, the technical trends as well as the motive technologies are overviewed for each device.

Measuring mechanical characteristics of optical disks is significant not only for designing drives but also for assuring disk interchangeability. This paper shows that the lens-movement detection method has the greatest overall potential and thus fits to a practical system for measuring mechanical characteristics. A system based on this method was constructed by developing simple and accurate capacitive sensors that can be built into an optical head to detect lens movement. The system configuration includes a precision turntable and a high-duarability reference disk to fully extract the potential. Test results show that this measuring system has adequate measuring range, accuracy, and stability. Some applications of this system are described in this paper. They show that the system is useful for evaluating and improving optical disk mechanical characteristics.

We introduce a procedure to determine the discrete Fourier spectra of the band-limited function from its irregularly distributed samples. The nonuniform data of the signal are represented by the non-orthogonal basis functions (non-harmonic Fourier functions) and discrete Fourier spectra of the signal. We construct a set of orthonormal basis functions from the above mentioned non-orthogonal basis functions using the Gram-Schmidt procedure. Based on the G-S procedure and the property of the orthogonalization, the spectral components of signal can be obtained by the conjugate transpose of orthonormal basis functions, their coefficients matrix and the nonuniform samples. Thus the desired signal can be obtained by the inverse Fourier transform of the determined discrete Fourier spectra. We apply this algorithm to reconstruct a band-limited low-pass and band-pass signal and show that our method provide more stable and better reconstruction than the matrix inversion method.

Mobile telecommunication is a rapidly growing market. Second generation systems such as GSM, DECT and ERMES, which are actually in an evolving status will be replaced by the third generation UMTS from the beginning of the next century on. While UMTS will allow data communication with up to 2Mbit/s, the fourth generation system MBS will provide up to 155Mbit/s. In several European R & D projects of the ESPRIT, DRIVE, COST and RACE programmes investigations concerning network planning, network operation, signalling, access techniques, security, terminal development and image and voice compression are carried out in order to create the scientific and technological bases for future UMTS and MBS. Some of these projects are described in more detail and an outlook toward future R & D activities is given. Finally some considerations are made concerning expectations of future services and questions concerning the development of wide band versus narrow band solutions are put.

This paper proposes an adaptive modulation/TDMA scheme to achieve high capacity personal multi-media communication systems. TDMA is employed to cope with various bit rate for multi-media services. The modulation scheme is selected from 1/4-rate QPSK, 1/2-rate QPSK, QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM according to the received C/IC (power ratio of the desired signal to the co-channel interference) and the delay spread. The spectral efficiency is evaluated by using the simulated bit error rate (BER) performance as well as the cumulative distribution of the C/IC with parameters of cell configurations. The results show that the spectral efficiency of the proposed scheme is 3.5 times higher than that of the conventional QPSK systems at the outage probability of 10%, and the effect is more remarkable at lower outage probability. The results also show that the proposed adaptive modulation is effective in improving delay spread immunity.

To provide personal, intelligent, and multimedia services through a mobile communications network, a Mobile Service Control Point (M-SCP) was developed, which performs both the location register and service control functions. The M-SCP was constructed on a common platform to allow quick introduction of new services. Software techniques to reduce the frequency of process-switching, assign the highest priority to real-time tasks, and operate a multiple-CPU structure provide faster real-time processing. This is confirmed by computer simulation and research in the field.

One of the most important topics of recent years is use of multimedia technology in radio systems for video, voice and data transmission. On the other hand, a major problem in such systems is the occurrence of errors due to multipath or interference noise. Forward error correction (FEC) is commonly used as a means of eliminating these errors. When employing the FEC technique, it is important to ensure that coding rate and coding gain requirements are met. In multimedia systems, however, the requirements differ with the type of media involved such as real-time voice, real-time video and data transmission. This paper proposes a variable-rate FEC method for multimedia systems as a means of overcoming this problem. The paper begins by presenting an information box and an ATM wireless LAN as examples of multimedia radio communication, and describes how the proposed variable-rate FEC method can be applied to these systems. Next, it shows in some detail how the ATM cells used in the variable-rate FEC are constructed. Then, it analyzes the effects of variable-rate FEC by employing a parameter called the Information Transmission Rate (ITR), which is defined as the product of the throughput rate and the coding rate. Finally, it shows the effects which the variable-rate FEC has on a typical quantity of traffic.

Development of a large-scale mobile communications network (IMN: Intelligent Mobile communications Network), as an infrastructure integrating multimedia functions, is indispensable for the support of future mobile communication services aiming toward "personalization," "intelligence," and "multimedia services." This paper discusses the aims of mobile communications and the outline of network technology aspects of PDC (Personal Digital Cellular) network which is currently in service. In addition, the future prospect of mobile communication technologies is discussed with special focuses on the support of universal mobility, network architecture including mobile communications platform, and multimedia technologies in the transport and access systems.

Linear lightwave networks (LLNs) are optical networks in which network nodes perform only linear operations on optical signals: power splitting, combining, and non-regenerative amplification. While previous efforts on LLNs assume only one fiber per link, we consider a multi-fiber linear lightwave network (M-LLN) architecture for telecommunications where switching exchanges are normally connected by multi-fiber cables. We propose a class of linear path (LP) allocation schemes for establishing optical paths in M-LLNs, and show that they have a better performance than those proposed for single-fiber LLNs. We show that M-LLNs can be implemented with commercially available components, and discuss the implementation issues in detail.

This paper describes CMOS embedded RAMs we developed utilizing 1.3 µm and 0.8 µm process technologies. Our goal was to achieve high-performance switching for digital communication systems. Because such switching can best be obtained by using high-performance embedded RAMs, we used 0.8 µm process technology and developed a 4 kW9 b single-port embedded RAM with 5 ns access time and 100 mW power dissipation during32 MHz operation, and a 1 kW9 b dual-port embedded RAM with 3.7 ns access time and 100 mW power dissipation during 40 MHz operation. We implemented these RAMs on one chip in developing three time-switch VLSIs, one buffer memory VLSI for ATM switches, and two cross-connect switch VLSIs.

This paper proposes and investigates an intelligent error-controlling scheme according to different importance of segmental information. In particular, the scheme is designed for facial images encoded by model-based coding that is a kind of intelligent compression coding. Intelligent communication systems regard the contents of information to be transmitted with extremely high compression and reliability. After highly efficient information compression by model-beaed coding, errors in the compressed information lead to severe semantic errors. The proposed scheme reduces semantic errors of information for the receiver. In this paper, we consider Action Unit (AU) as a segment of model-based coded facial image of human being and define the importance for each AU. According to the importance, an AU is encoded by an appropriated code among codes with different error-correcting capabilities. For encoding with different error controlling codes, we use three kinds of constructions to obtain unequal error protection (UEP) codes in this paper. One of them is the direct sum construction and the others are the proposed constructions which are based on joint and double coding. These UEP codes can have higher coderate than other UEP codes when minimum Hamming distance is small. By using these UEP codes, the proposed intelligent error-controlling scheme can protect information in segment in order to reduce semantic errors over a conventional error-controlling scheme in which information is uniformly protected by an error-correcting code.

A multi-channel high temperature superconducting interference device (high Tc SQUID) system with high magnetic field resolution has been developed. Step edge junctions were employed as weakly coupled Josephson junctions for the SQUID. These junctions worked well and their I-V curves fit the resistively shunted junction (RSJ) model. The SQUID design was investigated to improve magnetic field resolution. The size of the SQUID's center hole was investigated, and we found the optimized size of the hole to be about 25 µm. Meissner effect of superconductor was used in order to concentrate magnetic fluxes. A large washer SQUID and a flux concentrating plate was developed to concentrate magnetic flux to the SQUID center hole. The magnetic field resolution became 370 fT/Hz at 10 Hz and 220 fT/Hz at 10 kHz. This field resolution was enough to detect biomagnetic signals such as magnetocardiac signals. The SQUID was mounted on a special chip carrier and was sealed with epoxy resin for protection from humidity. We have designed and developed a 4-channel and a 16-channel high Tc SQUID system. We used them in a magnetically shielded room to measure magnetic signals of the human heart. We obtained clear multi-channel magnetocardiac signals, which showed clear so called QRS and T wave peaks. A clear isofield contour map of magnetocardiac signals was also obtained. These data indicated that high Tc SQUID is feasible for these biomagnetic applications.

This paper describes a pipelining universal system of discrete time cellular neural networks (DTCNNs). The new relaxation-based algorithm which is called a Pipelining Gauss Seidel (PGS) method is used to solve the CNN state equations in pipelining. In the systolic system of N processor elements {PEi}, each PEi performs the convolusional computation (CC) of all cells and the preceding PEi-1 performs the CC of all cells taking precedence over it by the precedence interval number p. The expected maximum number of PE's for the speeding up is given by n/p where n means the number of cells. For its application, the encoding and decoding process of moving images is simulated.

The throughput performance of a slotted, non-persistent Idle-Signal Casting Multiple Access (ICMA) protocol under the effects of various combinations of Rayleigh fading, lognormal shadowing, and spatial distribution of mobile users is studied. The opposing effects of propagation impairments on the performance of the protocol through simultaneously increasing the probability of receiver capture and attenuation of the received signal power level are demonstrated.

This paper presents new go-back-N ARQ protocols for point-to-multipoint communications over broadcast channels such as satellite or broadcast radio channels. In the conventional go-back-N ARQ protocols for multidestination communications, usually only error detection codes are used for error detection and m copies of a frame are transmitted at a time. In one of our protocols, a bit-by-bit majority-voting decoder based on all of the m copies of a frame is used to recover the transmitted frame. In another protocol, a hybrid-ARQ protocol, which is an error detection code concatenated with a rate repetition convolutional code with the Viterbi decoding, is used. In these protocols, a dynamic programming technique is used to select the optimal number of copies of a frame to be transmitted at a time. The optimal number is determined by round trip propagation delay of the channel, the error probability, and the number of receivers that have not yet received the message. Analytic expressions are derived for the throughput efficiency of the proposed protocols. The proposed point-to-multipoint protocols provide satisfactory throughput efficiency and perform considerably better than the conventional protocols under high error rate conditions, especially in environments with a large number of receivers and large link round trips. In this paper we analyze the performances of the proposed protocols upon the random error channel conditions.

Broadcasting with secrecy of messages is important in a situation such as pay television. In pay television only a broadcasting station broadcasts a message. On the other hand, broadcast communication is also important. Broadcast communication means any user in a whole group can broadcast a message to any subset of the group. In this paper the efficiency of secure broadcast communication is discussed in terms of the length of messages sent and the encryption speed. We prove that the length of the broadcast messages is not kept less than O(n), where n is the number of receivers, when a broadcast system has a form of a single system which is defined as the generalized form of an individual key method and a master key method. In contrast, the proposed secure broadcast communication method, a multi-dimension method, keeps the length of messages sent O(mmn), where m is the number of the dimension used in the multi-dimension method. At the same time the encryption speed was reduced from O(n(log(n+C2)+C3)) of the master key method to O(mn(logmn+C1)) of the multi-dimension method.

A polarity-convertible driver is necessary as a basic component of several Josephson random access memories. This driver must be able to inject a current having positive or negative polarity into a load transmission line such as a word or bit line of the RAM. In this paper, we propose a resistor coupled Josephson polarity-convertible driver which is highly sensitive to input signals and has a wide operating margin. The driver consists of several Josephson junctions and several resistors. The input signal is directly injected to the driver through the resistors. The circuit design is discussed on the operating principle of the driver. The driver is fabricated by 1.5 µm Nb technology with Nb/AlOx/Nb Josephson junctions, two layer Nb wirings, an Nb ground plane, Mo resistors, and SiO2 insulators. The Nb/AlOx/Nb Josephson junctions are fabricated using technology refined for sub-micron size junctions. The insulators between wirings are formed using bias sputtering technique to obtain good step coverage. The driver circuit size is 53 µm34 µm. Measurements are carried out at 10 kHz to quasistatically test the polarity-convertible function and the operating margin of the driver. Proper polarity-convertible operation is confirmed for a large operating bias margin of 70% at a fairly small input current of 0.3 mA.