This paper proposes the Multimedia Pre-allocation WDMA (MP-WDMA) media access control (MAC) protocol to provide an efficient packet transfer service for metro-wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks. MP-WDMA considers three traffic types: constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate 1 (VBR1), and VBR2 traffic for a multimedia service as categorized in Multimedia WDMA (M-WDMA) MAC protocol. MP-WDMA is based on pre-allocation WDMA (P-WDMA), but the three traffic types are simultaneously allocated at one time slot, and one of them is selected through low bandwidth control signaling. Namely, a station assigns appropriate priority to input traffic, based on proposed traffic priority rules in MP-WDMA in order to determine the type of traffic. Accordingly, MP-WDMA can reduce station complexity as well as the possibility of idle time slot occurrences, compared with M-WDMA. Additionally, we analytically investigate the channel utilization and channel access delay of MP-WDMA and compare them with those of M-WDMA to find a proper MAC protocol for the networks. As a result, MP-WDMA supports maximally 30% higher channel utilization than M-WDMA regardless of channel and traffic conditions. Furthermore, MP-WDMA reduces the channel access delay of the delay-sensitive VBR2 traffic at the cost of increasing the channel access delay of the delay-insensitive VBR1 traffic. In this regard, MP-WDMA is suitable for the networks in terms of station complexity, channel utilization, and the channel access delay for VBR2 traffic.

In AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), drain current reduction by current collapse phenomenon is a big obstacle for a high efficient operation of power amplifier application. In this study, we investigated the effects of SiN passivation film quality on the electrical characteristics of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs. First, we conducted some experiments to investigate the relationship between electrical characteristics of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs and various conditions of SiN passivation film by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD). We found that both gate current leakage and current collapse were improved simultaneously by SiN passivation film deposited by optimized condition of NH3 and SiH4 gas flow. It is found that the critical parameter in the optimization is a IN-H/ ISi-H ratio measured by Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) spectra. Next, a thermal CVD SiN was applied to the passivation film to be investigated from the same point of view, because a thermal CVD SiN is well known to have good quality with low hydrogen content and high IN-H/ISi-H ratio. We confirmed that the thermal CVD SiN passivation could improve much further both of the gate leakage current and the current collapse in AlGaN/GaN-HEMTs. Furthermore, we tried to apply the thermal CVD SiN to the gate insulator in MIS (Metal Insulator Semiconductor) structure of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs. The thermal CVD SiN passivation was more suitable for the gate insulator than PE-CVD SiN passivation in a view of reducing current collapse phenomena. It could be believed that the thermal CVD SiN film is superior to the PE-CVD SiN film to achieve good passivation and gate insulator film for AlGaN/GaN HEMTs due to the low hydrogen content and the high IN-H/ISi-H ratio.

We have developed 0.5-µm-emitter InP-based HBTs with high reliability. The HBTs incorporate a passivation ledge structure and tungsten-based emitter metal. A fabricated HBT exhibits high collector current density and a current gain of 58 at a collector current density of 4 mA/µm2. The results of dc measurements indicate that the ledge layer sufficiently suppresses the recombination current at the emitter-base periphery. The HBT also exhibits an ft of 321 GHz and an fmax of 301 GHz at a collector current density of 4 mA/µm2. The ft does not degrade even though the emitter size is reduced to as small as 0.5 µm2 µm. The results of an accelerated life test show that the degradation of dc current gain is due to thermal degradation of the interfacial quality of semiconductors at the passivation ledge. The activation energy is expected to be around 1.5 eV, and the extrapolated mean time to failure is expected to be over 108 hours at a junction temperature of 125. These results indicate that this InP HBT technology is promising for making over-100-Gbit/s ICs with high reliability.

Device characteristics of In0.5Ga0.5As/GaAs quantum dot infrared detector (QDIP) have been enhanced with hydrogen plasma treatment. After the hydrogen (H) plasma treatment, the dark currents were noticeably decreased and photoluminescence (PL) intensity was increased by H-passivation of interfacial traps between quantum dots and GaAs and of non-radiative defect centers caused during QD growths. Photo response, which could not be observed in as-grown QDIP due to large dark currents which obscured the photocurrent signal, was measured successfully after H-treatment due to H-passivation.

The RSA-based Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols have been proposed to realize both mutual authentication and generation of secure session keys where a client is sharing his/her password only with a server and the latter should generate its RSA public/private key pair (e,n),(d,n) every time due to the lack of PKI (Public-Key Infrastructures). One of the ways to avoid a special kind of off-line (so called e-residue) attacks in the RSA-based PAKE protocols is to deploy a challenge/response method by which a client verifies the relative primality of e and φ(n) interactively with a server. However, this kind of RSA-based PAKE protocols did not give any proof of the underlying challenge/response method and therefore could not specify the exact complexity of their protocols since there exists another security parameter, needed in the challenge/response method. In this paper, we first present an RSA-based PAKE (RSA-PAKE) protocol that can deploy two different challenge/response methods (denoted by Challenge/Response Method1 and Challenge/Response Method2). The main contributions of this work include: (1) Based on the number theory, we prove that the Challenge/Response Method1 and the Challenge/Response Method2 are secure against e-residue attacks for any odd prime e; (2) With the security parameter for the on-line attacks, we show that the RSA-PAKE protocol is provably secure in the random oracle model where all of the off-line attacks are not more efficient than on-line dictionary attacks; and (3) By considering the Hamming weight of e and its complexity in the RSA-PAKE protocol, we search for primes to be recommended for a practical use. We also compare the RSA-PAKE protocol with the previous ones mainly in terms of computation and communication complexities.

Reducing the power dissipation for LDPC code decoder is a major challenging task to apply it to the practical digital communication systems. In this paper, we propose a low power LDPC code decoder architecture based on an intermediate message-compression technique which features as follows: (i) An intermediate message compression technique enables the decoder to reduce the required memory capacity and write power dissipation. (ii) A clock gated shift register based intermediate message memory architecture enables the decoder to decompress the compressed messages in a single clock cycle while reducing the read power dissipation. The combination of the above two techniques enables the decoder to reduce the power dissipation while keeping the decoding throughput. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture improves the power efficiency up to 52% and 18% compared to that of the decoder based on the overlapped schedule and the rapid convergence schedule without the proposed techniques respectively.

For the success of a large deployment of UHF RFID, easy-to-use and low-cost engineering tools to facilitate the performance evaluation are demanded particularly in installations and for trouble shooting. The measurement of interrogation area is one of the most typical industrial demands to establish the stable readability of UHF RFID. Exhaustive repetition of tag position change with a read operation and a usage of expensive measurement equipment or special interrogators are common practices to measure the interrogation area. In this paper, a practical method to measure the interrogation area of a UHF RFID by using a battery assisted passive tag (BAP) is presented. After introducing the fundamental design and performances of the BAP that we have developed, we introduce the measurement method. In the method, the target tag in the target installation is continuously traversed either manually or automatically while it is subjected to a repetitive read of a commercial interrogator. During the target tag traversal, the interrogator's commands are continuously monitored by a BAP. With an extensive analysis on interrogator commands, the BAP can differentiate between its own read timings and those of the target tag. The read timings of the target tag collected by the BAP are recorded synchronously with the target tag position, yielding a map of the interrogation area. The present method does not entail a measurement burden. It is also independent of the choice of interrogator and tag. The method is demonstrated in a practical UHF RFID installation to show that the method can measure a 40 mm resolution interrogation area measurement just by traversing the target tag at a slow walking speed, 300 mm/sec.

In order to reduce the test cost, built-in self test (BIST) is widely used. One of the serious problems of BIST is that the compacted signature in BIST has very little information for fault diagnosis. Especially, it is difficult to determine which tests detect a fault. Therefore, it is important to develop an efficient fault diagnosis method by using incompletely identified pass/fail information. Where the incompletely identified pass/fail information means that a failing test block consists of at least one failing test and some passing tests, and all of the tests in passing test blocks are the passing test. In this paper, we propose a method to locate open faults by using incompletely identified pass/fail information. Experimental results for ISCAS'85 and ITC'99 benchmark circuits show that the number of candidate faults becomes less than 5 in many cases.

With the increasing complexity of LSI, Built-In Self Test (BIST) is a promising technique for production testing. We herein propose a method for diagnosing multiple stuck-at faults based on the compressed responses from BIST. We refer to fault diagnosis based on the ambiguous test pattern set obtained by the compressed responses of BIST as post-BIST fault diagnosis [1]. In the present paper, we propose an effective method by which to perform post-BIST fault diagnosis for multiple stuck-at faults. The efficiency of the success ratio and the feasibility of diagnosing large circuits are discussed.

In general, we do not know which fault model can explain the cause of the faulty values at the primary outputs in a circuit under test before starting diagnosis. Moreover, under Built-In Self Test (BIST) environment, it is difficult to know which primary output has a faulty value on the application of a failing test pattern. In this paper, we propose an effective diagnosis method on multiple fault models, based on only pass/fail information on the applied test patterns. The proposed method deduces both the fault model and the fault location based on the number of detections for the single stuck-at fault at each line, by performing single stuck-at fault simulation with both passing and failing test patterns. To improve the ability of fault diagnosis, our method uses the logic values of lines and the condition whether the stuck-at faults at the lines are detected or not by passing and failing test patterns. Experimental results show that our method can accurately identify the fault models (stuck-at fault model, AND/OR bridging fault model, dominance bridging fault model, or open fault model) for 90% faulty circuits and that the faulty sites are located within two candidate faults.

We propose a noise suppression method based on multi-model compositions and multi-pass search. In real environments, input speech for speech recognition includes many kinds of noise signals. To obtain good recognized candidates, suppressing many kinds of noise signals at once and finding target speech is important. Before noise suppression, to find speech and noise label sequences, we introduce multi-pass search with acoustic models including many kinds of noise models and their compositions, their n-gram models, and their lexicon. Noise suppression is frame-synchronously performed using the multiple models selected by recognized label sequences with time alignments. We evaluated this method using the E-Nightingale task, which contains voice memoranda spoken by nurses during actual work at hospitals. The proposed method obtained higher performance than the conventional method.

Development of an artificial reverberator for low-memory requirements is an issue of importance in applications such as mobile multimedia devices. One possibility is to use an All-Pass Filter (APF), which is embedded in the feedback loop of the comb filter network. In this paper, we propose a reverberator employing time-varying APFs to increase the reverberation performance. By changing the gain of the APF, we can increase the number of frequency peaks perceptually. Thus, the resulting reverberation sounds much more natural, even with less memory, than the conventional approach. In this paper, we perform theoretical and perceptual analyses of artificial reverberators employing time-varying APF. Through the analyses, we derive the degree of phase variation of the APF that is perceptually acceptable. Based on the analyses, we propose a method of designing artificial reverberators associated with the time-varying APFs. Through subjective tests, it is shown that the proposed method is capable of providing perceptually comparable sound quality to the conventional methods even though it uses less memory.

A new load balanced channel sharing method (CSM), namely Heuristic Traffic Load Balanced (HTLB) CSM, is proposed for metro-wavelength division multiple access (WDMA) networks. In particular, HTLB CSM is designed to be effective for pre-allocation based medium access control (MAC) protocols by balancing traffic loads corresponding to pre-assigned destinations per time slot. As a result, HTLB CSM is shown to provide lower time complexity than the well-known sub-optimal load balanced CSM, MULTIFIT CSM. Furthermore, the Jain Index of the HTLB CSM is shown to be higher and more consistent than the MULTIFIT CSM and other pre-fixed CSMs under diverse traffic conditions.

In this paper, we present a clean and simple formulation of survey propagation (SP) for constraint-satisfaction problems as "probabilistic token passing". The result shows the importance of extending variable alphabets to their power sets in designing SP algorithms.

We suggest a dual thresholds method for the dynamic bandwidth allocation in EPON. In the suggested method, a buffer in ONU has two thresholds and ONU generates a normal request and a greedy request based on the two thresholds. Also, OLT estimates the overall traffic load and grants the greedy request when estimated traffic is light. We study upstream channel resource wastage and show the suggested method decreases the upstream channel resource wastage. Using simulation, we validate the dual thresholds method is superior to the existing methods in the mean delay.

In this paper, horizontal (where an opamp is shared in two adjacent stages) and vertical (where an opamp is shared across two paths) opamp sharing techniques for a two-path band-pass (BP) ΔΣ modulator are described, and input-feedforward two-path fourth-order BP ΔΣ modulators that have only two opamps are proposed. The proposed modulators are based on the horizontal or vertical opamp sharing technique. They can be realized with both a summation circuit using a switched capacitor (SC) network and a second-order high-pass filter (HPF) with a horizontal shared opamp or a double-sampling first-order HPF with a vertical shared opamp, which are based on an SC first-order HPF with an opamp. These techniques can reduce the number of opamps with no additional component and the chip area as well as realize lower power consumption.

A novel dual mode bandpass filter (BPF) with improved spurious response is presented in this letter. To obtain low insertion loss, the coupling structure using the dual mode resonator and the feeding scheme using coplanar-waveguide (CPW) are constructed on the two sides of a dielectric substrate. A defected ground structure (DGS) is designed on the ground plane of the CPW to achieve the goal of spurious suppression of the filter. The filter has been investigated numerically and experimentally. Measured results show a good agreement with the simulated analysis.

A multi-path structure is proposed for reduction in effect of digital substrate noise which degrades analog circuit performance. As an example low-pass filters are implemented in a 0.18-µm CMOS process. 11-dBm reduction in digital substrate noise is achieved as compared with a conventional structure.

We demonstrate a wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) based on wavelength-locked Fabry-Perot laser diodes and thin-film filters. Twelve Fast Ethernet signals are bi-directionally transmitted over the multi-branch optical distribution network (ODN). The ODN has distributed branch nodes and bus networks.

We describe the transmission characteristics of a wavelength independent wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) based on a wavelength channel data rewriter (WCDR). The WCDR is composed of a linear amplifier (LA) and a saturated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), and by using the WCDR in optical network units (ONUs), we can erase the downstream signal and modulate the same wavelength channel with the upstream signal. In this paper, we analyze the data rewriting characteristic, the frequency chirp characteristic and the bit error rate (BER) degradation occasioned by the use of saturated SOAs. Furthermore, we report high-speed transmission with power penalty of less than 1 dB at bit rates of 1.25 Gbit/s, 2.5 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s for downstream signals and 1.25 Gbit/s for upstream signals after transmission through 40 km of single-mode fiber.