The induced voltage at the terminals of an implantable cardiac pacemaker of unipolar type was investigated by numerical calculations. Operating frequency was assumed 5 MHz according to a recent product. The dependencies of the induced voltage on various conditions were investigated including those on the locations of the transmitter and the pacemaker, and on the electric properties and the size of the phantom. The results showed that they were reasonably explained by considerations of quasi-static coupling of the electric field between the device and the pacemaker. Regarding the effect of electrical properties of the phantom a conservative result was obtained by using a phantom of homogeneous material with electric constants of fat. With regard to the phantom size the phantom used in previous studies provided more conservative results than that of larger size. The results suggested that the electric near-field intra-body communication devices are not likely to interfere with implantable cardiac pacemakers as far as the situation assumed in this study.

The address discharge characteristics formed when an address pulse is applied in AC plasma display panels are investigated by changing the ramp-down voltage during the reset period. The address discharge time lag can be reduced when the difference between the ramp-down voltage and the scan-low voltage is set at a high value during the ramp-down period because the loss of the wall charges accumulated between the scan (Y) and address (A) electrodes during the reset period is minimized. In addition, the voltage applied to the X electrode during the ramp-down period can prevent the voltage margin from reduction even though applying high voltage difference on the Y electrodes.

WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) has emerged as a promising radio access technology for providing high speed broadband connectivity to subscribers over large geographic regions. New enhancements allow deployments of relay stations (RSs) that can extend the coverage of the base station (BS), increase cell capacity, or both. In this paper, we consider the placement of transparent RSs that maximize the cell capacity. We provide a closed-form approximation for the optimal location of RS inside a cell. A numerical analysis of a number of case studies validates the closed-form approximation. The numerical results show that the closed-form approximation is reasonably accurate.

The brain-machine interface (BMI) is a new method for man-machine interface, which enables us to control machines and to communicate with others, without input devices but directly using brain signals. Previously, we successfully developed a real time control system for operating a robot arm using brain-machine interfaces based on the brain surface electrodes, with the purpose of restoring motor and communication functions in severely disabled people such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. A fully-implantable wireless system is indispensable for the clinical application of invasive BMI in order to reduce the risk of infection. This system includes many new technologies such as two 64-channel integrated analog amplifier chips, a Bluetooth wireless data transfer circuit, a wirelessly rechargeable battery, 3 dimensional tissue-fitting high density electrodes, a titanium head casing, and a fluorine polymer body casing. This paper describes key features of the first prototype of the BMI system for clinical application.

Proving the security of cancelable biometrics and other template protection techniques is a key prerequisite for the widespread deployment of biometric technologies. BioEncoding is a cancelable biometrics scheme that has been proposed recently to protect biometric templates represented as binary strings like iris codes. Unlike other template protection schemes, BioEncoding does not require user-specific keys or tokens. Moreover, it satisfies the requirements of untraceable biometrics without sacrificing the matching accuracy. However, the security of BioEncoding against smart attacks, such as correlation and optimization-based attacks, has to be proved before recommending it for practical deployment. In this paper, the security of BioEncopding, in terms of both non-invertibility and privacy protection, is analyzed. First, resistance of protected templates generated using BioEncoding against brute-force search attacks is revisited rigorously. Then, vulnerabilities of BioEncoding with respect to correlation attacks and optimization based attacks are identified and explained. Furthermore, an important modification to the BioEncoding algorithm is proposed to enhance its security against correlation attacks. The effect of integrating this modification into BioEncoding is validated and its impact on the matching accuracy is investigated empirically using CASIA-IrisV3-Interval dataset. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed modification and show that it has no negative impact on the matching accuracy.

In this letter, the reliabilty of the generalized normal-Laplace (GNL) distribution used for modeling the multiple access interference (MAI) plus noise in time-hopping (TH) binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) ultra-wideband (UWB) systems is evaluated in terms of the probability density function and the BER. The multiple access performance of TH-BPSK UWB systems based on GNL model is analyzed. The average BER performance obtained by using GNL approximation well matches with the exact BER results of TH-BPSK UWB systems. The parameter estimates of GNL distribution based on the moments estimation method is also presented.

A planar circularly-polarized (CP) small antenna is proposed. To obtain a low profile configuration, a co-planar waveguide (CPW) structure is employed. Circular polarization is achieved using a curved stub that generates current distribution in a direction orthogonal to the current distribution from the patch. Using meander lines and a series gap capacitance, a 70% size reduction is achieved compared to a half-wavelength resonant antenna. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed antenna is the smallest CP antenna using CPW technology. The measured 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth is 8.3% from 3.83 GHz to 4.16 GHz, and a 1.6 dBic gain and 89% efficiency are achieved.

This paper proposes a new method that reduces the computational cost of the phase-only correlation (POC)-based methods for displacement estimation in old film sequences. Conventional POC-based methods calculate all the points of the POC and only use the highest peak of the POC and its neighboring points to estimate the displacement with subpixel accuracy. Our proposed method reduces the computational cost by calculating the POC in a small region, instead of all the points of the POC. The proposed method combines a displacement pre-estimation with a modified inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT). The displacement pre-estimation uses the 1-D POCs of frame projections to pre-estimate the displacement with pixel accuracy and chooses a small region in the POC including the desired points for displacement estimation. The modified IDFT is then used to calculate the points in this small region for displacement estimation. Experimental results show that use of the proposed method can effectively reduce the computational cost of the POC-based methods without compromising the accuracy.

We propose a mechanism called “optical plug and play” for constructing GMPLS networks automatically. It offers lower operation effort and fast network construction, and avoids misconfiguration. Optical plug and play architecture has its procedure, a link-up search mechanism for OXCs, network and node architectures to realize optical plug and play, and an LMP extension to exchange the information between nodes necessary for identifying adjacent nodes. We implement prototypes of both OXCs and routers that support the optical plug and play proposal. Simulations and experiments confirm its performance and feasibility.

This paper develops planar circuit filters consisting of arbitrarily-shaped conductor patches and slots on a conductor-backed dielectric substrate, which are designed by an optimization technique based on the genetic algorithm. The developed filter has multiple resonators and their mutual couplings in the limited space by using both sides of the substrate, so that its compactness is realized. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of the present filter structure from some design samples numerically and experimentally. Then as a practical application, we design compact UWB filters, and their filter characteristics are verified from the measurements.

A sensor network consisting of a number of palm-sized nodes with small electric and magnetic sensors has been proposed to monitor local electromagnetic activities in space plasmas. In the present study, a compact loop antenna system is designed and fabricated for use in sensor nodes that can capture magnetic vector fields from ELF to MF frequencies. The performance of the developed system is shown to be sufficient to allow measurement of the magnetic field activity around artificial structures in addition to intense natural plasma waves in geospace.

Packet loss and delay are the major network impairments for transporting real-time voice over IP networks. In the proposed system, multiple descriptions of the speech are used to take advantage of the packet path diversity. A new objective method is presented for predicting the perceived quality of multi-stream voice transmission. Also proposed is a multi-stream playout buffer algorithm, together with an adaptive parameter adjustment scheme, that maximizes the perceived speech quality via delay-loss trading. Experimental results showed that, compared to FEC-protected single-path transmission, the proposed multi-stream transmission scheme achieves significant reductions in delay and packet loss rates as well as improved speech quality.

We present a design optimization method of H-plane waveguide components, based on the level set method with the finite element method. In this paper, we propose a new formulation for the improvement of a level set function, which describes shape, location, and connectivity of dielectric in a design region. Employing the optimization procedure, we demonstrate that optimized structures of an H-plane waveguide filter and T-junction are obtained from an initial structure composed of several circular blocks of dielectric.

We investigated the effects of various field plate and buried gate structures on the DC and small signal characteristics of 4H-silicon carbide (SiC) metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MESFETs). In comparison with the source-connected field plate, the gate-connected field plate exhibited superior frequency response while having similar DC characteristics. In order to further enhance the output power, dual field plates were employed in conjunction with a buried gate structure.

EIRP measurement in the direction of maximum radiation has not always been valid to estimate the radiated power from radio equipments integrated with antennas, for example, integrated radiator with antennas shaped like the notebook-sized PC. Therefore, it is recommended that total radiated power (TRP) from equipment under test (EUT) should be estimated by integrating measured EIRPs on the whole surface of the unit sphere. In this paper, a conventional and some novel sampling methods for the TRP estimation, which were proposed to reduce the number of measurement points, are examined by using a measured EIRP data set and compared with each other. For a simulated radio equipment shaped like a notebook-sized PC, it is found that the equi-area and generalized spiral points methods are superior to the equi-angle method in terms of reducing the number of the measurement points and orthogonal three planes method is another candidate in terms of saving measurement time unless the pattern radiated from EUT is not so complicated.

Various planar folded dipole antennas with feed lines are introduced and analyzed. With the added feed line, the planar folded dipole antenna has two resonance modes. Moreover, adjusting the spacing and width of the feed line improves the broadband characteristics of the antenna. The attached feed line has not only an impedance transforming characteristic but also a bandwidth transforming characteristic. The bandwidth transforming characteristic means that the feed line can broaden the bandwidth of folded dipole antenna. A way to reduce the antenna area is also studied, and the characteristics of the resulting compact antenna are analyzed.

A low-loss ultra-wide band (UWB) filter is presented, which uses miniaturized parallel coupled line along with an standard printed circuit board (PCB) technology. By analyzing even- and odd-mode impedances (in comparison with conventional parallel coupled lines) of miniaturized parallel coupled line, this structure provides tight coupling, thus, relaxing the requirements on physical dimensions width and spacing when designing broadband filters. A bandpass filter for Mode 1 (the first 3 sub-bands) in the 3.1-5 GHz band for Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB is realized and compared with a conventional parallel coupled line filter. The experimental results show as much as 0.9 dB insertion loss improvement over the conventional counterpart.

Previous research illustrates that LRU replacement policy is not efficient when applications exhibit a distant re-reference interval. Recently RRIP policy is proposed to improve the performance for such kind of workloads. However, the lack of access recency information in RRIP confuses the replacement policy to make the accurate prediction. To enhance the robustness of RRIP for recency-friendly workloads, we propose an Dynamic Adaptive Insertion and Re-reference Prediction (DAI-RRP) policy which evicts data based on both re-reference prediction value and the access recency information. DAI-RRP makes adaptive adjustment on insertion position and prediction value for different access patterns, which makes the policy robust across different workloads and different phases. Simulation results show that DAI-RRP outperforms LRU and RRIP. For a single-core processor with a 1 MB 16-way set last-level cache (LLC), DAI-RRP reduces CPI over LRU and Dynamic RRIP by an average of 8.1% and 2.7% respectively. Evaluations on quad-core CMP with a 4 MB shared LLC show that DAI-RRP outperforms LRU and Dynamic RRIP (DRRIP) on the weighted speedup metric by an average of 8.1% and 15.7% respectively. Furthermore, compared to LRU, DAI-RRP consumes the similar hardware for 16-way cache, or even less hardware for high-associativity cache. In summary, the proposed policy is practical and can be easily integrated into existing hardware approximations of LRU.

Although larger scale integration enhances the practicability of superconducting Josephson circuits, several technical problems begin to emerge during its progress. One of the problems is the increase of current through a ground plane (ground current). Excess ground current produces additional magnetic field and reduces operation margins of the circuits, because superconducting Josephson devices are very sensitive to magnetic field. In this paper, we evaluate current distribution in a superconducting ground plane by means of both experiments and numerical calculation. We also verify two methods for suppressing the ground current. One is a slot structure in the ground plane, and the other is alignment of the current-extraction point. Suppression of the ground current is quantitatively evaluated.

Wireless access networks of the future could provide a variety of context-aware services with the use of sensor information in order to solve regional social problems and improve the quality of residents' lives as a part of the regional infrastructure. NerveNet is a conceptual regional wireless access platform in which multiple service providers provide their own services with shared use of the network and sensors, enabling a range of context-aware services. The platform acts like a human nervous system. Densely located, interconnected access points with databases and data processing units will provide mobility to terminals without a location server and enable secure sensor data transport on a highly reliable, managed mesh network. This paper introduces the motivations, concept, architecture, system configuration, and preliminary performance results of NerveNet.