We have shown that a photonic sensor can be used as an electric-field probe for planar near-field measurements of X-band antennas. Because an antenna on the photonic sensor is small (about 0.1 λ) compared to the wavelength, the photonic sensor can directly measure the amplitude and the phase of the electric field close (about 0.3 λ) to the apertures of antennas without disturbing the electric field to be measured. Therefore we can obtain the antenna pattern by transforming the measured electric field without probe compensation. To verify the merits of the photonic sensor, we have evaluated the antenna patterns of a standard gain horn antenna and a microstrip array antenna at 9.41 GHz. Comparing the results obtained using the photonic sensor with those obtained using the conventional open-ended waveguide probe and other methods, we have shown that the antenna patterns agree with each other within 1 dB over wide ranges of directivity.

The main issue in real time voice applications over Internet is to investigate a lossless playout without jitter while maintaining playout delay as small as possible. Existing playout algorithms estimate network delay by using timestamps and determine the playout schedule only at the beginning of each talkspurt. Also their scheduled playout time is determined based on a fixed upper playout delay bound over a talkspurt. The sliding adaptive playout algorithm we propose can estimate jitter without using timestamps and its playout time is allowed to slide to a certain extent. The aim of sliding playout schedule is to determine the scheduled playout time at the beginning of each talkspurt based on the playout delay expected under the normal condition where the degree of actual jitter is below the magnitude which is not quite large in relation to variations in the "baseline" delays. Then the proposed algorithm can be effectively applied to minimize the scheduled playout delay while improving the voice quality against a spike which may occur at the beginning of a talkspurt as well as a spike which occurs in the middle of a talkspurt. We develop an analytical model of the general adaptive playout algorithms and analyze the playout buffer performance for different degrees of jitter, different values of the scheduled playout delay, different maximum lengths of delay spikes, and arbitrary tolerable ranges of sliding. Based on the analytical results, we suggest the specific values of parameters used in the sliding algorithm.

To realize the hardware object which facilitates the application development in the reconfigurable computing system, a hardware module (HwModule) is proposed and implemented. To access the circuit in the HwModule from the standard PC without detailed knowledge of the hardware, an object manager (ObjectManager) is also implemented. With the help of the ObjectManager, the programmers can use the hardware objects like the usual software objects. The HwModule is applied to the image matching, and the easiness of the application development for the HwModule is confirmed.

Free-standing 2D slab photonic band-edge lasers based on square lattice and triangular lattice are realized by optical pumping at room-temperature. Both in-plane-emission and surface-emission photonic band-edge lasers are observed and compared. Analyses on optical loss mechanisms for finite-size photonic band-edge lasers are also discussed.

In this paper, we investigate how to initialise cellular automata implemented in the hyperbolic plane. We generalise a technique which was indicated in to the case of any rectangular regular grid of the hyperbolic plane. This allows us to construct the initial configuration of any cellular automaton belonging to a rather large class of problems.

In this paper, we propose two fast codebook generation algorithms for entropy-constrained vector quantization. The first algorithm uses the angular constraint to reduce the search area and to accelerate the search process in the codebook design. It employs the projection angles of the vectors to a reference line. The second algorithm has feature of using a suitable hyperplane to partition the codebook and image data. These algorithms allow significant acceleration in codebook design process. Experimental results are presented on image block data. These results show that our new algorithms perform better than the previously known methods.

A "based" plane triangulation is a plane triangulation with one designated edge on the outer face. In this paper we give a simple algorithm to generate all biconnected based plane triangulations having exactly n vertices and with the maximum degree exactly D. The algorithm uses O(n) space and generates such triangulations in O(1) time per triangulation without duplications.

Graph drawing addresses the problem of constructing geometric representation of information and finds applications in almost every branch of science and technology. Efficient algorithms are essential for automatic drawings of graphs, and hence a lot of research has been carried out in the last decade by many researchers over the world to develop efficient algorithms for drawing graphs. In this paper we survey the recent algorithmic results on various drawings of plane graphs: straight line drawing, convex drawing, orthogonal drawing, rectangular drawing and box-rectangular drawing.

In-plane-aligned a-axis-oriented YBa2Cu3O7-δ (YBCO) thin films are attractive for the formation of planar intrinsic Josephson devices. In this study, these films were deposited by dc sputtering on LaSrGaO4 (LSGO) (100) substrates and the dependence of the characteristics on the deposition conditions was investigated. In-plane-aligned a-axis-oriented YBCO thin films were successfully grown in the substrate temperature range of 555-615. With the temperature gradient method, it was seen that the critical temperature of the film increased to 81 K. The current-voltage characteristic along the c-axis exhibited clear multibranch structures. These results indicate that ion-cleaning of the substrate surface broadens the growth temperature range of these films and planar intrinsic Josephson devices can be fabricated from these films.

An amperometric thin-film glucose biosensor based on a plasma-polymerized film using hexamethyldisiloxane as the monomer is presented. The plasma-polymerized film, achieved in plasma in the vapor phase, offers a new alternative for use in the design of the electrode-enzyme interface of biosensors. The film shows promise of high sensor performance; namely, rapid sensor response, low noise, a wide dynamic range, reproducibility, and reduction in the effects of interfering materials such as ascorbic acid. In this study, we examined the usefulness of the hexamethyldisiloxane plasma-polymerized film and investigated how the thickness of the plasma-polymerized film on a platinum electrode affected sensor characteristics: the selectivity for hydrogen peroxide versus interfering agents, the sensor response due to enzymatic reaction, and oxygen depletion.

This paper describes an area-efficient dual-rail array logic architecture, a logic-cell-embedded PLA (LCPLA), which has 2-input logic cells in the structure. The 2-input logic cells composed of pass-transistors can realize any 2-input Boolean function and are embedded in a dual-rail PLA. The logic cells can be designed by connecting some local wires and do not require additional transistors over logic cells of the conventional dual-rail PLA. By using the logic cells, some classes of logic functions can be implemented efficiently, so that high-speed and low-power operations are also achieved. The advantages over the conventional PLAs and standard-cell-based designs were demonstrated by using benchmark circuits, and the LCPLA is shown to be effective to reduce the number of product terms. In a structure with a 64-bit input and a 1-bit output including 220 product terms, the LCPLA achieved an area reduction by 35% compared to the conventional high-speed dual-rail PLA, and the power-delay product was reduced by 74% and 46% compared to the conventional high-speed single-rail PLA and the conventional high-speed dual-rail PLA, respectively. A test chip of this configuration was fabricated using a 0.35-µm, 3-metal-layer CMOS technology, and was verified with a functional test using a logic tester and an electron-beam tester at frequencies of up to 100 MHz with a supply voltage of 3.3 V.

AFM/STM observations were performed on sub nm thick C-Au-S film by co-operation process of plasma CVD and sputtering with using CH4, SF6 and Ar mixture gas and Au plate discharge electrode. From the refractive index values, the conductive granular molecules with a size of 0.4-0.6 nm were expected to exist in the film. For the film at thickness similar to the molecular size, Ra (arithmetic mean departures of roughness profile from the mean line) values were measured to be 0.712/6.10 nm by AFM/STM measurement, respectively. The one order large STM Ra value compared to the AFM Ra value suggests that the film contains conductive granular molecules.

Our study focuses on an evaluation of a novel speech processing strategy for multi-channel cochlear implant speech processors. Stimulation pulse trains for the Nucleus 24CI speech processor were generated in a way different from the speech processing strategies implemented in this processor. The distinctive features of the novel strategy are: 1) electrode stimulation order driven by location of maximum instantaneous frequency amplitude; 2) variable stimulation rates on electrodes; 3) variable number of selected channels within a cycle of signal processing schema. Within-subject designed tests on Japanese initial, medial and final consonants in CV, VCV and CV/N context tokens were carried out with cochlear implant patients using the Cochlear ACETM strategy, and results were compared with those of normal hearing listeners. Results of the initial and medial consonant tests showed significantly better performance with the novel strategy than with the ACE strategy for both the cochlear implant and normal hearing listener groups. Results of the final consonant tests showed a slightly better performance with the ACE strategy for cochlear implant listeners while showing a slightly better performance with the novel strategy for normal hearing listeners.

A new bipolar scan waveform is proposed to increase the light emission duty factor by achieving the fast address in AC plasma display panel (AC-PDP). The new bipolar scan waveform consists of two-step scan pulse, which can separate the address discharge mode into two different discharge modes: a space charge generation mode and a wall charge accumulation mode. By adopting the new bipolar scan waveform, the light emission duty factor is increased considerably under the single scan ADS driving scheme due to the reduction of address time per single subfield.

We studied nitrogen incorporation in Al2O3 gate dielectrics by nitrogen plasma and examined the dependence of the electrical properties on the nitrogen incorporation. We found that the nitrogen concentration and profile in Al2O3 films thinner than 3 nm can be controlled by the substrate temperature and the plasma conditions. The electrical characterization showed that the plasma nitridation suppresses charges in Al2O3 films and prevents dopant penetration through the gate dielectric without increasing the leakage current or the interfacial trap density. We also demonstrated the improved performance of a metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor by using a plasma nitrided Al2O3 gate dielectric. These results indicate that plasma nitridation is a promising method for improving the electrical properties of Al2O3 gate dielectrics.

Based on an experimental fact that surface wave plasmas excited by strongly coupled microwave through thin dielectric windows show nearly perfect absorption of microwave and, after diffusion, form a widely uniform dense plasma. A plasma with an uniformity of 5% over an area of 50 cm 60 cm was produced. The plasma produced by application of 2400 W total microwave power gives 1 1011 cm-3 in density and 1.5 eV in electron temperature.

Given an edge-weighted graph G, the minimum maximal matching problem asks to find a minimum weight maximal matching. The problem is known to be NP-hard even if the graph is planar and unweighted. In this paper, we consider the problem in planar graphs. First, we prove a strong inapproximability for the problem in weighted planar graphs. Second, in contrast with the first result, we show that a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the problem in unweighted planar graphs can be obtained by a divide-and-conquer method based on the planar separator theorem. For a given ε > 0, our scheme delivers in time a solution with size at most (1 + ε) times the optimal value, where n is the number of vertices in G and α is a constant number.

This paper proposes a test generation method using several partly compacted test plan tables for RTL data paths. Combinational modules in data paths are tested using several partly compacted test plan tables. Each partly compacted test plan table is generated from each grouped test plan set and is used to test combinational modules corresponding to the grouped test plans. The values of control signals in a partly compacted test plan table are supplied by a test controller. This paper also proposes the architecture of a test controller which can be synthesized in a reasonable amount of time, and proposes a test plan grouping method to shorten test length for data paths under a test controller area constraint. Experimental results for benchmarks show that the test lengths are shortened by 4 to 36% with -9 to 8% additional test controller area compared with the test generation method using test plans.

We have developed a planarization method applicable to large-scale superconductive Nb device fabrication. A planarized multi-layer wiring structure is obtained independently of the wiring size (width, length, and density) by combining three steps for fabricating an SiO2 insulator layer: bias-sputtering, chemical mechanical polishing, and etching with a reversal mask. Fabricated three-level wiring structures, consisting of 200- or 300-nm-thick Nb and SiO2 layers, had excellent layer flatness, and the leakage current (< 0.1 µA/cm2) between the Nb layers was sufficiently low. Two hundred chains of stepwise and stacked contacts yielded a sufficiently large critical current, typically more than 10 mA at 4.2 K.

The traditional way of approaching device-level placement problems for analog layout is to explore a huge search space of absolute placement representations, where cells are allowed to illegally overlap during their moves. This paper presents a novel exploration technique for analog placement, operating on a subset of tree representations of the layout, where the typical presence of an arbitrary number of symmetry groups of devices is directly taken into account during the search of the solution space. The efficiency of the novel approach is due to the use of red-black interval trees, data structures employed to support operations on dynamic sets of intervals.