This paper summarizes our recent efforts in modelocking Ti:sapphire lasers with semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs). We present the shortest optical pulses ever generated directly from a laser. The modelocking build-up time (T BU) of 60 µs is, to our knowledge, the shortest reported for a passively modelocked KLM laser to date.

In this paper we review the stretched-pulse principle and discuss its inherent advantages for ultrashort pulse generation and transmission. An analytic theory of the stretched-pulse fiber laser is presented and shown to be in good agreement with experimental results. An extension of the stretched-pulse theory is applied to both fiber lasers and dispersion-allocated soliton transmission and then compared to numerical results. We also discuss the design and operation of an environmentally stable stretched-pulse fiber laser.

An ultra-broadband optical parametric amplification can be attained by a noncollinear phase-matching. The group-velocity matching of the signal and idler reduces the signal-pulse width to 14-fs in an optical parametric amplifier based on a β-BaB2O4 crystal pumped by a second harmonics of a Ti: sapphire regenerative amplifier. This simple novel method shows the potential light source of a tunable sub-10-fs pulse in a visible region.

In this paper, we describe the properties of an external cavity modelocked semiconductor laser with a tunability of wavelength, pulse width and repetition rate. This modelocked laser generates optical pulses with pulse widths down to 180 fs and with repetition rates up to 14 GHz in a 120 nm wavelength range near 1. 55 µm or 1. 3 µm. The generated pulses are close to the transform limit and are therefore suitable for very high speed communication systems. In addition to the tunability, this pulse source is a compact and mechanically stable device. We report on two applications of this pulse source in optical time division multiplexing experiments. In the first example the modelocked laser is used as an all-optical clock recovery. In the second example the modelocked laser was used to characterize an interferometric switch by pump-probe experiments.

This paper describes a new Vector Sum Excited Linear Prediction (VSELP) coder with very low complexity. The method, called regular pulse VSELP (RP-VSELP), is based on regular pulse basis vectors with mutually orthonormal property. In this Approach, a very efficient vector-sum codebook is constructed from a set of mutually orthonormal regular pulse bassis vectors and enables us to simplify the codebook search without additional degradation of synthesized speech compared with that of the conventional VSELP. The regular pulse basis vectors are explicitly orthonormalized by means of the Gram-Schmidt procedure. To enhance the speech quality of the RP-VSELP speech coder, perceptually weighted distortion measure between the input and the synthesized speech is utilized in an iterative closedloop training process of the regular pulse basis vectors. It is shown that speech quality is improved by the training process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces the synthesized speech quality comparable to that of the VSELP scheme at the bit-rate of 4.8 Kbps.

A new method is proposed for recovering an unknown source signal ,which is observed through two unknown channels characterized by non-minimum phase FIR filters. Conventional methods cannot estimate the non-minimum phase parts and recover the source signal. Our method is based on computing the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest eigenvalue of the input correlation matrix and using the criterion with the multi-channnel inverse filtering theory. The impulse responses are estimated by computing the eigenvector for all modeling orders. The optimum order is searched for using the criterion and the most appropriate impulse responses are estimated. Multi-channel inverse filtering with the estimated impulse responses is used to recover the unknown source signal. Computer simulation shows that our method can estimate nonminimum phase impulse responses from two reverberant signals and recover the source signal.

A laser power optimizing method for multi-pulse recording is described. Multi-pulse recording uses the recording pulse formed by bias part and comb part. To obtain best readout signal characteristics and reduce the time for optimizing, new mark pattern is recorded and then two parts of the recording pulse are individually adjusted by evaluating the detected signals during pre-write testing. At the optimized laser power by this method, a good qualitative eyepattern was obtained. As a result, this new method proves to be suitable for the multi-pulse recording and adapted to various disks with different recording properties.

The data retention characteristics for Flash EEPROM degrade after a large number of write and erase cycles due to the increase of the tunnel oxide leakage current. This paper proposes a new write/erase method which uses a reverse polarity pulse after each erase pulse. By using this method, the leakage current can be suppressed. As a result, the read disturb time after 105cycles write/erase operation is more than 10 times longer in comparison with that of the conventional method. Moreover, using this method, the endurance cycle dependence of the threshold voltage after write and erase operation is also drastically improved.

With increases in the speed of semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, the importance of internal testing with sufficient temporal resolution has been growing. This paper describes recently established electro-optic testing technologies based on pulse lasers and electro-optic crystal probes. Practicability, limitation and future issues are discussed.

An adaptive decoding scheme for a concatenated code used in the frequency-hopped spread-spectrum communication system in the presence of a pulse-burst jammer is proposed and its performance is analyzed. Concatenated coding schemes employing binary inner-code and Reed-Solomon outer code are investigated and the use of side information is allowed to decode both erasures and errors. The proposed scheme makes the decoder enable to adapt to the jamming level by switching between two decoding modes such that the decoded bit error rate can be reduced. The optimal threshold value for switching in this proposed scheme is derived. It has been shown that the proposed decoding scheme yields a significant performance improvement over a conventional decoding scheme. In addition, performance analysis and its variation of adaptive decoding scheme with the imperfect side information are also presented.

Over the past few years, many industrial processes have switched to electrical processes from conventional fossil fuel as a primary energy source, since electricity can be transmitted more economically than the transport of fossil fuels, as well as less pollution problems and labour- and spacesaving nature. For the environmental protections, ozone generation for water treatments, and decomposition of pollution gases such as SOx, NOx, COx, etc., by high pressure gas discharge processes become an important research subject. However, due to the early stage of development, the EMC problem is not yet well considered. In this review, we try to address the EMC problem in the various atmospheric pressure gas discharge processing techniques and identify future needs of research.

This letter proposes a pulse width modulated (PWM) control method which can stabilize chaotic orbits onto unstable fixed points and unstable periodic orbits. Some numerical experiments using the Lorenz equation show that chaotic orbits can be stabilized by the PWM control method. Furthermore, we investigate the stability in the neighborhood of an unstable fixed point and discuss the stability condition of the PWM control method.

This paper describes the new analog-digital merged circuit architecture which utilizes the pulse modulation signals. By reconsidering the information representing and processing principles, and the circuit operations governed by the physical law, the new circuit architecture is proposed to overcome the limitations of existent VLSI technologies. The proposed architecture utilizes the pulse width modulation (PWM) signal which has analog information in the time domain, and be constructed with the novel PWM circuits which carry out the multi-input arithmetic operations, the signal conversions and the data storage. It has a potential to exploit the high speed switching capability of deep sub-µm devices, and to reduce the number of devices and the power dissipation to one-tenth of those of the binary digital circuits. Therefore it will effectively implement the intelligent processing systems utilizing 0.5-0.2µm scaled CMOS devices.

In this paper we propose a new method for removing the characteristic of the piezoelectric transducer from the received signal in the pulse-echo method so that the time resolution in the determination of transit time of ultrasound in a thin layer is increased. The total characteristic of the pulse-echo system is described by cascade of distributed-constant systems for the ultrasonic transducer, matching layer, and acoustic medium. The input impedance is estimated by the inverse matrix of the cascade system and the voltage signal at the electrical port. From the inverse Fourier transform of input impedance, the transit time in a thin layer object is accurately determined with high time resolution. The principle of the method is confirmed by simulation experiments.

A new low-power and high-speed CMOS interface circuit is proposed in which signals are transmitted by means of impulse voltage. This mode of transmission is called impulse transmission. Although a termination resistor is used for impedance matching, the current through the output transistors and the termination resistor flows only in transient states and no current flows in stable states. The output buffer and the termination resistor dissipate power only in transient states, so their power dissipation is reduced to 30% that of conventional low-voltage-swing CMOS interface circuits at 160 MHz. The circuit was fabricated by 0.5 µm CMOS technology and was evaluated at a supply voltage of 3.3 V. Experimental results confirm low power of 4.8 mW at 160 MHz and high-speed 870 Mb/s error free point-to-point transmission.

Computer circumstance have changed drastically, and larger capacity removable media is indispensable. Magneto-optical disk is promising candidate to satisfy computer user's needs. In this report, future perspective of high density magneto-optical recording technology is investigated.

The performance of coded multi-pulse pulse position modulation (MPPM) consisting of m slots and 2 pulses, denoted as (m, 2) MPPM, with imperfect slot synchronization is analyzed. Convolutional codes and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are employed for (m, 2) MPPM, and the bit error probability of coded (m, 2) MPPM in the presence of the timing offset is derived. In each coded (m, 2) MPPM, we compare the performance of some different code rate systems. Moreover, we compare the performance of both systems at the same information bit rate. It is shown that in both coded systems, the performance of code rate-1/2 coded (m, 2) MPPM is the best when the timing offset is small. Wheji the timing offset is somewhat large, however, uncoded (m, 2) MPPM is shown to perform better than coded (m, 2) MPPM. Further, convolutional coded (m, 2) MPPM with the constraint length k7 is shown to perform better than RS coded (m, 2) MPPM for the same code rate.

This paper reviews very high-speed optical signal processing technology based on the instantaneous characteristic of optical nonlinearities. Focus is placed on 100-Gbit/s optical time-division multiplexing (TDM) transmission systems. The key technologies including ultrashort optical pulse generation, all-optical multiplexing/demultiplexing and optical timing extraction techniques are alse described together with their major issues and future prospects.

An excitation signal for a synthesis filter plays an important role in producing high quality speech at a low bit rate. This paper presents a new efficient excitation model, Adaptive Density Pulse (ADP) , for low bit-rate speech coding. This ADP is a pulse train whose density (spacing interval) is constant within a subframe but can be varied subframe by subframe. First, the ADP excitation signal is defined. A procedure for finding the optimal ADP excitation is presented. Some results on investigating the effects of the ADP parameters on the synthesized speech quality are discussed. ADP excitation is introduced to the CELP (Code Excited Linear Prediction) coding method to improve speech quality at bit rates around 4 kbps. A CELP coder with an ADP (ADP-CELP) is described. ADP excitation makes it possible for the CELP coder to follow transient portions of speech signals. Also ADP excitation can reduce computational complexity in selecting the best excitation from a codebook, which has been the primary drawback of CELP. The number of multiplications can be reduced to the order of 1/D2 by utilizing the sparseness of ADP excitation, where D is the pulse interval. The authors evaluated the speech quality of a 4 kbps ADP-CELP coder by computer simulation. ADP excitation improved the performance of conventional CELP in segmental SNR.

FM laser operation of a Ti:sapphire laser is studied experimentally for the first time with an internal phase modulator. We obtained extremely wide FM sidebands of 8 THz width whose phase modulation index was 25,000 rad at a modulation frequency of 160 MHz.