This paper reports on the effect of switching action on the contact surfaces of earthquake disaster prevention relays. Large-scale earthquakes occur frequently in Japan and bring extensive damage with them, and fire caused by electrical equipments is one example of the serious damage which can occur. Earthquake sensors capable of maintaining a high level of reliability when earthquakes occur play an important role as a means of minimizing this damage. For this reason, we carried out observations by focusing on samples which had either been subjected to an electric current of 10 mA or 0.1 A. The samples of 10 mA exhibited low and constant contact resistance despite the addition of seismic motion, while the samples of 0.1 A samples exhibited varying contact resistance and damage on their contact spots resulting from the addition of seismic motion. The sample surfaces were then observed using an atomic force microscope (AFM) in tapping mode and a surface potential microscope (SPoM). As a result, we found that even the unused earthquake disaster prevention relay (standard sample) which had a surface lined with asperities on its parallel striations formed by irregular protrusions due to dust and other deposits. In addition, scanning the contact surface with the SPoM at the same potential revealed the occurrence of differences in surface potential which varied in response to the asperities on the striations.

An optimized Built-In Self-Test technology is proposed in this paper. A simplified algebraic model is developed to represent the configurations of single input change circuits. A novel single input change sequence generation technique is designed. It consists of a modified scan shift register, a seed storage array and a series of XOR gates. This circuitry can automatically generate single input change sequences of more unique vectors. Experimental results based on the ISCAS-89 benchmark show that the proposed method can achieve high stuck-at fault coverage with low switching activity during test applications.

A simple and successful design of initial codebook of vector quantization (VQ) is presented. For existing initial codebook algorithms, such as random method, the initial codebook is strongly influenced by selection of initial codewords and difficult to match with the features of the training vectors. In the proposed method, training vectors are sorted according to the norm of training vectors. Then, the ordered vectors are partitioned into N groups where N is the size of codebook. The initial codewords are obtained from calculating the centroid of each group. This initializtion method has a robust performance and can be combined with the VQ algorithm to further improve the quality of codebook.

The main idea in perceptual image compression is to remove the perceptual redundancy for representing images at the lowest possible bit rate without introducing perceivable distortion. A certain amount of perceptual redundancy is inherent in the color image since human eyes are not perfect sensors for discriminating small differences in color signals. Effectively exploiting the perceptual redundancy will help to improve the coding efficiency of compressing color images. In this paper, a locally adaptive perceptual compression scheme for color images is proposed. The scheme is based on the design of an adaptive quantizer for compressing color images with the nearly lossless visual quality at a low bit rate. An effective way to achieve the nearly lossless visual quality is to shape the quantization error as a part of perceptual redundancy while compressing color images. This method is to control the adaptive quantization stage by the perceptual redundancy of the color image. In this paper, the perceptual redundancy in the form of the noise detection threshold associated with each coefficient in each subband of three color components of the color image is derived based on the finding of perceptually indistinguishable regions of color stimuli in the uniform color space and various masking effects of human visual perception. The quantizer step size for the target coefficient in each color component is adaptively adjusted by the associated noise detection threshold to make sure that the resulting quantization error is not perceivable. Simulation results show that the compression performance of the proposed scheme using the adaptively coefficient-wise quantization is better than that using the band-wise quantization. The nearly lossless visual quality of the reconstructed image can be achieved by the proposed scheme at lower entropy.

To conserve energy, periodic active/sleep dynamics is adopted in wireless sensor networks. At the same time, the QoS guarantees, such as packet delay, packet loss ratio and network throughput need to be satisfied. We develop a finite queuing model for sensor nodes and derive network performance for contention-based wireless sensor networks with synchronous wakeup patterns. Furthermore, the impact of active/sleep duty cycle, time scale and node buffer size on the tradeoff between energy efficiency and QoS guarantees is studied based on the model. Simulation results well match our analytical results and validate the accuracy of our model and approach.

A binaural hearing assistance system based on the frequency domain binaural model has been previously proposed. The system can enhance a signal coming from a specific direction. Since the system utilizes a binaural signal, an inter-channel communication between left and right subsystems is required. The bit rate reduction in inter-channel communication is essential for the detachment of the headset from the processing system. In this paper, the performance of a system which uses a differential pulse code modulation codec is examined and the relationship between the bit rate and sound quality is discussed.

In this paper, a communication system using vector quantization (VQ) and channel coding is considered. Here, a design scheme has been proposed to optimize source codebooks in the transmitter and the receiver. In the proposed algorithm, the overall distortion including both the quantization error and channel distortion is minimized. The proposed algorithm is different from the previous work by the facts that the channel encoder is used in the VQ-based communication system, and the source VQ codebook used in the transmitter is different from the one used by the receiver, i.e. asymmetric VQ system. And the bounded-distance decoding (BDD) technique is used to combat the ambiguousness in the channel decoder. We can see from the computer simulations that the optimized system based on the proposed algorithm outperforms a conventional system based on a symmetric VQ codebook. Also, the proposed algorithm enables a reliable image communication over noisy channels.

Novel low phase noise quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) and quadrature injection locked frequency divider (QILFD) with two coupled Hartley VCOs are proposed and implemented using the standard TSMC 0.18 µm CMOS 1P6M process. The QVCO employs pMOS as the core to reduce the up-conversion of low-frequency device noise to RF phase noise. It uses super-harmonic coupling technique to couple two differential Hartley VCOs and four small-size coupling transistors to set the directivity of quadrature output phases. At the 1.7 V supply voltage, the output phase noise of the QVCO is -124 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency from the carrier frequency of 4.12 GHz, and the figure of merit is -185 dBc/Hz. At the supply voltage of 1.7 V, the total power consumption is 13.1 mW. At the supply voltage of 1.5 V, the tuning range of the free-running QILFD is from 2.05 GHz to 2.36 GHz, about 310 MHz, and the locking range of the ILFD is from 3.99 to 5.19 GHz, about 1.20 GHz, at the injection signal power of 0 dBm.

In time-varying channels, the channel state information available at the transmitter (CSIT) is outdated due to inherent time delay between the uplink channel estimation and the downlink data transmission in TDD systems. In this letter, we propose an iterative precoding method and a linear decoding method which are both based on minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) criteria to mitigate the interference among data streams and users created by outdated CSIT for multiuser MIMO downlink systems. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the impairment of the outdated CSIT and improve the system capacity.

With the smaller layout area and parasitic capacitance under the same electrostatic discharge (ESD) robustness, silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) has been used as an effective on-chip ESD protection device in radio-frequency (RF) IC. In this paper, SCR's with the waffle layout structures are studied to minimize the parasitic capacitance and the variation of the parasitic capacitance within ultra-wide band (UWB) frequencies. With the reduced parasitic capacitance and capacitance variation, the degradation on UWB RF circuit performance can be minimized. Besides, the fast turn-on design on the low-capacitance SCR without increasing the I/O loading capacitance is investigated and applied to an UWB RF power amplifier (PA). The PA co-designed with SCR in the waffle layout structure has been fabricated. Before ESD stress, the RF performances of the ESD-protected PA are as well as that of the unprotected PA. After ESD stress, the unprotected PA is seriously degraded, whereas the ESD-protected PA still keeps the performances well.

3GPP evolved packet system (EPS) is an all-IP based system that supports various access networks such as LTE, HSPA/HSPA+ and non-3GPP networks. Recently, the support of IP flows with packet level QoS profiles has been added to the requirements of the EPS. This paper proposes an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme that supports the QoS of such IP flows in the 3G LTE access network of the EPS. Defining the retransmission as a critical factor for QoS, the proposed scheme applies different maximum packet error probability Pmax to each packet when selecting the AMC transmission mode. In determining Pmax, the QoS constraints as well as channel condition are considered, balancing two objectives: the satisfaction of the QoS and the maximization of spectral efficiency. Simulations show that it is able to reduce both delay violation and retransmission, while improving throughput in comparison with an existing scheme.

For wideband MIMO-OFDM systems, scheduling and link adaptation are key techniques to improve the throughput performance. However, in systems without reciprocity between the uplink and the downlink channels, these techniques require a high feedback overhead of the channel quality indication (CQI) information. In this paper, we propose a novel CQI feedback reduction method, which is based on the conventional compression techniques exploiting the discrete cosine transformation (DCT). The basic idea is to adaptively permute the CQI sequences of different MIMO streams according to one of the possible patterns before the DCT compression so that the amount of feedback bits is minimized. The possible patterns used are carefully designed according to our analysis of the two types of correlations (the inter-stream correlation and the inter-subband correlation) that exist in MIMO-OFDM transmission, as well as their impact on the compression efficiency. Simulation results verify that the proposed method can effectively reduce the CQI feedback overhead under varying channel conditions.

An all-optical phase multiplexing scheme for phase-modulated signals is proposed and experimentally demonstrated using four-wave mixing (FWM) in a highly-nonlinear fiber (HNLF). Two 10-Gb/s π/2-shifted differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) signals are experimentally demonstrated to be converted and phase-multiplexed into a 20-Gb/s differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) signal with non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) formats, respectively. Experimental results show that, due to phase-modulation-depth doubling effect and phase multiplexing effect in the FWM process, a DQPSK signal is successfully generated through the proposed all-optical phase multiplexing with improved receiver sensitivity and spectral efficiency.

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity frequency offset insensitive detection method for the 2.45 GHz LR-WPAN demodulator. In IEEE 802.15.4 LR-WPAN (Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network) specification, the frequency offset as highest 80 ppm in the 2.45 GHz band is recommended for low-complexity, low-cost, and low-power implementation. The proposed detection method is verified such that the performance is within 2 dB of the optimal coherent detection with low complexity, which is less than half in comparison with conventional detection methods.

Interleaved Frequency Division Multiplexing (IFDM) can achieve high diversity gain as well as establishing orthogonal frequency multiplexing by using a comb-shaped frequency spectrum. In IFDM, as the number of repeat transmissions of a modulated symbol is increased, the comb-shaped frequency spectrum should be narrowed, so that the frequency diversity gain is decreased. In addition, IFDM suffers from inter-path interference imposed on the transmitted signal by multipath fading channel. In this paper, a novel frequency spectrum construction is proposed. In the proposed frequency spectrum construction, the comb-shaped frequency spectrum is frequency-shifted for every modulated symbol. As a result, the frequency spectrum of the frame composed of many modulated symbols is widely spread. In addition, the inter-path interference can be suppressed because the modulated symbol is orthogonal, in the frequency domain, to the following symbol. From the computer simulation, the frequency spectrum rotation can achieve better error rate performance thanks to the increase in frequency diversity gain and suppressing inter-path interference.

A fuzzy logic control battery equalizing controller (FLC-BEC) is adopted to control the cell voltage balancing process for a series connected Li-ion battery string. The proposed individual cell equalizer (ICE) is based on the bidirectional Cuk converter operated in the discontinuous capacitor voltage mode (DCVM) to reduce the switching loss and improve equalization efficiency. The ICE with the proposed FLC-BEC can reduce the equalizing time, maintain safe operations during the charge/discharge state and increase the battery string capacity.

An enormous amount of multimedia data will be transmitted by various devices connected to the wireless personal area network, and this network environment will require very high transmission capacity. In this letter, we apply multiple antennas to the MB-OFDM UWB system for high performance. With an emphasis on a preamble design for multi-channel separation, we address the channel estimation in the MB-OFDM system with multiple antennas. By properly designing each preamble so that the multiple antennas remain orthogonal in the time domain, the channel estimation can be applied to the MB-OFDM specification in the case of more than 2 transmit antennas. By using the multiple-antenna scheme and proposed channel estimation technique, the reliability and performance of the MB-OFDM system can be improved.

In terms of outage behavior, it has been shown that incremental relaying achieves the best performance among cooperative diversity protocols such as: Amplify-And-Forward (AF), Decode-And-Forward (DF), and Selection Decode-And-Forward (SDF). Exploiting a limited feedback from the destination, incremental relaying lets the relay forward the signal received from the source whenever an error happens at the destination, then, the signals from both the source and the relay are combined to make a decision. Noticing that the signal from the source, indicated by the error, is detrimental, we propose a new scheme not using that signal but only making a decision based on the fresh signal from the relay. Large performance improvement and complexity reduction are attained as we show in the analysis and simulation results. Theoretical results are derived and shown to match with the simulation counterparts.

For the construction of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) systems using their unique properties, a PCF coupler (PCFC) is one of the key components of the systems. The characteristics of the PCFC depend on the state of air holes in the tapered region of the PCFC because the state of air holes in the tapered region affects light propagation in the PCFC taper. In this paper, coupling characteristics of PCFCs were theoretically investigated. In PCFCs with air hole remaining tapers, we found that a smaller elongation ratio i.e. a stronger elongation is required to obtain optical coupling as an air hole pitch or a ratio of air hole diameter to pitch is larger. In PCFCs with air hole collapsed tapers, it was clarified that a dependence of extinction ratio on air hole collapsed elongation ratio is higher for smaller elongation ratio. It was also clarified that an air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to an air hole collapsed PCFC. Air hole remaining PCFCs and air hole collapsed PCFCs were fabricated using a CO2 laser irradiation technique. We could successfully control whether air holes in the PCFC taper were remaining or collapsed by adjusting the irradiated laser power in the elongation process of the PCFC fabrication. It was experimentally clarified that the air hole remaining PCFC has slow wavelength characteristics in extinction ratio compared to the air hole collapsed PCFC. The tendencies of the measured wavelength characteristics of PCFCs agree with those of numerical results.

A new adaptive model based on fuzzy integrals has been presented and used for combining three well-known methods, Eigenface, Fisherface and SOMface, for face classification. After training the competence estimation functions, the adaptive mechanism enables our system the filtering of unsure judgments of classifiers for a specific input. Comparison with classical and non-adaptive approaches proves the superiority of this model. Also we examined how these features contribute to the combined result and whether they can together establish a more robust feature.