A novel class of microstrip bandpass filter is configured using the impedance transformers and an improved stepped impedance resonator (SIR). This SIR is composed of a central narrow strip section with an aperture on ground and two wide strip sections at the two sides. This low-high-low SIR resonator has a promising capability in achieving an extremely large ratio of first two resonant frequencies for design of a bandpass filter with ultra-broad stopband. The two quarter-wavelength transformers with low and high impedances, referred as to impedance- and admittance-inverters, are modeled and utilized as alternative types of inductive and capacitive coupling elements with highly tightened degrees for wideband filter design. After extensive investigation is made on the two transformers and the proposed SIR, the two novel bandpass filters are constructed, designed and implemented. Two sets of predicted and measured frequency responses over a wide frequency range both quantitatively exhibit their several attractive features, such as ultra-broad stopband with deep rejection and broadened dominant passband with low insertion loss.

The application of Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (O-STBC) as the encoding scheme in the presence of "non-quasi-static" fading was considered. A simple and efficient adaptive method of channel estimation based on the interpolation of estimates acquired at the pre-amble and post-amble of framed blocks of information is developed. Moreover, the proposed method is proven, both theoretically and by simulations, to outperform the alternative of channel tracking, despite its significant low complexity.

Cross-document personal name resolution is the process of identifying whether or not a common personal name mentioned in different documents refers to the same individual. Most previous approaches usually rely on lexical matching such as the occurrence of common words surrounding the entity name to measure the similarity between documents, and then clusters the documents according to their referents. In spite of certain successes, measuring similarity based on lexical comparison sometimes ignores important linguistic phenomena at the semantic level such as synonym or paraphrase. This paper presents a semantics-based approach to the resolution of personal name crossover documents that can make the most of both lexical evidences and semantic clues. In our method, the similarity values between documents are determined by estimating the semantic relatedness between words. Further, the semantic labels attached to sentences allow us to highlight the common personal facts that are potentially available among documents. An evaluation on three web datasets demonstrates that our method achieves the better performance than the previous work.

In frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM) for TES signals, a magnetic field summation method utilizing a multi-input SQUID has the fundamental merit of small degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio. We formulated shifts of the operation point due to a common impedance and cross talk currents. These effects are evaluated for several FDM methods, and the requirements for the bandwidth and filters are summarized. The design parameters of multi-input SQUIDs and a flux locked loop driving circuits are also presented.

A combination of horizontal expansion and vertical stacking of optical Banyan (HVOB) is the general architecture for building Banyan-based optical cross-connects (OXCs), and the intrinsic crosstalk problem of optical signals is a major constraint in designing OXCs. In this paper, we analyze the blocking behavior of HVOB networks and develop the lower bound on blocking probability of a HVOB network that is free of first-order crosstalk in switching elements. The proposed lower-bound is significant because it provides network designers an effective tool to estimate the minimum blocking probability they can expect from a HVOB architecture regardless what kind of routing strategy to be adopted. Our lower bound can accurately depict the overall blocking behavior in terms of the minimum blocking probability in a HVOB network, as verified by extensive simulation based on a network simulator with both random routing and packing routing strategies. Surprisingly, the simulated and theoretical results show that our lower bound can be used to efficiently estimate the blocking probability of HVOB networks applying packing strategy. Thus, our analytical model can guide network designers to find the tradeoff among the number of planes (stacked copies), the number of SEs, the number of stages and blocking probability in a HVOB network applying packing strategy.

Novel microstrip dual-band bandpass filters with controllable fractional bandwidths and good in-between isolation are presented and implemented. A half-wavelength stepped-impedance resonator is firstly characterized, aiming at producing the two resonant frequencies at 2.4 and 5.2 GHz. Two types of coupled microstrip lines in the parallel and anti-parallel formats are then investigated in terms of unified equivalent J-inverter network. Extensive results are derived to quantitatively show their distinctive frequency-distributed coupling performances under different coupling lengths. The coupling degrees of these two coupled lines at the two resonances are properly adjusted to achieve the dual-passband response with varied or tunable bandwidths. In addition, the parallel coupled line is modeled to bring out a transmission zero between the two resonances so as to achieve the good in-between isolation. The three two-stage bandpass filters are initially designed to exhibit their dual-band response with changeable dual-band bandwidths. A three-stage dual-band filter is in final optimally designed and its predicted performance is confirmed in experiment.

Syntax and prosody are closely related to each other. This paper is concerned with the problem of exploiting pause information for recovering dependency structures of read Japanese sentences. Our parser can handle both symbolic information such as dependency rule and numerical information such as the probability of dependency distance of a phrase in a unified way as linguistic information. In our past work, post-phrase pause that immediately succeeds a phrase in question was employed as prosodic information. In this paper, we employed two kinds of pauses in addition to the post-phrase pause: post-post-phrase pause that immediately succeeds the phrase that follows a phrase in question, and pre-phrase pause that immediately precedes a phrase in question. By combining the three kinds of pause information linearly with the optimal combination weights that were determined experimentally, the parsing accuracy was improved compared to the case where only the post-phrase pause was used as in our previous work. Linear combination of pause and fundamental frequency information yielded further improvement of parsing accuracy.

The network performance of a single joint multicasting capable optical cross-connect (jMC-OXC) integrating both space- and frequency-splitters is simulated. The results show that the jMC-OXC architecture with limited frequency-splitters can obtain a close performance to that with full frequency splitters. The improvement offered by jMC-OXCs on the performance of multicasting routing is also discussed.

Vertical stacking is a novel technique for creating nonblocking (crosstalk-free) optical multistage interconnection networks (MINs). In this paper, we propose a new class of optical MINs, the vertically stacked Benes (VSB) networks, for crosstalk-free realization of permutations in a single pass. An NN VSB network requires at most O(Nlog N) switching elements, which is the same as the Benes network, and much lower overall hardware cost than that of the existing optical MINs built on the combination of horizontal expansion and vertical stacking of banyan networks, to provide the same crosstalk-free permutation capability. Furthermore, the structure of VSB networks provides a more flexible way for constructing optical MINs because they give more choices in terms of the number of stages used in an optical MIN. We also present efficient algorithms to realize crosstalk-free permutations in an NN VSB network in time O(Nlog N), which matches the same bound as required by the reported schemes.

Characteristics of a class of stepped-impedance resonators (SIRs) which is loaded with two dielectric rods, are investigated by a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method. Dielectric rods to be inserted between a strip conductor and the ground plane have higher relative permittivity than that of the substrate. When a tapped half-wavelength (λ/2) microstrip resonator is loaded with two dielectric rods, the electric length of a loaded λ/2 resonator becomes longer than λ/2, which makes its fundamental resonant frequency () to be generated on the region lower than that of an unloaded λ/2 resonator (fr) and its first spurious response (fsp1) is generated on the region higher than 2. Therefore, to shift back to fr, the resonator's length is to be reduced, and this, in turns, suppress the spurious responses. Then, the resonant characteristics of an SIR employing the proposed method has also been investigated, and it is found that this is capable of suppressing the spurious responses in wideband together with an attenuation pole in the stopband, and of further reducing the resonator's length. Therefore, wide exploitation of the presented method can be expected in the filter design based on the LTCC technique.

The authors propose the simple and efficient method based on the shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) method in order to evaluate multi-reflection effects inside a radome. In this paper, we show the analysis procedure of the proposed method. Next, we compare calculated data with some measured data in order to verify the proposed method. We confirmed that the proposed method is effective for the objects with radome except the areas where strong edge diffraction appears.

Target reconstruction algorithm from its monostatic radar cross section (RCS) has been proposed for polygonal cylinders with curved surfaces. This algorithm is based on our previous finding that the main contribution to the back scattering is due to edge diffracted fields excited at a facet of nearly specular reflection direction. Dimension of this constitutive facet of the target is estimated from the local maxima and its lobe width in the angular RCS variation. Half and quarter circular cylinders are used as canonical scattering objects, and their measured and numerically simulated monostatic RCS values have been studied extensively to find scattering pattern characteristic difference between flat and circularly curved surfaces. Thus estimated constitutive facets are connected in order, and this procedure will be continued until the distance between the first and the final edges would be minimized. Our algorithm has been tested for other targets, and it is found that it works well for predicting metal convex targets with flat and curved facets.

A transition between an NRD guide, suitable for construction of high performance millimeter-wave integrated circuits, and a microstrip line, being used to mount semiconductor devices such as HEMT, HBT, and MMIC, was developed at 60 GHz. The main emphasis was placed on the manner of field matching between the NRD guide and the microstrip line. We propose adoption of this a new transition structure employing a vertical strip line, which can be easily coupled to the NRD guide, and a coaxial line connected to the microstrip line. Moreover, we applied a packaging structure with a choke circuit for the microstrip line to prevent undesired leakage between the NRD guide and the microstrip line. The insertion loss of the fabricated transition was measured to be less than 0.5 dB in the bandwidth of 3 GHz at a center frequency of 60.5 GHz. The transition was applied to MMIC amplifier integration in the NRD guide at 60 GHz. The forward and reverse gains were measured to be 15 dB and -20 dB, respectively, at 60 GHz.

We observed the optically forbidden energy transfer between cubic CuCl quantum dots coupled via an optical near-field interaction using time-resolved near-field photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The energy transfer time and exciton lifetime were estimated from the rise and decay times of the PL pump-probe signal, respectively. We found that the exciton lifetime increased as the energy transfer time fell. This result strongly supports the notion that near-field interaction between QD makes the anti-parallel dipole coupling. Namely, a quantum-dots pair coupled by an optical near field has a long exciton lifetime which indicates the anti-parallel coupling of QDs forming a weakly radiative quadrupole state.

A method of evaluating the wavelength filter spectrum response is introduced. The increase of the crosstalk level due to the filtering and the relation between the total crosstalk and the spectral efficiency are derived in detail using the Gaussian filter. Since this method can be applied to various kinds of filter spectrum responses, the ultimate spectral efficiencies of filters are compared. In this comparison, the problem of the box-like filter, which has been considered to be desirable, is revealed, and this is improved by cascading the filter spectrum. The requirement on the rejection floor that inheres in the filter is also made clear.

This paper proposes an adaptive noise canceller (ANC) with low signal-distortion for human-robot communication. The proposed ANC has two sets of adaptive filters for noise and crosstalk; namely, main filters (MFs) and subfilters (SFs) connected in parallel thereto. To reduce signal-distortion in the output, the stepsizes for coefficient adaptation in the MFs are controlled according to estimated signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the input signals. This SNR estimation is carried out using SF output signals. The stepsizes in the SFs are determined based on the ratio of the primary and the reference input signals to cope with a wider range of SNRs. This ratio is used as a rough estimate of the input signal SNR at the primary input. Computer simulation results using TV sound and human voice recorded in a carpeted room show that the proposed ANC reduces both residual noise and signal-distortion by as much as 20 dB compared to the conventional ANC. Evaluation in speech recognition with this ANC reveals that with a realistic TV sound level, as good recognition rate as in the noise-free condition is achieved.

TCP performance in the IEEE 802.11-based multihop ad hoc networks is extremely poor, because the congestion control mechanism of TCP cannot effectively deal with the problem of packet drops caused by mobility and shared channel contention among wireless nodes. In this paper, we present a cross-layer method, which adaptively adjusts the TCP maximum window size according to the number of RTS (Request To Send) retry counts of the MAC layer at the TCP sender, to control the number of TCP packets in the network and thus decrease the channel contention. Our simulation results show that this method can remarkably improve TCP throughput and its stability.

Carbon brushes for starters are used under severe conditions of high electric current density, high contact pressure and high sliding velocity. Lead has traditionally been added to carbon brushes to improve their performance and durability. Because lead is an environmentally hazardous substance, after January 2005 the EU will prohibit adding lead to carbon brushes for electric motors installed in vehicles. The purpose of our current study is to develop materials of lead-free carbon brushes for starters. Analyzing the effects of adding lead has shown that lead inhibits the brush resistance from increasing under high temperatures, or a combination of both high temperature and high humidity. This is because corrosion of lead precedes that of copper, which is one of the materials comprising the brush, and this prevents the copper from corroding. Moreover, lead functions as a solid lubricant and reduces brush wear. We developed the lead-free brush material, by adding soft metallic substances that corrode prior to copper and are also oxidation-resistant, as well as possessing low hardness and solid lubricant properties. The developed lead-free brush surpasses the conventional lead-added brush in durability and permanence.

Recently, DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) has been used for nondestructive air monitoring, in which the LS (least squares) method is used to calculate trace gas concentrations due to its computational simplicity. This paper applies the ICA (independent component analysis) method to the DOAS system of air monitoring, since the LS method is insufficient to recover the desired spectra perfectly due to sparsity characteristic. If the sparsity of reference spectra in the DOAS system imposes the assumption of independence, the ICA algorithm can be used. The proposed method is used to regress the observed spectrum on the estimates of the reference spectra. The ICA algorithm can be seen as a preprocessing method where the ICs of the references are used as the input in the regression. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in simulation studies using synthetic data.

We initiated development of our own data processing software for laser microscope data with C# language. This software is provided with volume calculation function of a target portion, based on a new calculation algorithm that can precisely handle the volume calculation of the portion located on a tilted surface or on a distorted surface. In this paper, this algorithm and some exemplary results obtained thereby, as well as some further development aims, are briefly described.