We propose a new input arbitration method for an input buffered switch with a buffered crossbar. In the proposed method, each input module selects the first eligible queue from the starting point. The starting points of input modules are different from each other in any case. We show that the uniqueness of the starting points improves the switch performance. Finally, using computer simulations, we confirm the proposed method is better than the conventional method under the uniform and on-off traffic.

In transient analyzing of a crosstalk, the crosstalk waveform can be obtained with a commercial simulator such as SPICE simulation or FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) simulation. In case of using a simple model, a CMOS-IC load is considered as a constant capacitance load in crosstalk simulation. However, the semiconductor devices, such as CMOS-IC, have a characteristic of nonlinear impedance depending on the input voltage. We measured the far-end crosstalk of two parallel microstrip lines for a CMOS inverter (74HC04) load by changing the magnitude of the input step voltage. As the result, we found that the far-end crosstalk for the CMOS inverter load dose not necessarily depend on the input capacitance of the CMOS inverter.

A three-mode switched-LNA has been developed using a 0.25 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The LNA features low noise figure (NF) performance, while achieving both low dissipation power and low distortion characteristics. The proposed MOSFET switch incorporating a newly developed switch circuit with a triple-well structure, which changes the LNA's mode, provides a parasitic capacitance of just 0.52 times that of a conventional MOSFET switch. This results in a significant NF improvement, by 0.16-0.33 dB, for the three-mode switched-LNA compared to a conventional LNA. Extensive studies of the MOSFET switch with regard to the structural parameters and the doping profiles are reported. Experimental results and the overall performance of a trial IC incorporating the three-mode switched-LNA are also given.

The authors have been interested in a Scanning Laser Microscope (SLM) and applied it to studies of contact phenomena. In particular, a digital SLM is being currently used, and confirmed to be a successful tool for investigating the contact phenomena. In this paper, the theory and mechanism of a digital SLM are briefly explained, and some actual data obtained with the digital SLM are presented for demonstrating its usefulness for studies of contact phenomena.

Large number of electronic connectors are widely used in various electronic and telecommunication systems. No matter whether it is optical telecommunications or mobile phone systems, connectors are important links for electronics. Unfortunately connector contacts are exposed in air, they are different from any other electronic components, the contacts are greatly influenced by the environment where they operate. In China, dust and corrosion products are the main contaminants to cause contact failure. Evidently the failed contacts seriously deteriorate the reliability of electronic and telecommunication systems. This paper summarizes the recent achievements obtained by our Lab on the effect of dust and corrosion products to the connector contact failure. Since dust contamination is a very complex problem which is not only popular in China, but also happened in many countries. Continuous studies will be very useful to improve the contact reliability of connectors, setting up new and effective testing methods and standards, building up experimental and computer simulation systems.

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and measurement of a sequential-rotation microstrip-array antenna for Electronic Toll Collection System (ETCS). The ETCS is made possible by using roadside equipment with a radiation pattern that can accurately pinpoint the designated communication area, without interference from other lanes. The sequential-rotation microstrip-array antenna is designed and an absorber attached to the antenna is considered to reduce the side lobe level (SLL) for the antenna of ETCS. Results show that the antenna yields a return loss at a center frequency of -20.675 dB, an axial ratio of 1.15 dB, and a gain of 20.26 dBi.

A field trial, within a suburban macro-cell environment, of a space-time (ST) equalizer for TDMA mobile communication systems is described. The ST equalizer was a cascade connection of two array processors for a four-antenna array and a two-branch-metric-combining maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) that was designed to obtain full space- and path-diversity gains from first-arrival and one-symbol-delayed signals while suppressing excessively long-delayed inter-symbol interference (ISI). The radio frequency was 3.35 GHz, the transmission rate was 4.096 Mb/s, and the modulation was QPSK. The long-delayed ISI reduction and the space-path diversity effect of the ST equalizer was validated by Eb/N0 vs. bit-error-rate (BER) curves with respect to delay spread and antenna spacing as compared with the case of an array processor alone being used.

This paper presents a review of volumetric erosion studies applied to electrical contacts. The numerical methods presented are generic and could equally be applied to a number of areas where surfaces have been eroded or damaged. Equally there is no scale limitation of the surfaces to which the numerical methods can be applied. The paper starts with an introduction of the issues associated with the measurement of contact erosion, and then presents a summary of various hardware system for making 3D measurements of surfaces such as electrical contacts. This is followed by a review of the generic form fitting methods and also volume calculation methods. The paper concludes with a review of results taken from a test system for contact studies and from contact samples taken from commercial relays.

It is found that the supercontinuum spectrum is generated from cross-phase modulated soliton pulses which are propagated through a dispersion-flattened/decreasing fiber with low birefringence. The cross-phase modulation is achieved by exciting two orthogonally polarized modes in a birefringent fiber and the effect of input azimuth of linearly polarized pulses is discussed theoretically and numerically.

This paper describes the requirements for fault recovery on photonic networks and proposes a fast restoration scheme for recovering optical networks. The proposed scheme is a type of pre-assignment restoration. The features of the scheme are that it is suitable for multi-recovery classes aimed at fine control of the optical paths and that it establishes harmonization between restoration control and distributed network control such as in IP networks. The scheme is implemented on Photonic multi protocol label switching (MPLS) routers. A restoration demonstration was performed and recovery was achieved within 500ms in the optical layer.

This paper presents a new reconfigurable hardware paradigm, called evolvable hardware (EHW), and its application to the biomedical engineering problem of an artificial hand controller. Evolvable hardware is based on the idea of combining a reconfigurable hardware device with an artificial intelligence robust search technique called genetic algorithms (GAs) to execute reconfiguration autonomously. The first version of the EHW chip was designed in 1998, and this paper describes the latest improvements to the EHW chip, as well as outlining its architecture and the hardware implementation of the GA operations. Execution speed for genetic operations is shown to be about 38.7 times faster with the hardware implementation than with software program running on an AMD Athlon processor (1.2GHz). As an application of the EHW chip, this paper introduces a controller for a multi-functional prosthetic-hand, and presents experimental data in which a practical myoelectric pattern classification rate of 97.8% was achieved through the application of the EHW chip.

Wavelength conversion using the cross-gain modulation (XGM) of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) in a traveling-wave type semiconductor optical amplifier (TW-SOA) is theoretically studied. Taking into account the spatial and temporal variations of carrier density along the SOA length, output signal and converted ASE waveforms are analyzed. We also reveal the dependency of the signal and converted ASE waveforms on input signal power and repetition frequency, and confirm that numerical analyses well agree with the experimental results. Finally we qualitatively clarify the way to improve frequency response by simulating eye-diagrams for long SOAs and assist light pumping for the first time.

We have devised and implemented a new low-loss microstrip transmission structure on LTCC substrate by including void cavities in the dielectric layer between conductor strip and ground plane. Measurements of λ/4 T-resonators with the novel microstrip structure reveal total loss of 0.0126dB/mm and Q-factor of 267 at 15.85GHz. The dielectric loss is analyzed as small as 0.0005dB/mm at the frequency, and that is equivalent to an improvement of a factor of 18 compared to the conventional LTCC microstrip structure. The proposed microstrip structure with the embedded void cavities is suited for low loss LTCC based RF-MCM applications.

This paper describes an Embedded DRAM Hybrid Macro, which supports various memory specifications. The eDRAM module generator with Hybrid Macro provides more than 120,000 eDRAM configurations. This eDRAM includes a new architecture called Auto Signal Management (ASM) architecture, which automatically adjusts the timing of the control signals for various eDRAM configurations, and reduces the design Turn Around Time. An Enhanced-on-chip Tester performs the maximum 512b I/O pass/fail simultaneous judgments and the real time repair analysis. The eDRAM testing time is reduced to about 1/64 of the time required using the conventional technique. A test chip is fabricated using a 0.18 µm 4-metal embedded DRAM technology, which utilizes the triple-well, dual-Tox, and Co salicide process technologies. This chip achieves a wide voltage range operation of 1.2 V at 100 MHz to 1.8 V at 200 MHz.

In this study, we introduce a method for estimating the syntactic structure of Japanese speech from F0 contour and pause duration. We defined a prosodic unit (PU) which is divided by the local minimal point of an F0 contour or pause. Combining PUs repeatedly (a pair of PUs is combined into one PU), a tree structure is gradually generated. Which pair of PUs in a sequence of three PUs should be combined is decided by a discriminant function based on the discriminant analysis of a corpus of speech data. We applied the method to the ATR Phonetically Balanced Sentences read by four Japanese speakers. We found that with this method, the correct rate of judgement for each sequence of three PUs is 79% and the estimation accuracy of the entire syntactic structure for each sentence is 26%. We consider this result to demonstrate a good degree of accuracy for the difficult task of estimating syntactic structure only from prosody.

In this paper, we discuss crosstalk equalization technique for high-speed digital transmission systems. This equalization technique makes use of the cyclostationarity of the crosstalk interferer. We first analyze the eigenstructure of the equalizer in the presence of cyclostationary crosstalk interference. It is shown that the eigenvalues of the equalizer depend upon the folded signal and interferer power spectra, and the cross power spectrum between the signal and the interferer. The expressions of the minimum mean square error (MMSE) and the excess MSE are then obtained by using the equalizer's eigenstructure. Analysis and simulation results indicate that such peculiar equalizer's eigenstructure in the presence of cyclostationary interference results in significantly different initial convergence and steady-state behaviors as compared with the stationary noise case. We also show that the performance of the equalizer varies depending on the relative clock phase of the symbol clocks used by the signal and the crosstalk interferer.

As a typical planar antenna in Japan, a microstrip antenna and radial line slot antenna are chosen and some original technologies are introduced for them. About the microstrip antenna, the analyzing method is described first and the method based on the theory of microstrip planar circuit born in Japan is introduced. According to the formulas derived by this method, the design procedure considering the bandwidth is established. In addition, it is shown clearly that a microstrip antenna can produce the circular polarizations at two kinds of frequencies with a single feed. Furthermore, two kinds of broadband techniques born in Japan are picked up. About other unique microstrip antennas, they may be introduced in a suitable section each time. As for the RLSA, the history on invention is briefly presented. The radiation mechanisms depending on the slot-set arrangement and the excitation mode are discussed. The slot-coupling analysis to simulate the excitation of a two-dimensional uniformly-excited slot array is explained. The simple design based on the operation with traveling-wave propagation is also described. The technical progress to keep high efficiency in a wide gain range for satellite-TV reception is reviewed. Extensions of the RLSAs to millimeter-wave bands and plasma etching systems are finally summarized.

Accurate estimation of accentual attribute values of words, which is required to apply rules of Japanese word accent sandhi to prosody generation, is an important factor to realize high-quality text-to-speech (TTS) conversion. The rules were already formulated by Sagisaka et al. and are widely used in Japanese TTS conversion systems. Application of these rules, however, requires values of a few accentual attributes of each constituent word of input text. The attribute values cannot be found in any public database or any accent dictionaries of Japanese. Further, these values are difficult even for native speakers of Japanese to estimate only with their introspective consideration of properties of their mother tongue. In this paper, an algorithm was proposed, where these values were automatically estimated from a large amount of data of accent types of accentual phrases, which were collected through a long series of listening experiments. In the proposed algorithm, inter-speaker differences of knowledge of accent sandhi were well considered. To improve the coverage of the estimated values over the obtained data, the rules were tentatively modified. Evaluation experiments using two-mora accentual phrases showed the high validity of the estimated values and the modified rules and also some defects caused by varieties of linguistic expressions of Japanese.

This paper presents a study on modeling inter-word pauses to improve the robustness of acoustic models for recognizing noisy conversational speech. When precise contextual modeling is used for pauses, the frequent appearances and varying acoustics of pauses in noisy conversational speech make it a problem to automatically generate an accurate phonetic transcription of the training data for developing robust acoustic models. This paper presents a proposal to exploit the reliable phonetic heuristics of pauses in speech to aid the detection of varying pauses. Based on it, a stepwise approach to optimize pause HMMs was applied to the data of the DARPA SPINE2 project, and more correct phonetic transcription was achieved. The cross-word triphone HMMs developed using this method got an absolute 9.2% word error reduction when compared to the conventional method with only context free modeling of pauses. For the same pause modeling method, the use of the optimized phonetic segmentation brought about an absolute 5.2% improvements.

A four-pole quasi-elliptic function bandpass filter is designed and fabricated using a miniaturized microstrip square Stepped Impedance Resonator (SIR). The Nonuniform Finite Difference Time Domain (NUFDTD) method is used to design the resonator and to calculate the coupling coefficients of three basic structures. Theoretical and experimental results are presented. This filter is not only compact size but also has a wide upper stop band.