In this report, we demonstrate electrocatalytic oxidation properties of ascorbic acid at poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) thin films in view of their potential application for bio-sensing devices. PEDOT thin films were deposited on gold thin films by electropolymerization of EDOT monomer in acetonitrile solvent. In-situ electrochemical-surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy (EC-SPR) was used to detect both electrochemical and optical signals upon an injection of ascorbic acid.

We propose frequency shifted optical single sideband (OSSB), a novel OSSB modulation scheme. It uses a continuous wave to up-convert the source signal, and the signal and the continuous wave then undergo suppressed carrier OSSB modulation simultaneously. This scheme inherently has no unwanted sidebands, even if the suppressed carrier OSSB modulator is defective. Experiments of 12 GHz RF signal transmission confirm that it achieves 2.4 dB relaxation in chromatic dispersion power fading under the condition of 15 dB SSR.

In this letter, we propose combinatorial and search construction methods of 2-D multi-weight optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) with autocorrelation 0 and crosscorrelation 1, called multi-weight single or no pulse per row (MSNPR) codes. An upper bound on the size of MSNPR codes is derived and the performance of MSNPR codes is compared to those of other OOCs in terms of the bit error rate (BER) and evaluated using blocking probability. It is also demonstrated that the MSNPR codes can be flexibly constructed for different applications, providing the scalability to optical CDMA networks.

The characteristics of violet-sensitive organic photodetectors (OPDs) utilizing polyalkylfluorene and triplet materials have been studied as a host and a dopant material, respectively. For the photo absorption layer, poly(9,9-dioctylfluorene) [PFO] and a phosphorescent iridium complex (Iridium (III) bis(2-(4,6-difluorophenyl)pyridinato-N,C2) [FIrpic] or Iridium (III) bis(2-(2'-benzothienyl)pyridinato-N,C3')(acetyl-acetonate) [(btp)2Ir(acac)]) were used as a host and a dopant material, respectively. PFO: (btp)2Ir(acac) device showed less photocurrent than PFO device because (btp)2Ir(acac) enhances recombination of the photo generated carriers in the photo absorption layer. On the other hand, PFO : FIrpic device showed larger photocurrent than PFO device due to triplet energy transfer from FIrpic to PFO. A cutoff frequency of 20 MHz was observed using a sinusoidal modulated violet laser light illumination under the reverse bias of 8 V.

In-situ measurement of photoelectron spectra of polypyrrole during electrochemical undoping/doping cycles has been carried out by using an open-type electrochemical cell. It has been observed that the ionization potential decreases with decreased electrochemical potential. This result seems to be reasonable because the decreased electrochemical potential corresponds to the undoping or recovery of electrons into vacant state of valence band.

Attenuated total reflection (ATR) property utilizing surface plasmon (SP) excitation was investigated for BK-7 prism/MgF2/Ag film/fluorescent organic dye film structure. In the structure, it is expected that SPs are excited at MgF2/Ag and Ag/dye film interfaces by Otto and Kretschmann configurations, respectively. In the experimental ATR curve, reflection dips for the SP excitations at the interfaces could be detected. Furthermore, SP emission lights were observed by irradiation of Ar ion laser beam from the dye film side. The SP emission light curve with two peaks was observed and it was also considered that the peaks corresponded to the SP excitation of Otto and Kretschmann configurations. The SP emission light spectra indicated the excited fluorescent dyes induced the SP emission lights. Intense emission light of Otto configuration was observed in this sample.

To improve path loss estimation, a ray tracing method for inhomogeneous building surfaces and its verification are presented in this paper. Considering real building surfaces with many heterogeneous materials, the effective specular reflection based on a physical optics (PO) approximation is modeled and applied to the reflection in a ray tracing method. To verify the proposed method, measurement at 2.7 GHz is performed in a complex urban environment. Comparisons between the measurements and the ray tracing results are made in LOS and NLOS environments.

We have developed novel humidity and gas detector system using quartz crystal oscillators (QCO) deposited with cellulose Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films. We have realized stable humidity detection by the LB-based QCO sensor for extremely high humidity subsequent to the water dipping condition. Also, specific gaseous molecules such as alcohol could have been sensitively detected.

One-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) with alternating layers of TiO2 and SiO2 was fabricated with spin coating and low temperature baking, resulting in a successful tuning of the PC stop band so as to block the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) of a π-conjugate polymer film. Single PC as a substrate, not a cavity with two PC's, of the polymer film was sufficient to shift the tangential ASE to the energy at PC stop band edge, indicating that the tangential ASE propagating along the interface was modulated by its evanescent-field tail in the PC, which opens the new pathway for low-threshold coherent luminescence from an ultrathin π-conjugate polymer film with ultimate mode volume.

This paper presents a unified test compression technique for scan stimulus and unknown masking data with seamless integration of test generation, test compression and all unknown response masking for high quality manufacturing test cost reduction. Unlike prior test compression methods, the proposed approach considers the unknown responses during test pattern generation procedure, and then selectively encodes the less specified bits (either 1s or 0s) in each scan slice for compression while at the same time masks the unknown responses before sending them to the response compactor. The proposed test scheme could dramatically reduce test data volume as well as the number of required test channels by using only c tester channels to drive N internal scan chains, where c = 「 log 2N 」 + 2. In addition, because all the unknown responses could be exactly masked before entering into the response compactor, test loss due to unknown responses would be eliminated. Experimental results on both benchmark circuits and larger designs indicated the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

The share of leakage in cache power consumption increases with technology scaling. Choosing a higher threshold voltage (Vth) and/or gate-oxide thickness (Tox) for cache transistors improves leakage, but impacts cell delay. We show that due to uncorrelated random within-die delay variation, only some (not all) of cells actually violate the cache delay after the above change. We propose to add a spare cache way to replace delay-violating cache-lines separately in each cache-set. By SPICE and gate-level simulations in a commercial 90 nm process, we show that choosing higher Vth, Tox and adding one spare way to a 4-way 16 KB cache reduces leakage power by 42%, which depending on the share of leakage in total cache power, gives up to 22.59% and 41.37% reduction of total energy respectively in L1 instruction- and L2 unified-cache with a negligible delay penalty, but without sacrificing cache capacity or timing-yield.

As well as the schedule affects system performance, the control skew, i.e., the arrival time difference of control signals between registers, can be utilized for improving the system performance, enhancing robustness against delay variations, etc. The simultaneous optimization of the control step assignment and the control skew assignment is more powerful technique in improving performance. In this paper, firstly, we prove that, even if the execution sequence of operations which are assigned to the same resource is fixed, the simultaneous optimization problem under a fixed clock period is NP-hard. Secondly, we propose a heuristic algorithm for the simultaneous control step and skew optimization under given clock period, and we show how much the simultaneous optimization improves system performance. This paper is the first one that uses the intentional skew to shorten control steps under a specified clock period. The proposed algorithm has the potential to play a central role in various scenarios of skew-aware high level synthesis.

The reduction of the peak power consumption of LSI is required to reduce the instability of gate operation, the delay increase, the noise, and etc. It is possible to reduce the peak power consumption by clock scheduling because it controls the switching timings of registers and combinational logic elements. In this paper, we propose a fast peak power wave estimation method for clock scheduling and fast clock scheduling methods for the peak power reduction. In experiments, it is shown that the peak power wave estimated by the proposed method in a few seconds is highly correlated with the peak power wave obtained by HSPICE simulation in several days. By using the proposed peak power wave estimation method, proposed clock scheduling methods find clock schedules that greatly reduce the peak power consumption in a few minutes.

In video streaming applications over the Internet, TCP-friendly rate control schemes are useful for improving network stability and inter-protocol fairness. However, they do not always guarantee a smooth video streaming. To simultaneously satisfy both the network and user requirements, video streaming applications should be quality-adaptive. In this paper, we propose a new quality adaptation mechanism to adjust the quality of congestion-controlled video stream by controlling the frame rate. Based on the current network condition, it controls the frame rate of video stream and the sending rate in a TCP-friendly manner. Through a simulation, we prove that our adaptation mechanism appropriately adjusts the quality of video stream while improving network stability.

This paper proposes a MAC protocol for presence information discovery in ubiquitous networks. The proposed protocol is designed for proactive discovery in which wireless devices periodically broadcast packets containing presence information. The protocol is based on Framed Aloha. The objective of the protocol is to assure the discovery time of single-hop neighbors considering wireless collisions and also power consumption. In this paper, we show that the proposed protocol is able to assure specified discovery time in distributed networks with random topology.

A novel CMOS LC quadrature oscillator (QO) which adopts complementary-coupling circuitry has been proposed. The performance improvement in I/Q phase error and phase noise of the proposed QO, is explained in comparison with conventional QOs. The proposed QO is implemented in 0.18 µm CMOS technology along with conventional QOs. The measurement result of the proposed QO shows -133.5 dBc/Hz of phase noise at 1 MHz offset and 0.6 I/Q phase difference, while oscillating at 1.77 GHz. The proposed QO shows more than 6.5 dB phase noise improvement compared to that of the conventional QOs over the offset frequency range of 10 K-1 MHz, while dissipating 4 mA from 1.4 V supply.

Even though weighted frequent pattern (WFP) mining is more effective than traditional frequent pattern mining because it can consider different semantic significances (weights) of items, existing WFP algorithms assume that each item has a fixed weight. But in real world scenarios, the weight (price or significance) of an item can vary with time. Reflecting these changes in item weight is necessary in several mining applications, such as retail market data analysis and web click stream analysis. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a dynamic weight for each item, and propose an algorithm, DWFPM (dynamic weighted frequent pattern mining), that makes use of this concept. Our algorithm can address situations where the weight (price or significance) of an item varies dynamically. It exploits a pattern growth mining technique to avoid the level-wise candidate set generation-and-test methodology. Furthermore, it requires only one database scan, so it is eligible for use in stream data mining. An extensive performance analysis shows that our algorithm is efficient and scalable for WFP mining using dynamic weights.

Broadcasting is an elementary operation in wireless multi-hop networks. Flooding is a simple broadcast protocol but it frequently causes serious redundancy, contention and collisions. Probability based methods are promising because they can reduce broadcast messages without additional hardware and control packets. In this paper, the counter-based scheme which is one of the probability based methods is focused on as a broadcast protocol, and the RAD (Random Assessment Delay) Extension is proposed to improve the original counter-based scheme. The RAD Extension can be implemented without additional hardware, so that the strength of the counter-based scheme can be preserved. In addition, we propose the additional algorithm called Hop Count Aware RAD Extension to establish shorter path from the source node. Simulation results show that both of the RAD Extension and the Hop Count Aware RAD Extension reduce the number of retransmitting nodes by about 10% compared with the original scheme. Furthermore, the Hop Count Aware RAD Extension can establish almost the same path length as the counter-based scheme.

Wide area ubiquitous wireless networks, which consist of access points (APs) connected to the fixed network and a great many wireless terminals (WTs), can offer a wide range of applications everywhere. In order to enhance network performance, we need to collect different kinds of data from as many WTs as possible; each AP must be capable of accommodating more than 103 WTs. This requirement can be achieved by employing DSA, a typical centralized media access control scheme, since it has high resource utilization efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel DSA scheme that employs three new techniques to enhance throughput performance; (1) considering that most terminals tend to send data periodically, it employs both polling-based schemes, i.e. request-polling and data-polling, and a random access scheme. (2) In order to enhance bandwidth utilization effectiveness by polling, the polling timing is decided according to the data generation timing. (3) The AP decides the polled data size according to the latest distribution of data size and polls the WT for the data directly. If the data-polling size can not be determined with confidence, the AP uses request-polling instead of data-polling. Simulations verify that the proposed scheme offers better transmission performance than the existing schemes.

This paper introduces a theory for fast optimization of the circuit topology and parameters in sinusoidal oscillators. The theory starts from a system model composed of standard active and passive elements. We then include even the output load in the circuit, so that there is no longer any interaction with the outside of the system through the port. This model is thus called no-input-no-output (NINO) oscillator. The circuit is cut at an arbitrary branch, and is characterized in terms of the scalar impedance from the cut point. This is called active impedance because it is a function of not only the stimulating frequency but also the active device gain. The oscillation frequency and necessary device gain are estimated by solving impedance-domain Barkhausen equilibrium equations. This estimation works for the adjustment of circuit elements to meet the specified oscillation frequency. The estimation of necessary device gain enables us to maximize the oscillation amplitude, thanks to the inherent negative-slope nonlinearity of active devices. The active impedance is also used to derive the oscillation Q (quality) factor, which serves as a key criterion for sideband noise minimization i.e. frequency spectrum purification. As an alternative measure to active impedance, we also introduce branch admittance matrix determinant. This has the same numerical effect as the scalar impedance but can be used to formulate oscillator characteristics in a more elegant fashion, and provides a lucent picture of the physical behavior of each element in the circuit. Based on the proposed theory, we provide the tabled formulas of oscillation frequency, necessary device gain, active Q factor for a variety of typical Colpitts, Hartley, and cross-coupled twin-FET (field-effect transistor) oscillators.