A new generation method of rotating electromagnetic fields (rotating-EM fields) for radio frequency (RF) radiated immunity/susceptibility test and its basic characteristics are described. Two different double-side-band suppressed-carrier (DSB-SC) signals are required for generating the slowly rotating-EM field for the immunity/susceptibility test. These DSB-SC signals are generated by a DSB-SC-signal generator based on the new concept which consists of voltage-variable attenuators, bi-phase switches, a direct-digital synthesizer and a micro processor. Using the DSB-SC-signal generator, the DSB-SC signal of arbitrary RF frequency can be generated more easily than the conventional system. In this paper, the principle of the DSB-SC signal generator and the basic characteristics of the DSB-SC signals generated by the generator are clarified. The measured basic characteristics of the rotating-EM field generated using the new concept are shown and it is confirmed that the field can be applied for the RF immunity/susceptibility test. In addition, the susceptibility test of an equipment under test is made as an example, the validity of our proposed system is established.

In this paper we focus on the decoding error of the Log-Likelihood Ratio Belief Propagation (LLR-BP) decoding algorithm caused by oscillation. The decoding error caused by the oscillation is dominant in high Eb/N0 region. Oscillation of the LLR of the extrinsic value in the bit node process (ex-LLR) is propagated to the other bits and affects the whole decoding. The Ordered Statistic Decoding (OSD) algorithm is known to improve the error rate performance of the LLR-BP decoding algorithm. The OSD algorithm is performed by deciding the reliability of each bit based on a posteriori probability. In this paper we propose two decoding algorithms based on two types of oscillations of LLR for LDPC codes. One is the oscillation-based OSD algorithm with deciding the reliability of each bit based on oscillation. The other is the oscillation-based LLR-BP decoding algorithm that modifies ex-LLR based on oscillation. In the oscillation-based LLR-BP decoding algorithm, when ex-LLR oscillates, then we reduce the magnitude of this ex-LLR to reduce the effects on the other bits. Both algorithms improve the decoding errors caused by oscillation. From the computer simulations, we show that paying attention to the oscillation, we can improve the error rate performance of the LLR-BP decoding algorithm.

This paper proposes an analysis and design methodology for the robust control of affine-in-control nonlinear systems subject to actuator saturation in discrete-time formulation. The robust stability condition is derived for the closed-loop system by the introduction of the fuzzy Kronecker delta. Based on the newly acquired stability condition, a design method is proposed to guarantee the robust H∞ performance. In the design, LMI-based pole placement is employed to use the freedom allowed in the selection of the controller. The validity of the proposed method is asserted by the computer simulation.

The motion of arc spots of breaking arc is investigated for Ag electrical contacts in DC 42 V/10 A resistive circuit using a high-speed camera. Also, the eroded contact surfaces are observed with a microscope after each breaking operation. As results, some kinds of different films and eroded regions are distinguished. Diameters of these regions are corresponding to the widths of the cathode and anode spot regions that are obtained by using the high-speed camera. It is found that the films and eroded regions on the electrical contacts are generated at different stages of the breaking arc.

In each contact material (Ag, Cu, Ni, and Fe), the breaking arcs occurring between an electrical contact pair in a resistive circuit of DC42 V/10.5 A were observed with a high-speed camera (1000 frames/s). Arc voltage and arc current were also measured simultaneously. By analyzing cathode and anode bright spots in the photographs, the positions of cathode and anode bright spots on contact surfaces were plotted on the graph. As a result, cathode and anode bright spots were found to express the characteristic motion in each material. Moreover, by comparing those results with the photograph of contact surface after all operations.

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.

Arc duration of breaking arcs is investigated in order to obtain an experimental equation for the dependence of the arc duration on supply voltage in DC resistive circuit in air at atmospheric pressure. Materials of the contact pairs are Au, Ag, Cu, Ni, Pt and Pd. The interrupted current is ranging from 6 A to 10 A and the supply voltage is 30 V, 42 V and 54 V. Sato's experimental equation for the arc length is modified to obtain more appropriate experimental equation for our experimental results. The arc termination current It and minimum arc voltage Vm that are obtained with the experimental results are used as parameters of the experimental equation for each contact material. And characteristic coefficients C for each contact material in the experimental equation are obtained. As results, the experimental equation for each contact material well agrees with the experimental results. The experimental equation for several contact materials is presented.

Information transmission among biological neurons is carried out by a complex series of spike signals. The input inter-spike arrival times at a neuron are believed to carry information which the neurons utilize to carry out a task. In this paper, a new scheme which utilizes the input inter-spike intervals (ISI) for decoding an input spike train is proposed. A spike train consists of a sequence on input spikes with various inter-spike times. This decoding scheme can also be used for neurons which have multiple synaptic inputs but for which each synapse receives a single spike within one input time window. The ISI decoding neural network requires only a few neurons. Example applications show the usefulness of the decoding scheme.

AgCdO12wt% contacts mounted on electrical relays were tested in a dc 14 V-21 A or 42 V-8.4 A resistive circuit as make-only contacts. In this experiment, we took photograph records and measured arc duration and number of bounces. A transferred pip was grown on the cathode surface, and its height H grew H/Ga>0.5, where where H is height of pip, Ga is the contact separation, sticking occurred easily. Neither the rapidity of growth or the shape of the transferred pip influenced circuit conditions, but there were differences observed for the each sample. Since the arc discharge of switching operations at make-only contacts occurs during a rebound, the arc duration, as well as the number of bounces fluctuates.

We calculated the shielding characteristic of a three-dimensional array of strip conductors by using the electric field integral equation method and its expansion to an array structure. From reflection coefficients, the effective permittivity of the array is calculated. The effective permittivity becomes negative in the frequency range above resonance, in which the electromagnetic waves travel through the material in an evanescent mode and the transmission coefficient becomes very small.

In this paper, the electric field radiated by a lightning discharge is derived in the time-frequency domain. By modeling a tortuous and branched lighting discharge, we computed the discrete wavelet transform of the radiated electric field, providing time localization of the fine structure of the field, which is though to be related to the discharge path geometry. By solving the radiated field in the wavelet domain, we aim at simulating the effects of the channel geometry on the victim system.

This paper describes a distributed video transcoding system that can simultaneously transcode an MPEG-2 video file into various video coding formats with different rates. The transcoder divides the MPEG-2 file into small segments along the time axis and transcodes them in parallel. Efficient video segment handling methods are proposed that minimize the inter-processor communication overhead and eliminate temporal discontinuities from the re-encoded video. We investigate how segment transcoding should be distributed to obtain the shortest total transcoding time. Experimental results show that implementing distributed transcoding on 10 PCs can decrease the total transcoding time by a factor of about 7 for single transcoding and by a factor of 9.5 for simultaneous three kinds of transcoding rates.

This CMOS transceiver IC exploits the superheterodyne architecture to implement a low-cost RF front-end with only 6.25 mm2 die area for IEEE 802.11b standard. The transceiver is implemented in 0.25 µm CMOS process with 2.7 V supply voltage, and achieves a -86 dBm 11 Mb/s receive sensitivity and a 2 dBm transmit output power.

Active integrated antenna techniques have high potential for giving smaller size, lighter weight, lower cost and higher efficiency, in particular to millimeter-wave circuit-antenna systems. This paper gives a review of active integrated antenna techniques with emphasis on beam steering and retrodirective antenna arrays. Various beam steering operations of integrated antenna oscillator arrays using locking phenomena are presented. Beam steering arrays of such type have the feature that phase shifters are not necessary in the arrays. Arrays with higher harmonic output radiation can enlarge the beam steering range. Arrays of locked active antennas which operate as self-oscillating mixers can be beam controllable receiving antennas.

In this letter, we propose a complexity-scalable DCT-based video encoder which works for the highly resource-limited terminals, such as cellular phone, PDA, handheld terminals, etc. The basic concept in the proposed method is for DCT operations to be adaptively changing the complexity like buffer control algorithm in the CBR (Constant Bit-Rate) video encoder.

An on-package dual-mode square-loop band pass filter is studied by applying a non-uniform finite difference time domain (NU-FDTD) method. The filter is integrated on a package containing a transceiver, and it is designed to operate in dual-modes, i.e., and , to ensure a good electric performance around the center frequency at 5.25 GHz, which is commonly allocated in wireless local area network (WLAN). This filter is also referred as a dual-mode integrated-circuit package filter (DM-ICPF) based on its operational mode and integration onto an IC-package. The frequency characteristics in terms of the scattering parameters are studied, and the results are validated against the computed results using commercial software, the high frequency structure simulator (HFSS). Results show an excellent agreement between the numerical data, and the proposed DM-ICPF structure can be applied in the area of the highly integrated wireless transceivers.

This paper presents a cascode-pair distributed amplifier design approach using 0.25 µm GaAs-based PHEMT MMIC technology, which covers 2-32 GHz. Electromagnetic simulation results show that this amplifier achieves 18 dB gain from 2 to 32 GHz and 0.5 dB gain flatness over the band. The reflected coefficients at the input and output ports are below -10 dB up to 27 GHz. The output power at 1 dB compression is greater than 24 dBm at 20 GHz. An appropriate feedback resistance can be utilized to improve P1 dB for about 6 dBm. The DOE (design of experiment) approach is carried out by a simulation tool for better performance and tolerance of the devices is also analyzed. The circuit configuration is capable of operating over ultra-broad band amplification.

The shared time division multiplexing (shared-TDD) scheme has been proposed to accommodate asymmetric communications between uplink and downlink. The accommodation of connection-less services in Shared-TDD systems causes a difficulty of TDD boundary control. This paper proposes a TDD boundary control (resource assignment) scheme, which can optimize a position of the TDD boundary based on the ratio of uplink to downlink traffic in code division multiple access (CDMA)/shared-TDD systems with connection-less services. The proposed scheme controls the TDD boundary based on the estimated uplink and downlink traffic. Computer simulations show that the proposed scheme effectively controls the radio resource, and thus improves total system throughput performance.

A mutated adder architecture utilizing a mixture of carry propagation schemes is proposed to design a delay-area efficient adder which were not available in an ordinary design space. Further, we develop an optimization method based on integer linear programming to search the expanded design space of the mutated adder.

A robust microphone array for speech enhancement and noise suppression is studied in this paper. To overcome target signal cancellation problem of conventional beamformer caused by array imperfections or reverberation effects of acoustic enclosure, the proposed microphone array adopts an arbitrary model of channel transfer function (TF) relating microphone and speech source. Since the estimation of channel TF itself is often intractable, herein, transfer function ratio (TFR) is estimated instead and used to form a suboptimal beamformer. A robust TFR estimation method is proposed based on signal subspace analysis technique against stationary or slowly varying noise. Experiments using simulated signal and actual signal recorded in a real room illustrate that the proposed method has high performance in adverse environment.