This paper presents a variable pipeline depth processor, which can dynamically adjust its pipeline depth and operating voltage at run-time, we call dynamic pipeline and voltage scaling (DPVS), depending on the workload characteristics under timing constraints. The advantage of adjusting pipeline depth is that it can eliminate the useless energy dissipation of the additional stalls, or NOPs and wrong-path instructions which would increase as the pipeline depth grow deeper in excess of the inherent parallelism. Although dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is a very effective technique in itself for reducing energy dissipation, lowering supply voltage also causes performance degradation. By combining with dynamic pipeline scaling (DPS), it would be possible to retain performance at required level while reducing energy dissipation much further. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our DPVS approach for a variety of benchmarks, reducing total energy dissipation by up to 64.90% with an average of 27.42% without any effect on performance, compared with a processor using only DVS.

We propose a technique of selecting seeds for the LFSR-based test pattern generators that are used in VLSI BISTs. By setting the computed seed as an initial value, target fault coverage, for example 100%, can be accomplished with minimum test length. We can also maximize fault coverage for a given test length. Our method can be used for both test-per-clock and test-per-scan BISTs. The procedure is based on vector representations over GF(2m), where m is the number of LFSR stages. The results indicate that test lengths derived through selected seeds are about sixty percent shorter than those derived by simple seeds, i.e. 0001, for a given fault coverage. We also show that seeds obtained through this technique accomplish higher fault coverage than the conventional selection procedure. In terms of the c7552 benchmark, taking a test-per-scan architecture with a 20-bit LFSR as an example, the number of undetected faults can be decreased from 304 to 227 for 10,000 LFSR patterns using our proposed technique.

A test generation method with time-expansion model can achieve high fault efficiency for acyclic sequential circuits, which can be obtained by partial scan design. This method, however, requires combinational test pattern generation algorithm that can deal with multiple stuck-at faults, even if the target faults are single stuck-at faults. In this paper, we propose a test generation method for acyclic sequential circuits with a circuit model, called MS-model, which can express multiple stuck-at faults in time-expansion model as single stuck-at faults. Our procedure can generate test sequences for acyclic sequential circuits with just combinational test pattern generation algorithm for single stuck-at faults. Experimental results show that test sequences for acyclic sequential circuits with high fault efficiency are generated in small computational effort.

Software Radio has been proposed in the 1990s as the solution to flexible transceiver design for future wireless systems. Potential advantages and drawbacks of this approach have been described and analysed in verbose format in many articles. However, a mathematical perspective of the software radio design problem is to be found in the literature only once. Despite this attempt to develop a sound formal description the conclusions do not reach beyond algorithm design. Open issues in system design are often mentioned, but remain unresolved hitherto. We develop a novel mathematical perspective of software radio, and we formulate the design problem accordingly, by means of an integer linear programming (ILP) representation. This type of problem is well-known in computer science and operations research, but it has never been linked to software radio design before. In a first approach to solve the ILP problem we reduce it to a scheduling problem with processor constraints. In the remainder of the theoretical section we introduce the notions of granularity G and speedup s to assess the quality of modular implementations. A random runtime argument leads the way to a system-theoretic approach to modular design issues such as maximizing speedup over a great number of different implementations. For the special case G = 1 we deduce the speedup potential of a primitive graph in analytical form. In the experimental section we compare simulation results to our theory, and we extend the experiments to a more complicated graph which stems from a real software radio design project. The paper concludes with a discussion and a brief outlook to future research issues.

This letter presents the advantages of a cascaded algebraic codebook structure at relatively high bit-rates. The cascaded structure that consists of two stages provides flexible pulse combinations due to an additional gain term in the second stage. The perceptual quality of the cascaded structure can be further improved by using a gain re-estimation scheme. Experiments confirm that the cascaded structure has a big advantage in terms of quality and complexity as the bit-rate becomes higher.

In this paper, an efficient optimization algorithm for solving the inverse problem of a two-dimensional lossless homogeneous dielectric object is investigated. A lossless homogeneous dielectric cylinder of unknown permittivity scatters the incident wave in free space and the scattered fields are recorded. Based on the boundary condition and the incident field, a set of nonlinear surface integral equation is derived. The imaging problem is reformulated into optimization problem and the steady-state genetic algorithm is employed to reconstruct the shape and the dielectric constant of the object. Numerical results show that the permittivity of the cylinders can be successfully reconstructed even when the permittivity is fairly large. The effect of random noise on imaging reconstruction is also investigated.

The size of the microscopic electron spot is an important parameter for the white-uniformity of a CRT. It changes as a function of the focus voltage and beam repulsion. This paper explains the mechanism behind this phenomenon. The model is supported by means of measurements.

The paper develops the transformation rules in order to use the Stochastic Petri Net model to evaluate the performance of various task scheduling algorithms. The transformation rules are applied to DFRN scheduling algorithm to investigate its effectiveness. The performance comparison reveals that the proposed approach provides very accurate evaluation for the scheduling algorithm when the Communication to Computation Ratio value is small.

Recently routing protocols for QoS aware multicast are actively studied, but there are few studies focusing on the scalability of link state advertisement when the available bandwidth of a link is updated along with the QoS aware multicast tree construction. This paper proposes a new QoS aware multicast routing protocol that is scalable in terms of the link state advertisement exchange. Our protocol has the following features; (1) A multicast network is divided into domains, and the advertisement of information on links within a domain is limited within the domain. (2) Among the border multicast routers, only the link state information of inter-domain links is advertised. As a result, the number of link state advertisement messages will be drastically reduced. (3) When a multicast tree spreads over multiple domains, the tree construction needs to be performed without information on links in other domains, and it is possible that the construction may fail. In order to cope with this problem, the crank back mechanism of a tree construction is introduced. This paper describes the detailed procedures and the message formats of our protocol. It also describes the evaluation of the number of exchanged link state advertisement messages and shows that our protocol can reduce the number comparing with the conventional protocols.

Edge linking is a fundamental computer vision task, yet presents difficulties arising from the lack of information in the image. Viewed as a constrained optimization problem, it is NP hard-being isomorphic to the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. This paper proposes a gradient ascent learning algorithm of the elastic net approach for edge linking of images. The learning algorithm has two phases: an elastic net phase, and a gradient ascent phase. The elastic net phase minimizes the path through the edge points. The procedure is equivalent to gradient descent of an energy function, and leads to a local minimum of energy that represents a good solution to the problem. Once the elastic net gets stuck in local minima, the gradient ascent phase attempts to fill up the valley by modifying parameters in a gradient ascent direction of the energy function. Thus, these two phases are repeated until the elastic net gets out of local minima and produces the shortest or better contour through edge points. We test the algorithm on a set of artificial images devised with the aim of demonstrating the sort of features that may occur in real images. For all problems, the systems are shown to be capable of escaping from the elastic net local minima and producing more meaningful contours than the original elastic net.

In this paper, we study reliable decentralized supervisory control of discrete event systems with a control architecture where certain controllable events are controlled under the conjunctive fusion rule, and certain others are controlled under the disjunctive fusion rule. We first introduce a notion of reliable co-observability with respect to such a partition of the controllable event set. We then prove that reliable co-observability together with Lm(G)-closure and controllability is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a reliable decentralized supervisor under a given partition. Moreover, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a partition of the controllable event set under which a given specification language is reliably co-observable.

Making up an electromagnetic wave simulator based on the FEM is tried, which may run on some widely used platforms by use of Java and a single commercial tool. Since the codes and configuration files to be created for this simulator are common, one can construct the simulator running on the platforms at the same time. Using this simulator, the transmission properties of two- and three-dimensional waveguide discontinuities in optical and microwave waveguides are analyzed, the inverse problem in material constant measurement is solved, and the computed results are presented including plots of the electric field distribution.

It is expected that per-user customized services are widely used in next generation Personal Communication Network. To provide personalized services for each call, per-user service profiles are frequently referenced, so efficient service profile management is essentially required. To provide service profile based services, typically two schemes can be employed: One is Intelligent Network based Central scheme and the other is IMT-2000 based full replication scheme, we refer to as Follow-Me Replication Unconditional (FMRU). Since the Central scheme only depends on the service call rate and the FMRU is merely dependent on the movement rate, it is apparent that the FMRU scheme outperforms the Central scheme if the call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) is large, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a new service profile replication schemes, Adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (AFMRC) that determine replication automatically according to the user's varying CMR in real-time. We compared the performance of the AFMRC with the previous non-adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (FMRC) scheme. Performance results indicate that as the CMR of a user changes, AFMRC adapts well compared to the existing schemes.

A novel hybrid numerical method, which is based on the extended spectral domain approach combined with the mode-matching method, is applied to evaluate the scattering parameter of waveguide discontinuities. The formulation procedure utilizes the biorthogonal relation in the transformation, and the Green's functions in the spectral domain are obtained easily even in the inhomogeneous lossy regions. The present method does not include the approximate perturbational scheme, and it can evaluate accurately and stably the scattering parameters of either for the thin or thick obstacles made of the wide variety of materials, the lossless dielectrics to highly conductive media, in short computation time. The physical phenomena of transmission through the lossy obstacles are investigated by numerical computations. The results are compared with FEM where FEM computations are feasible, although the FEM computations cannot cover the whole performances of the present method. The good agreement is observed in the corresponding range. The matrix size in this method is smaller than that of other methods. Therefore, the present method is numerically efficient and it would be able to apply for the integrated evaluation of a successive discontinuity. The resonant characteristics of rectangular waveguide cavity are analyzed accurately taking the conductor losses into consideration.

Field-theoretical equivalent circuit models of a variety of coplanar waveguide (CPW) lumped-element discontinuities for two dominant modes are characterized by executing the short-open calibration (SOC) procedure in the fullwave method of moments (MoM). In our developed MoM platform, the impressed current sources with even or odd symmetry are introduced at the selected ports in order to separately excite the even and odd dominant modes, i.e., CPW- and CSL-mode. After the port network parameters are numerically derived using the Galerkin's technique, the two SOC standards are defined and evaluated in the self-consistent MoM to effectively de-embed and extract the core model parameters of a CPW circuit or discontinuity. After the validation is confirmed via comparison with the published data, extensive investigation is carried out to for the first time demonstrate the distinctive model properties of one-port CPW short- and open-end elements as well as two-port inductive and capacitive coupling elements with resorting to its two different dominant modes.

A novel motion vector re-estimation technique for transcoding into lower spatial resolution is proposed. This technique is based on the fact that the block matching error is proportional to the complexity of the reference block with Taylor series expansion. It is shown that the motion vectors re-estimated by the proposed method are closer to optimal ones and offer better quality than those of previous techniques.

A two stage non-scan design for testability method is proposed. The first stage selects test points based on an earlier testability measure conflict. A new design for testability algorithm is proposed to select test points by a fault-oriented testability measure conflict+ in the second stage. Test points are selected in the second stage based on the hard faults after the initial ATPG run of the design for testability circuit in the preliminary stage. The new testability measure conflict+ based on conflict analysis of hard-faults in the process of test generation is introduced, which emulates most general features of sequential ATPG. The new testability measure reduces testability of a fault to the minimum D or controllability of the primary outputs, and therefore, does not need observability measure any more. Effective approximate schemes are adopted to get reasonable estimation of the testability measure. A couple of effective techniques are also adopted to accelerate the process of the proposed design for testability algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method gets even better results than two of the recent non-scan design for testability methods nscan and lcdft.

We have developed a three-dimensional eye movement simulator that simulates eye movement. The simulator allows us to extract the instantaneous eye movement rotation axes from clinical data sequences. It calculates the plane formed by rotation axes and displays it on an eyeball with rotation axes. It also extracts the innervations for eye muscles. The developed simulator is mainly programmed by a CG programming language, OpenGL. First, the simulator was applied to saccadic eye movement data in order to show the so-called Listing's plane on which all hypothetical rotation axes lie. Next, it was applied to clinical data sequences of two patients with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV). Instantaneous actual rotation axes and innervations for eye muscle extracted from data sequences have special characteristics. These results are useful for the elucidation of the mechanism of vestibular symptoms, particularly vertigo.

Autonomous distributed manufacturing systems(ADMS) consist of multiple intelligent components with each component acting according to its own judgments. The ADMS objective is to realize more agile and adaptive manufacturing systems. This paper presents the introduction of context-dependent agents (CDAs) in ADMS, and switch strategies depending on system conditions to achieve better performance can be realized by agents that use the same strategies under all system conditions. For the real-time job scheduling problem, the present paper recalls a basic CDA architecture, and presents the results of an extensive empirical evaluation its performance relative to other rule-based schemes based on several common indices for real-time dispatch.

The boundary element method (BEM), a representative method of numerical calculation of electromagnetic wave scattering, has been used for solving boundary integral equations. Using BEM, however, we finally have to solve a linear system of L equations expressed by dense coefficient matrix. The floating-point operation is O(L2) due to a matrix-vector product in iterative process. Greengard-Rokhlin's fast multipole algorithm (GRFMA) can reduce the operation to O(L). In this paper, we describe GRFMA and its floating-point operation theoretically. Moreover, we apply the fast Fourier transform to the calculation processes of GRFMA. In numerical examples, we show the experimental results for the computation time, the amount of used memory and the relative error of matrix-vector product expedited by GRFMA. We also discuss the convergence and the relative error of solution obtained by the BEM with GRFMA.