In this paper, a test method is proposed to detect lead opens in CMOS LSIs. The test method is based on supply current which flows when test input vectors and AC electric field are provided from the outside of the ICs. Also, an application method of the test input vectors is proposed in this paper. It is shown experimentally that lead opens of SSIs and LSIs will be detected by providing each of the test input vectors per the period of AC electric field applied.

This paper presents the architecture and design of the video CODEC circuit that can compress and reconstruct 4:2:2 color VGA video images in real time. Our circuit is based on two-dimensional DWT and inter-frame compression technique. For low-power real-time operation, we modified the traditional Mallat's sub-band coding method to reduce the amount of computation and memory access required in two-dimensional DWT. We also incorporated inter-frame compression technique into our CODEC circuit to enhance the compression capability. To avoid an intensive computation required in motion detection, we encoded only the macro blocks in the current frame which are different from those in the same location of the previous frame to exploit the fact that the background image does not change much in DVR system. We fabricated the CODEC chip using 0.35 µm 3.3 V CMOS standard cell process and applied it to the 16-channel DVR security system.

Commercial breaks are often placed at the climax of stories in recent TV programs in Japan, which may cause some serious effects on audiences, especially children, since this practice disturbs the concentrations. The experiment measured the psycho-physiological state of four children before and after commercials. The results showed that the next peak of attention is delayed by distracting the attention.

An information retrieval (IR) system with query expansion on a low-cost high-performance PC cluster environment is implemented. We study how query performance is affected by query expansion and two declustering methods using two standard Korean test collections. According to the experiments, the greedy method shows about 20% enhancement overall when compared with the lexical method.

This paper proposes a new method, EC-MDC that can detect and correct bit errors in the bitstream generated by multiple description coding. The proposed method generates two sub-bitstreams having a few redundancies as much as conventional multiple description coding. If a sub-bitstream at one side has bit error, the bit error can be corrected by using sub-bitstream of the other side. In BER-SNR experiments, reconstruction quality of the proposed method shows about 11dB higher than that of the conventional MDC at BER < 10-3 when a sub-bitstream is corrupted.

The present paper proposes differential transmission line structures on Si ULSI. Interconnect structures are examined using numerical results from a two-dimensional electromagnetic simulation (Ansoft, 2D Extractor). The co-planar and diagonal-pair lines are found to have superior characteristics for gigahertz signal propagation through long interconnects. The proposed diagonal-pair line can reduce the crosstalk noise and interconnect resource concurrently.

In this study, an improved heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) active mixer is designed and fabricated. The HBT MMIC active mixer that is integrated with a low-noise amplifier (LNA) and active power adder can not only achieve high isolation, but can also dispense with one active component and reduce power consumption at the same time. Measurement results show that the conversion gain, LO-RF isolation, and double sideband noise figure (DSB-NF) of the proposed mixer are 22 dB, 40 dB, and 7 dB, respectively.

Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is being developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In GMPLS-based wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) optical networks, a wavelength in a fiber is used as a label. In the existing GMPLS signaling protocol for bidirectional paths in WDM networks with the wavelength continuity constraint, bidirectional path setup fails with high probability because the upstream label allocated by the previous hop node may not be accepted at the transit node. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an efficient bidirectional label switched path (LSP) setup scheme based on an upstream label set. Called the Upstream Label Set (ULS) scheme, it is an extension of the existing GMPLS signaling protocol. The ULS scheme is consistent with the existing GMPLS signaling procedure and so offers backward compatibility. The numerical results suggest that when the number of the LSP setup retries is limited, the ULS scheme offers lower blocking probability than the existing GMPLS signaling scheme which uses only with the upstream label (UL). In addition, under the condition that the constraint of the number of LSP setup retries is relaxed, the LSP setup time of the ULS scheme is faster than that of the existing scheme. Furthermore, by using our developed prototype of the GMPLS control system, in which the ULS scheme was installed, we demonstrated that the ULS scheme successfully setup bidirectional LSPs.

A fully integrated RF front-end for W-CDMA applications including a low noise amplifier, a down conversion mixer, a digitally programmable gain amplifier, an on-chip VCO, and a fractional-N frequency synthesizer is designed using a 0.35-µm CMOS process. A multi-stage ring shaped on-chip LC-VCO exhibiting bandpass characteristics overcomes the limitation of low-Q components in the tank circuits and improves the phase noise performance. The measured phase noise of the on-chip VCO is -134 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The receiver RF front-end achieves a NF of 3.5 dB, an IIP3 of -16 dBm, and a maximum gain of 80 dB. The receiver consumes 52 mA with a 3-V supply and occupies only 2 mm2 die area with minimal external components.

Evaluation of cyclic transitions in the discrete-time neural networks with antisymmetric and circular interconnection weights has been derived in an asymptotic mathematical form. The type and the number of limit cycles generated by circular networks, in which each neuron is connected only to its nearest neurons, have been investigated through analytical method. The results show that the estimated numbers of state vectors generating n- or 2n-periodic limit cycles are an exponential function of (1.6)n for a large number of neuron, n. The sufficient conditions for state vectors to generate limit cycles of period n or 2n are also given.

Recently, Muramatsu proposed source coding algorithms that use the randomness of a past sequence. The technique of his source coding algorithms is one method of constructing codes from the technique of random coding. By using his technique, we propose a channel coding algorithm with random numbers which can be observed by both the encoder and the decoder where the random numbers are independent of the messages to be transmitted. Then the proposed coding algorithm can transmit messages over a discrete memoryless channel up to the channel capacity with an arbitrarily small decoding error rate and arbitrarily small bits of random numbers per message transmission asymptotically.

In this paper, we propose a method of linear time-varying filtering of discrete time signals. The objective of this method is to derive a component, of an input signal, whose alias-free generalized discrete time-frequency distribution [Jeong & Williams 1992] concentrates on a specific region of a time-frequency plane. The method is essentially realized by computing an orthogonal projection of an input onto a subspace that is spanned by orthonormal signals, whose distributions concentrate on the region. We show that such orthonormal signals can be derived as eigenvectors of a matrix whose components are explicitly expressed by using the kernel of the distribution and the regions. This result shows that we can design such a filter prior to processing of the input if the specific region is given as a priori. This result is a generalization of [Hlawatsch & Kozek 1994], that is originally derived for the continuous Wigner distributions, to the discrete distributions.

In this paper, we proposed the novel method for the recognition of English calling cards by using the contour tracking algorithm and the enhanced fuzzy RBF (Radial Basis Function) neural networks. The recognition of calling cards consists of the extraction phase of character areas and the recognition phase of extracted characters. In the extraction phase, first of all, noises are removed from the images of calling cards, and the feature areas including character strings are separated from the calling card images by using the horizontal smearing method and the 8-directional contour tracking method. And using the image projection method the feature areas are split into the areas of individual characters. We also proposed the enhanced fuzzy RBF neural network that organizes the middle layer effectively by using the enhanced fuzzy ART neural network adjusting the vigilance parameter dynamically according to the similarity between patterns. In the recognition phase, the proposed fuzzy neural network was applied to recognize individual characters. Our experiment result showed that the proposed recognition algorithm has higher success rate of recognition and faster learning time than the conventional RBF network based recognitions.

This paper presents a new submesh allocation scheme for mesh connected multicomputer systems, called CFSL-TR (Classified Free Submesh List-Task Relocation), which reduces task waiting time in two aspects, shortening submesh search time and reducing the submesh allocation delay caused by external fragmentation. This scheme classifies independent free submeshes by their types: square, horizontal rectangle, or vertical rectangle. Then it searches for the best-fit submesh only from one list depending on the type of the given task, thus saving submesh searching time. If no suitable submeshes are found, it is most likely caused by external fragmentation. In such a case, our scheme relocates the tasks being executed to free submeshes and combines the newly available submesh with other fragmented ones to form a larger submesh. This allows allocation of the task, otherwise to be put on the queue, hence reducing the submesh allocation delay. Through simulation, we show that our scheme helps reduce task waiting time and that it is by far more effective to reduce the submesh allocation delay caused by external fragmentation rather than to reduce submesh search time for reduction of the task waiting time.

In 1960, the famous computer pioneer J.C.R. Licklider described a vision for human-computer interaction that he called "man-computer symbiosis. " Licklider predicted the development of computer software that would allow people "to think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own. " More than 40 years later, one rarely encounters any computer application that comes close to capturing Licklider's notion of human-like communication and collaboration. We echo Licklider by arguing that true symbiotic interaction requires at least the following three elements: a complementary and effective division of labor between human and machine; an explicit representation in the computer of the user's abilities, intentions, and beliefs; and the utilization of nonverbal communication modalities. We illustrate this argument with various research prototypes currently under development at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (USA).

Most of the existing studies on storing and searching XML documents effectively manipulate each XML document independently. Therefore, techniques for storing XML documents together that have similar meaning or structure are required for efficiency. Also, as a unified access method for various XML storage systems that have different storage forms, studies to integrate the DTD or XML schema of each storage system into one are required, because many XML documents do not have a particular DTD or XML schema, or XML documents can be written in various ways. Therefore, studies on the integration techniques for XML instances are needed. The XML integration technique can be used effectively in the case of constructing a data warehouse for heterogeneous XML storage systems. The proposed integration techniques remove the space duplicated for the same elements in XML documents. The proposed techniques significantly reduce the search time for general queries on the XML documents because it stores the related parts in XML documents close.

Applying the formerly proposed classification framework for first order line search optimization techniques we introduce novel superlinear first order line search methods. Novelty of the methods lies in the line search subproblem. The presented line search subproblem features automatic step length and momentum adjustments at every iteration of the algorithms realizable in a single step calculation. This keeps the computational complexity of the algorithms linear and does not harm the stability and convergence of the methods. The algorithms have none or linear memory requirements and are shown to be convergent and capable of reaching the superlinear convergence rates. They were practically applied to artificial neural network training and compared to the relevant training methods within the same class. The simulation results show satisfactory performance of the introduced algorithms over the standard and previously proposed methods.

DNA Sequence Design Problem is a crucial problem in information-based biotechnology such as DNA computing. In this paper, we introduce a powerful design strategy for DNA sequences by refining Random Generator. Random Generator is one of the design strategies and offers great advantages, but it is not a good algorithm for generating a large set of DNA sequences. We propose a Two-Step Search algorithm, then show that TSS can generate a larger set of DNA sequences than Random Generator by computer simulation.

This paper offers an initial analysis of economic and market issues in the development and deployment of mobile remote physiological monitoring services for medical patients through wireless wearable sensors and actuators. Examining the characteristics of the service technologies and related industries, this study focuses on the structure, participants and roles of standardisation of the layers within the emerging mobile remote physiological monitoring industry. The study concludes that the structure of the emerging mobile remote physiological monitoring industry will be oriented about service provision, be integrated with other personal / patient data storage services and be heavily influenced by the interplay of technological developments, the health market structure, existing players and regulation. Additionally, the keys players are likely to be the system integrators and service providers concentrating on large institutional customers. A focus of the paper is analysing both the causes and implications of a modular, horizontally layered industry structure likely to result from the mix of technologies, suppliers and customers as this market develops. The paper discusses why, although horizontal specialisation is the most likely outcome, there is little risk of key layers becoming commoditised. The paper also discusses the appropriate types and levels of standardisation and equipment certification activities that should be encouraged, along with from which groups and industries the pressure for these will come.

A new approach to optical clock distribution utilizing optical waveguide interconnect technology is introduced. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm for design and optimization of embedded optical clock distribution networks for printed wiring boards. The optimization approach takes into account bending and propagation losses of optical waveguides. Less than 26.1 psec in signal timing skew is obtained for a signal flight time of 614.38 psec. About 15% reduction in optical power consumption is also obtained over clock nets routed with existing (optical) methods.