The concept of an Ω-matrix was introduced by Nishi in order to estimate the number of solutions of a resistive circuit containing active elements. He gave a finite characterization by means of four conditions which are all satisfied if and only if the matrix under investigation is an Ω-matrix. In this note we show that none of the four conditions can be omitted.

The cardio-music synchrogram, which is a visualization tool that helps us observe the phase synchronization between heartbeats and beats of music, is originated in cardio-respiratory synchrogram. In this paper, we proposed a novel statistical method for detecting synchronization periods in cardio-music synchrogram (CMS), and reported the synchronization periods of the cardiac activity for 8 subjects in a listening experiments. Our approach focused on the difference between the statistical distributions of the correlation coefficient calculated for the CMS in a control experiment and in the CMS in the listening experiment.

In this paper, we propose new physical design techniques to reduce crosstalk noise and crosstalk-induced delay variations caused in a nanometer-scale system-on-a-chip (SoC). We have almost eliminated the coupling effect between signal wires by simply optimizing parameters for the automatic place and route methodology. Our approach consists of two techniques, (1) A 3-D optimization technique for tuning the routing grid configuration both in the horizontal and vertical directions. (2) A co-optimization technique for tuning the cell utilization ratio and the routing grid simultaneously. Experiments on the design of an image processing circuit fabricated in a 0.13 µm CMOS process with six layers of copper interconnect show that crosstalk noise is almost eliminated. From the results of a static timing analysis considering the worst-case crosstalk condition, the longest path delay is decreased by about 15% maximum if technique (1) is used, and by about 7% maximum if technique (2) is used. The 7-15% delay reduction has been achieved without process improvement, and this reduction corresponds to between 1/4 and 1/2 generation of process progress.

In this letter, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme using trigonometric polynomial approximation for OFDM systems with transmit diversity. While the conventional channel estimation scheme has a high computational complexity in given channel delay profiles, the proposed scheme is efficient in the computational complexity. Especially, for channels with smaller rms delay spreads, the proposed scheme has improved BER performance and complexity reduction. In addition, we evaluate the performance of maximum delay spread estimation in unknown channel. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by computer simulation in various multi-path fading environments.

To develop ultra high density magnetic recording systems, a quasi-static system with a reciprocating medium motion against a stand still head was developed for a read/write tester. Double-layered perpendicular recording media and merged GMR heads assembled on a conventional head-gimbal assembly (HGA) were applied to evaluate the read/write performances. A smooth sliding contact motion was achieved, however, the head-to-medium spacing was varied depending on the head motion direction. The spacing in the reverse running direction of the conventional head slider seems to be smaller than that of the flying height in a high-speed spin stand. A merged ring head was suitable for perpendicular magnetic recording in the case of the reverse direction sliding.

Neural networks for Vector Quantization (VQ) such as K-means, Neural-Gas (NG) network and Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map (SOM) have been proposed. K-means, which is a "hard-max" approach, converges very fast. The method, however, devotes itself to local search, and it easily falls into local minima. On the other hand, the NG and SOM methods, which are "soft-max" approaches, are good at the global search ability. Though NG and SOM exhibit better performance in coming close to the optimum than that of K-means, the methods converge slower than K-means. In order to the disadvantages that exist when K-means, NG and SOM are used individually, this paper proposes hybrid methods such as NG-K, SOM-K and SOM-NG. NG-K performs NG adaptation during short period of time early in the learning process, and then the method performs K-means adaptation in the rest of the process. SOM-K and SOM-NG are similar as NG-K. From numerical simulations including an image compression problem, NG-K and SOM-K exhibit better performance than other methods.

Finding DC operating points of nonlinear circuits is an important and difficult task. The Newton-Raphson method adopted in the SPICE-like simulators often fails to converge to a solution. To overcome this convergence problem, homotopy methods have been studied from various viewpoints. For the global convergence of homotopy methods, it is a necessary condition that a given initial solution is the unique solution to the homotopy equation. According to the conventional criterion, such an initial solution, however, is restricted in some very narrow region. In this paper, considering the circuit interpretation of homotopy equations, we prove theorems on the uniqueness of an initial solution for globally convergent homotopy methods. These theorems give new criteria extending the region wherein any desired initial solution satisfies the uniqueness condition.

In this letter, we present groupwise successive interference cancellation (GSIC) receiver with adaptive minimum mean squared error (MMSE) detection and extended GSIC (EGSIC) receiver with adaptive MMSE detection for dual-rate DS-CDMA system. The receivers are GSIC receiver and EGSIC receiver combined with adaptive MMSE detection which is introduced to make initial bit detection more reliable. Furthermore, a multi-user detection scheme is introduced to mitigate the effect of multiple access interference (MAI) between users in a group which is usually ignored in conventional GSIC receiver and EGSIC receiver. Specifically, parallel interference cancellation (PIC) is adopted as a multi-user detection scheme within a group. It is shown that performance of the GSIC receiver and EGSIC receiver is significantly improved by employing adaptive MMSE detection. It is also shown that the performance of the receivers can be improved further by using PIC within a group.

In this paper, we present our investigation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the local query regions for solving the computation restrictions of the LSI on the global information space. Through the experiments with different SVD dimensionality on the local query regions, the results show that low-dimensional LSI can achieve much better precision than VSM and similar precision to global LSI. Such small SVD factors indicate that there is an almost linear surface in the local query regions. The largest or the two largest singular vectors have the ability to capture such a linear surface and benefit the particular query. In spite of the fact that Local LSI analysis needs to perform the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) computation for each query, the surprisingly small requirements of the SVD dimension resolve the computation restrictions of LSI for large scale IR tasks. Moreover, on the condition that several relevant sample documents are available, application of low dimensional LSI for these documents can obtain comparable precision with the Local RF in a different manner.

Distributed execution of a service often means that various places compete for the right to progress. If they exchange the right by explicit communication, there is a continuous flow of protocol messages. If the maximum transit delay of the communication medium is short, a better solution is to restrict progress of places to their individual time windows. The paper describes how to derive such time-sharing-based multi-party protocols for well-formed services specified in LOTOS/T+. The method is compositional with respect to the structure of the given service specification, supporting alternative, sequential, interrupt and parallel composition of services.

A new type of photodetector called "photosensitive floating field emitter, (PFFE)" has been proposed. The PFFE device combines an n-type cone-shaped triode field emitter with a-Si p-i-n photodiode film. However, a PFFE cannot detect two-dimensional distributions of light intensity. In this paper, we propose a novel structure to overcome the above this problem of the PFFE. The device was fabricated on a silicon-on-sapphire substrate to permit irradiation from the backside. p-n photodiodes were constructed within a field emitters, the n+ region being separated by p+ regions to permit detection of two- dimensional light distributions. The emission current of the PFFE/SOS was found to be proportional to the illumination intensity, but the quantum efficiency was only about 2%. This quantum efficiency is lower than that expected. Under irradiation, the emission current increased, but the gate-leakage current increased. This gate-leakage current was several orders of magnitude larger than the emission current. Almost photo-generated electrons lost in the gate electrode.

Although there has been a great deal of research on automatic summarization, most methods rely on statistical methods, disregarding relationships between extracted textual segments. We propose a novel method to extract a set of comprehensible sentences which centers on several key points to ensure sentence connectivity. It features a similarity network from documents with a lexical dictionary, and spreading activation to rank sentences. We show evaluation results of a multi-document summarization system based on the method participating in a competition of summarization, TSC (Text Summarization Challenge) task, organized by the third NTCIR project.

In this paper, we propose an answer seeking algorithm for question answering that integrates structural matching and paraphrasing, and report the results of our empirical evaluation conducted with the aim of examining effects of incorporating those two components. According to the results, the contribution of structural matching and paraphrasing was not so large as expected. Based on error analysis, we conclude that structural matching-based approaches to answer seeking require technologies for (a) coreference resolution, (b) processing of parse forests instead of parse trees, and (c) large-scale acquisition of paraphrase patterns.

In light of the increasing number of computer applications that rely heavily on multimedia data, the database community has focused on the management and retrieval of multidimensional data. Nearest Neighbor queries (NN queries) have been widely used to perform content-based retrieval (e.g., similarity search) in multimedia applications. Incremental NN (INN) query is a kind of NN queries and can also be used when the number of the NN objects to be retrieved is not known in advance. This paper points out the weaknesses of the existing INN search algorithms and proposes a new one, called Batch-Incremental Nearest Neighbor search algorithm (denoted B-INN search algorithm), which can be used to process the INN query efficiently. The B-INN search algorithm is different from the existing INN search algorithms in that it does not employ the priority queue that is used in the existing INN search algorithms and is very CPU and memory intensive for large databases in high-dimensional spaces. And it incrementally reports b(b > 1) objects simultaneously (Batch-Incremental), whereas the existing INN search algorithms report the neighbors one by one. In order to implement the B-INN search, a new search (called k-d-NN search) with a new pruning strategy is proposed. Performance tests indicate that the B-INN search algorithm clearly outperforms the existing INN search algorithms in high-dimensional spaces.

This paper proposes a novel CMOS built-in current sensor (BICS) for on-line current testing. Proposed BICS detects abnormal current in circuit under test (CUT) and makes a Pass/Fail signal through comparison between the CUT current and the duplicated inverter current. This circuit consists of two current-to-voltage conversion transistors, a full swing generator, a voltage comparator, and an inverter block. It requires 16 transistors. Since this BICS does not require the extra clock, the added extra pin is only one output pin. Furthermore, the BICS does not require test mode selection. Therefore the BICS can be applied to on-line current testing. The validity and effectiveness are verified through the HSPICE simulation of circuits with defects. When the CUT is an 8 8 parallel multiplier, the area overhead of the BICS is about 4.34%.

A framework is described for a peer-to-peer information exchange system, and a collaborative information retrieval (IR) scheme for the system is proposed. The aims of the system include smooth knowledge and information management to activate organizations or communities. Conventional server-centric systems are weak because they create information-providing bottlenecks. Accordingly, the proposed framework targets the collaborative inter-working of personal repositories that accumulate per-user information, and accept and service requests. Issues concerning the framework are addressed. One issue is the retrieval of information from another's personal repository; the retrieval criteria of a system are tightly personalized for its user. The system is assumed to employ a vector space model with a concept-base as its IR mechanism. The vector space on one system is very different from that on another system. Another issue is the automated control of the information-providing criteria. This paper presents solutions to the first problem. To achieve IR that provides satisfactory results to a user requiring information from another's personal repository, we need vector space equalization to compensate for the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. The paper presents a vector space equalization scheme, the automated relevance feedback scheme, that compensates the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. We implement the scheme as a system and evaluate its performance using documents on the Internet.

The performance of an indium-gallium-arsenide avalanche photodiode serving as a 1550 nm single-photon detector is investigated. Quantum efficiency is evaluated for laser pulses with an average of < 0.015 photons per pulse, which are important for the demonstration of unconditionally secure quantum key distribution [G. Brassard et al.: Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 6, p.1330 (2000)]. An operating temperature of 243 K is achieved by thermo-electrical cooling, yielding a quantum efficiency of 18% with a dark-count probability per gate of 2.8 10-5. The results obtained here guarantee unconditionally secure fiber-optic quantum key distribution over 50 km.

In this paper, we consider the all-to-all broadcast problem in optical broadcast star networks using Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Our network model assumes that receivers are fixed-tuned and transmitters are tunable such that optical lasers assigned to transmitters have limited access to the network bandwidth; hence, each node must be equipped with multiple optical lasers and/or multiple optical filters in order to maintain a single-hop network. This paper is primarily concerned with single-hop networks, in which each node is assigned a single optical filter. Lower bounds are first established on the number of lasers per each node and the minimum schedule length, and a schedule achieving the minimum schedule length is presented. The results are applicable to arbitrary tuning delays, arbitrary numbers of wavelength channels, and optical lasers' arbitrary tuning ranges. Network models with optical devices having limited tuning ranges have not yet been considered in connection with transmission schedules, and this is the first work in this new direction.

A series of micromagnetic models including simulations of the 3D thin film write head field, the GMR read head, the thin film media and channel codes are utilized to study the recording performance in longitudinal hard disk drives (HDD) at extremely high densities. The (0, 4/4) encoder is utilized to translate the user data into (0, 4/4) constrained codes, before the write process is performed. The write current is achieved from the constrained code in the NRZ format. The read back voltage is reshaped to the PR-IV signal and the Viterbi detector is utilized to recover the data. In a medium of 10 nm grains, the recording linear density limits with the PRML method are about 1000 kfci, which is 1.5 times of those with the PD channel.

In the design of a set-associative cache, maintaining low average access time and reducing the average energy dissipation are important issues. In this paper, we propose a set-associative cache that can provide the flexibility to configure its associativity according to different program behaviors, which means that the proposed cache scheme can be configured from n-way set-associative cache to direct-mapped cache. Besides, the proposed cache scheme also can disable all tag-subarrays and only enable a desired data-subarray when adjacent memory references are within the same block as the previous access. By this scheme, the power consumption can be saved when an n-way set-associative cache configures the cache with lower associativity (less than n) due to only enabling fewer subarrays of the tag memory and data memory, and when the tag checking is eliminated for the intra-block access due to disabling all subarrays of the tag memory. However, the performance is still maintained to the same as the conventional set-associative cache or the direct-mapped cache.