The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system is one of several suitable candidates for use in broadband wireless communications. However, due to multipath propagation, the received signal suffers from frequency-selective fading which causes significant degradation of system performance. Antenna diversity reception is widely used to solve this problem. However, this approach is not suitable for the downlink, because it increases the complexity and power consumption of the mobile station (receiver). In this paper, we consider closed-loop mode transmit diversity for OFDM, instead of diversity reception, to improve the performance in the downlink. The base station (transmitter) has several transmit antennas and each antenna is weighted by a weighting factor calculated based on feedback information (FBI). This system is a closed loop, since the FBI is fed back from the receiver. We propose a new weight generation scheme by making use of the correlation between adjacent OFDM subcarriers. The performance is evaluated under a broadband wireless channel model by computer simulation. The results show that the proposed weight generation scheme exhibits better performance than the conventional weight generation scheme without increasing the number of the FBI bits in the uplink.

We report our studies on the spectral sensitivity of superconducting NbN thin-film single-photon detectors (SPD's) capable of GHz counting rates of visible and near-infrared photons. In particular, it has been shown that a NbN SPD is sensitive to 1.55-µm wavelength radiation and can be used for quantum communication. Our SPD's exhibit experimentally measured intrinsic quantum efficiencies from 20% at 800 nm up to 1% at 1.55-µm wavelength. The devices demonstrate picosecond response time (<100 ps, limited by our readout system) and negligibly low dark counts. Spectral dependencies of photon counting of continuous-wave, 0.4-µm to 3.5-µm radiation, and 0.63-µm, 1.33-µm, and 1.55-µm laser-pulsed radiations are presented for the single-stripe-type and meander-type devices.

This paper presents a high-throughput VLSI architecture for LZFG data compression and decompression. To reduce the hardware cost and maintain both of the interior node and the leaf node numbering systems, we modify the original LZFG data structure. Compared to the original LZFG tree, the number of characters in our modified LZFG data structure must be greater than one to establish one new interior node down the root node into the new node. Meanwhile, this architecture employs a series of encoding cells with content addressable memory (CAM) to search the longest match and maintain the LZFG data tree during the encoding and decoding processes. By using the parallel design, the compressor and decompressor can keep a constant high bit rate to encode and decode one character per clock cycle, that is, it is directly proportional to the operating clock rate, but independent of the sizes of the word dictionary and the input file. By using 0.25 µm CMOS silicon technology, the operating clock rate can be as high as 85 MHz. Some untargeted encoding cells will be disabled to reduce the power consumption during the comparison operation. Therefore, this architecture can be easily applied in the high-speed real-time communication and data storage systems.

The FDTD method needs Fourier analysis to obtain the fields of a single frequency. Furthermore, the frequency spectra of the fields used in the FDTD method ordinarily have wide bands, and all the fields in FDTD are treated as real numbers. Therefore, if the permittivity ε and the permeability µ of the medium depend on frequency, or if the surface impedance used for the surface impedance boundary condition (SIBC) depends on the frequency, the FDTD method becomes very complicated because of convolution integral. In the electromagnetic theory, we usually assume that the fields oscillate sinusoidally, and that the fields and ε and µ are complex numbers. The benefit of introduction of the complex numbers is very extensive. As we do in the usual electromagnetic theory, the authors assume that the fields in FDTD oscillate sinusoidally. In the proposed FDTD, the fields, ε, µ and the surface impedances for SIBC are all treated as the complex numbers. The proposed FDTD method can remove the above-mentioned weak points of the conventional FDTD method.

The measurement sensitivity of microwave surface resistance, Rs, of high temperature superconducting (HTS) thin films using half-wavelength microstrip resonator with copper and HTS ground plane is analyzed for fundamental and higher order modes of the resonator. The estimated sensitivity of Rs-measurement is at least an order of magnitude greater at fundamental resonant frequency compared to when measured using higher order harmonic modes.

We studied the possibility of making an objective diagnosis of dementia based on radiological findings by evaluating cerebral and hippocampal atrophy and the corpus callosum shape on MRI images in patients with Alzheimer-type dementia, compared with healthy elderly individuals. There was a statistically significant difference in the hippocampus area index, the ventricle area index, and the area ratio for the second, forth, and fifth parts of corpus callosum. Discriminant analysis using these three parameters demonstrated the sensitivity of 88.5% and the specificity of 85.7%, suggesting a highly positive diagnostic rate. These results indicate that quantitative MRI measurements could be used for differentiating Alzheimer-type dementia from similar diseases.

In this paper, we describe our SFQ circuit design and measurement carried out in SRL-ISTEC. We are studying an oversampling sigma-delta modulator and a counter-type decimation filter with multistage structure for developing AD converters for software-defined radio application. We are also developing a superconducting memory, whose peripheral circuits are constructed with SFQ circuits.

We present analytical and numerical results on the flux-quantum transitions in a three-junction superconducting quantum interference device (3J-SQUID) controlled by two RF signals. The 3J-SQUID has two superconducting loops, and the RF signals are magnetically coupled to the loops. Flux-quantum transitions in the 3J-SQUID loops can be controlled by utilizing the phase difference of the two RF signals. Under proper conditions, we can obtain a situation where one flux quantum passes through the 3J-SQUID per one cycle of the RF signals without DC current biasing, which results in a zero-crossing step on the current-voltage characteristics. In this paper, we first explain the operation principle by using a quantum state diagram of a 3J-SQUID. Next, we numerically simulate RF-induced transitions of the quantum states. A zero-crossing step on the current-voltage characteristics is demonstrated. We also investigate dependence of zero-crossing steps upon parameters of the 3J-SQUID and RF signals.

This paper introduces a probabilistic modeling of alarm observation delay, and shows a novel method of model-based diagnosis for time series observation. First, a fault model is defined by associating an event tree rooted by each fault hypothesis with probabilistic variables representing temporal delay. The most probable hypothesis is obtained by selecting one whose Akaike information criterion (AIC) is minimal. It is proved by simulation that the AIC-based hypothesis selection achieves a high precision in diagnosis.

In the field of computer graphics (CG), some adaptive methods have been proposed in order to make CG images more real in relatively low computational cost. As one of such adaptive methods, in this paper, an adaptive method will be proposed for detection of edges and approximation of surfaces in the use of the so-called automatic differentiation. In the proposed method a CG image with high quality can be generated in suitable computational cost. In this paper, three cases will be considered. The first is an adaptive distributed ray tracing which can adaptively generate anti-aliased CG images in suitable computational cost. The second is a high quality triangular meshing, which guarantees accuracy of the generated meshes according to shape of given surface in suitable computational cost. The last case is used in the so-called radiosity method.

This contribution discusses which information can be derived from estimated directions of arrival (DOAs) and directions of departure (DODs) from a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio system, and establishes two new parameters describing the multipath spread at both link ends. We find that the multipath component separation, MCS, combines delay, (double-) angular and Doppler dispersion, as appropriate. MCS provides a system-independent radio characterization of propagation environments and aids in selecting optimum positions for smart-antenna deployment. Evaluation of double-directional measurements (antenna arrays at both link ends) in indoor environments show the usefulness and the limits of the multipath component separation concept.

In the literature, the optimum discrete interpolation approximation is presented. However, this approximation is the optimum for the union of the set of band-limited signals and the set of the corresponding approximation errors. In this paper, under several assumptions, we present two optimum extended discrete interpolation approximations such that the set of the corresponding approximation errors is included in the set of signals if we ignore some negligible component of error. In this paper, we assume that the decimated sampling interval T satisfies T M, where M is the number of paths of the filter bank. The maximally distinct or under sampled filter banks treated in this paper have FIR analysis filters with or without a continuous pre-filter and FIR synthesis filters with a band-limited continuous D/A filter. The first discussion is useful for designing a kind of down-converter which transforms HDTV signal with wide band-width to SDTV signal with narrow band-width, for example. In this discussion, we assume that the SDTV signal is limited in |ω|π/T and the Fourier spectrum of the HDTV signal has wider band but is approximately included in the corresponding narrow band of the SDTV signal. In the well-known scalable coding of signals, if the spectrum of a signal with higher resolution is not included approximately in the spectrum of the corresponding signal with lower resolution, the quality of the quantized output signal with lower resolution will become quite low practically. As shown in [3], however, scalable coding has received much attention recently in the fields of HDTV/SDTV compatibility. Therefore, it will be natural to consider that the spectrum of HDTV signal with higher resolution is similar to and is included approximately in the corresponding spectrum of SDTV signal with lower resolution. The analysis filters are FIR filters with a continuous pre-filter approximately band-limited in |ω|π/T. To improve the quality of the SDTV signal, the whole spectrum component of the HDTV signal is used in the presented down-converter. Another discussion is a general theory of approximation for filter banks using the prescribed analysis filters. In this discussion, although some modification for the band-width is introduced in the process of analysis, the final band-width of the receiver is limited in |ω| π. The FIR analysis filters do not have pre-filter. The condition imposing on the set of signals is more general than the corresponding condition in the first optimum approximation theory. Finally, we present the optimum transmultiplexer TR. In general, under the condition that the receiver filters are prescribed, a transmultiplexer has approximation error between the original signal and the transferred signal. However, the presented TR minimizes approximately the supreme value of arbitrary positive measures of approximation error that can be defined, totally or separately, with respect to all the channels. Note that, in the presented discussion, we can prescribe the degree of FIR filters used in TR, strictly.

Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications v1.1 (DOCSIS v1.1), developed for data transmissions over Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks, defines five upstream services for supporting per-flow Quality of Services (QoS). The cable modem termination system (CMTS) must periodically grant upstream transmission opportunities to the QoS flows based on their QoS parameters. However, packets may violate QoS requirements when several flows demand the same interval for transmission. This study proposes a two-phase, i.e., the scheduling sequence determination phase and the minislot assignment phase, minislot scheduling algorithm to reduce the QoS violation rate. In the scheduling sequence determination phase, the flow whose packets are most unlikely to violate QoS is scheduled first. Then, in the minislot assignment phase, the scheduler allocates to a flow the available interval where the likelihood of packet violation is minimum. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheduling algorithm can reduce the QoS violation rate by 80-35% over that of the first-come-first-serve-random-selection algorithm. It increases the utilization by 25% as well. The two-phase minislot scheduling algorithm can work within the DOCSIS v1.1 framework.

In this article we present the subject of wideband channel modeling and simulation, stressing the method of orthogonalization. We compare the performance of this simulation method using Karhunen-Loeve, Wavelets and other basis over radio channels represented via the Input-Delay Spread Bello Function.

Scalabilities of bit rate and coding format in coded multimedia contents have become very important for the efficient use of network bandwidth and storage capacity with the recent availability of a wide variety of bandwidth and storage media. However, the conventional approach uses decompression and recompression processes to realize the above scalabilities, which require very expensive computations. In addition, a very large cache space is required for storing the decoded audio-video data. This paper describes three fast scalability methods for MPEG audio and video data, MPEG audio/video bit rate conversion and MPEG format conversion, in order to address these problems. As for the first scalability, MPEG audio coding bit rate conversions, we describe subband domain conversion using bandwidth limitation, requantization and a requantization reflecting phychoacoustic model. Four types of MPEG video bit rate conversion are described that use bandwidth limitation, out-loop requantization, in-loop requantization, and hybrid requantization. As for the format conversion, the fast baseband domain format conversion is performed using coding information such as motion vectors and coding types extracted from input coded video. The experimental results of several comparisons with the above scalabilities and conventional transcoding methods are also shown.

A numerical technique based on Haar wavelets is used for solving transient problems of transmission lines. The approach of our method is to convert the original coupled partial differential equations, the transmission line equations or the telegrapher equations, to a system of ordinary matrix differential equations via Haar wavelets. Then, transient problems of transmission lines can be solved by matrix operations. Numerical examples of homogeneous and dispersive lines, along with both linear and nonlinear loads are verified. In addition, non-sinusoidal signals such as the unit step function and the rectangular pulse for digital applications are included to demonstrate the use of this efficient, easy-to-handle, stable, and versatile method.

In this letter, an algorithm that estimates one of the most important channel parameters, maximum Doppler frequency, fD, is proposed. The algorithm uses phase variations of received pilot signals, which is strongly related with fD in a fading environment. In addition, a phase variation measurement method for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulated signals is also proposed and it makes possible to estimate fD from BPSK modulated information signals as well as unmodulated pilot signals. The results show that the proposed algorithm is very simple and shows good performance over wide Doppler frequency range.

The size dependent properties of the intrinsic Josephson junctions in Bi2Sr2CaCu2Oy single crystal mesas in the external magnetic field are studied. The mesas of (1-140) µm long with 7-29 junctions were fabricated and their current-voltage characteristics were measured in external magnetic field applied parallel to the CuO2 layers up to 0.16 T. In zero magnetic field, multiple resistive branches with large hysteresis were observed in the current-voltage characteristics for the fabricated mesas. Almost identical critical currents were also observed for all the junctions in each mesa. With applied magnetic field, Ic of the longer mesas showed a complex magnetic field dependence as compared to that of the short mesas (of about 1 µm in length). It was observed that the lower critical magnetic field of the junctions decreased and approached a constant value with increasing number of junctions and also with increasing length of the junctions. Similar magnetic behavior was obtained by numerical simulations based on coupled sine-Gordon equations for such stacked junctions.

We report the measurements on the ramp-edge type Josephson and quasiparticle tunnel junctions with the different interface angle geometry using high-Tc YBa2Cu3O7-y (YBCO) electrodes. The YBCO/I/Ag tunnel junctions with different crystal-interface boundary angles are fabricated for the investigation of zero bias conductance peak. The angle dependent zero bias conductance peak typical to a dx2-y2-wave superconductor is observable. For Josephson junctions, YBCO ramp-edge junctions with different ab-plane electrodes relatively rotated by 45are fabricated using a CeO2 seed-layer technique. The temperature dependence of the maximum Josephson current for YBCO/PBCO/YBCO junctions (PBCO: PrBa2Cu3O7-y) exhibits angle-dependent behavior, qualitatively different from the Ambegaokar-Baratoff prediction. Under microwave irradiation of 9 GHz, the Shapiro steps appear at integer and/or half integer multiples of the voltage satisfying Josephson voltage-frequency relation, whose behavior depends on the sample angle geometry. The results are reasonably interpreted by the dx2-y2-wave theory by taking the zero energy state into account.

We present the design of dual rail Data Driven Self Timed (DDST) DEMUX and MUX circuits for 50 GHz operation. The chosen current density is 6.5 kA/cm2 and simulations show good margins for speeds exceeding 50 GHz. Our previously reported dual-rail on-chip test system is also scaled up for 50 GHz operation.