A coaxial cable measurement system applicable up to 60 GHz in the cryogenic temperature is developed by using V-connectors. In this system, the fine location of coupling loop antennas can be adjusted by three-dimensional mechanical stages in the low temperature region. In order to verify usefulness of this system, the temperature dependence of surface resistance (Rs) of Y-Ba-Cu-O (YBCO) films was measured at 30 GHz by the two-dielectric resonator method using TE011- and TE013- mode sapphire rod resonators. The measured result of Rs was 0.5 mΩ at 30 GHz and 20 K, which was 1/40, compared with those of copper plates.

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.

Despite the enormous power of present-day computers, digital systems cannot respond to real-world events in real time. Biological systems, however, while being built with very slow chemical transistors, are very fast in such tasks like seeing, recognizing, and taking immediate actions. This paper discusses the issue of how we can build real-time intelligent systems directly on silicon. An intelligent VLSI system inspired by a psychological brain model is proposed. The system stores the past experience in the on-chip vast memory and recalls the maximum likelihood event to the current input based on the associative processor architecture. Although the system can be implemented in a CMOS digital technology, we are proposing here to implement the system using circuits operating in the analog/digital-merged decision making principle. Low-level processing is done in the analog domain in a fully parallel manner, which is immediately followed by a binary decision to yield answers in digital formats. Such a scheme would be very advantageous in achieving a high throughput computation under limited memory and computational resources usually encountered in mobile applications. Hardware-friendly algorithms have been developed for real-time image recognition using the associative processor architecture and some experimental results are demonstrated.

In this paper, we propose an improved network-flow based multi-way circuit partitioning algorithm whose objective is to minimize the number of sub-circuits. It iteratively extracts a size-maximal feasible sub-circuit one at a time. In our approach, two devices are applied. One is in the use of an exact min-cut graph, and the other is in the idea of keeping the number of I/O pins of the residual circuit as small as possible after one-time extraction. We implemented our algorithm in C for experiments, and tested it with several industrial cases and MCNC benchmarks. Compared to the known approach, we observed more than 10% reduction in average of the sub-circuit number.

Transmitter diversity is a powerful technique to improve the transmission quality of downlink in microcellular mobile communications systems. Under cochannel interference (CCI) at the base station (BS), the transmitter diversity is not necessarily effective, because the desired-plus-interference signal power used as a criterion of downlink branch selection is not always relative to the downlink propagation condition. This paper proposes the theoretical derivation of bit error rate (BER) performance in the transmitter diversity under CCI occurring at BS, as parameters of average SIR at BS, normalized Doppler frequency, and so on. It is confirmed from the correspondence of theoretical results with simulation results that the proposed theoretical approach is applicable to the CCI environments at BS.

This paper describes the circuit design procedure of the zero-current soft switching (ZCS) high frequency inverter for induction heating uses. Its output power can be regulated from its maximum to minimum by the instantaneous current vector control scheme using phase shift control between switching units at a fixed frequency. In addition, it can be safely operated since no extraordinarily high voltage or current results even at a short-circuit period at the load. Also, its overall efficiency reaches 90%. The detailed load and frequency characteristics of the inverter are elucidated by the computer-aided simulation. Then, the circuit design procedure is presented, and practical numerical examples are obtained according to this procedure which reveal that the inverter is highly practical and the design procedure is effective. The trial inverters yielding 2 kW or 4 kW were actually prepared. The observed values of the voltages and currents of the inverters were found to be in good agreement with the calculated ones. These facts certificate the validity of the proposed design procedure.

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a new method of extracting independent components from multivariate data. It can be applied to various fields such as vision and auditory signal analysis, communication systems, and biomedical and brain engineering. There have been proposed a number of algorithms. The present article shows that most of them use estimating functions from the statistical point of view, and give a unified theory, based on information geometry, to elucidate the efficiency and stability of the algorithms. This gives new efficient adaptive algorithms useful for various problems.

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.

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.

A wavelet based algorithm for scalable video compression is described, with the main focus put on memory bandwidth reduction and efficient VLSI implementation. The proposed algorithm adopts a modified 2-D subband decomposition scheme in conjunction with a partial zerotree search for efficient Embedded Zerotree Wavelet coding. The experiment with the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with that of conventional DWT, MPEG-2, and JPEG demonstrates that the image quality of the proposed algorithm is consistently superior to that of JPEG, and our scheme can even outperform MPEG-2 in some cases, although it does not exploit the inter-frame redundancy. In spite of the performance inferiority to the conventional DWT, the proposed algorithm attains significant reduction of DWT memory requirements, enhancing a reasonable balance between implementation cost and image quality.

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 paper, we review the progress in BiSrCaCuO-2212 Intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJs) by summarizing our recent results in fabrication and high frequency experiments. Using a double-side fabrication process, a well defined number of intrinsic Josephson junctions in a well defined geometry can be fabricated. The junctions in the stack are quite homogeneous, and the power distribution of external irradiation among the junctions is even. Shapiro steps are clearly observed up to 2.5 THz, and the general condition for the occurrence of Shapiro steps at frequency frf is that it should be much greater than the plasma frequency fpl. Under certain conditions the Shapiro steps are zero-crossing, making some applications possible, such as quantum voltage standard etc.

The initial phase alternation of RZ pulses having duty cycle beyond 50% in dispersion-managed-link is found to help stabilize DM solitons transmissions. The stable soliton propagation of such wide RZ pulses should ease the difficulties designing soliton-based DWDM systems due to less spectral occupancy/channel. For the proof of concept, 40 Gbit/s WDM transmissions are numerically investigated and the initial phase alternation improved the transmission distance by the factor of 2 in the soliton-soliton interaction limited regime. The advantage of this concept has also been verified by conducting 40 Gbit/s single and 8 channels WDM transmission experiments using OTDM techniques with initial phase alternation.

A 1.6-Tb/s dense WDM signal was successfully transmitted over 480 km using the carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CS-RZ) modulation format. The CS-RZ format was chosen because it exhibited better transmission performance over a wide fiber-input power window than the NRZ and RZ formats in a 40-Gb/s-based WDM transmission experiment with 100-GHz channel spacing, confirming its nonlinearity-insensitive nature in dense WDM systems. With the wide power window of CS-RZ, we achieved stable transmission of 4040-Gb/s WDM signals over a 480-km (680 km) standard SMF line with only the C-band, in which a spectral ripple remained during transmission. Distributed Raman amplification and forward error correction were not used, providing a margin for already installed transmission lines.

In this paper, we propose an activity-based estimation scheme to determine the received signal power disparity, that enhances the BER performance of the SIC scheme in a DS/CDMA system considering a practical voice activity factor, and compare BER performance with those of other schemes with or without estimation. Numerical analysis results show that the SIC scheme with the proposed activity-based estimation improves the BER performance compared with that without considering voice activity, and it approaches to that of the ideal estimation as the total number of concurrent users increases. In addition, the higher becomes the maximum attainable SNR, the better becomes the BER performance of the proposed activity-based estimation scheme.

This paper proposes a statistical design approach for Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) 40 Gbit/s systems with Forward Error Correction (FEC); the approach considers Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD). We introduce a fluctuating PMD emulator to experimentally clarify FEC performance in PMD-limited systems. By using the proposed design approach, and considering the FEC relaxation effect on PMD, the maximum transmission distance of an NRZ 40 Gbit/s system without PMD compensation is estimated as several hundreds of km depending on the number of cable concatenations per link and the probability threshold of system acceptance.

In this letter, sampling and quantizer design for the Gaussian detection problem are considered. A constraint on the transmission rate from the remote sensor to the optimal discrete detector is assumed. The trade-off between sampling rate and the number of quantization levels is studied and illustrated by means of an example.

We demonstrated variable dispersion compensation using the Virtually Imaged Phased Array (VIPA) for a 40-Gbit/s dense-WDM transmission system. The large tunable range from -800 to +800 ps/nm in the entire C-band wavelength range and the high tunable resolution of 1 ps/nm was achieved by using a 3-dimensional mirror equipped with a stepping motor that we developed. We adopted the dispersion monitor of 40-GHz intensity extracted from the received 40-Gbit/s baseband signals, and verified that this dispersion monitoring method is applicable to nonlinear transmission by detecting the monitor peak. Using the VIPA variable dispersion compensator and the dispersion monitor, we demonstrated 1.28-Tbit/s (40-Gbit/s 32 ch) automatic dispersion compensation. As a result, we confirmed that only two VIPAs and one fixed dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) are needed to make our method applicable to the entire C-band for dense WDM 40-Gbit/s systems having a large transmission range of 80 km.

Methodologies for more efficient Raman amplification and a more suitable modulation format for 40 Gbit/s WDM unrepeatered transmission are investigated. Management of the fiber effective area is proposed to realize low noise distributed Raman amplification. An Aeff management technique in which low-Aeff fiber is located in a median section instead of the last section, was confirmed numerically and experimentally to improve the OSNR and Q-factor. Carrier-suppressed-return-to-zero (CS-RZ) modulation has the advantage of reducing fiber-nonlinearity effects and permitting denser multiplexing of the wavelengths. 40 Gbit/s 32-channel unrepeatered WDM transmission over 202 km was demonstrated employing the proposed methodologies.

The effectiveness of Aeff enlarged positive dispersion fiber (EE-PDF) and hybrid amplification configuration with erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and fiber Raman amplifier for reducing the fiber nonlinearity and improving the transmission performance in long distance 40 Gbit/s-based WDM transmission was investigated. We have confirmed that the use of EE-PDF in modified dispersion map for 40 Gbit/s transmission is quite effective to increase the transmissible distance and have successfully demonstrated 16 40 Gbit/s WDM transmission over 2000 km with proper dispersion management. We have also confirmed that the use of distributed Raman amplification is quite effective to extend the repeater spacing. By adding the optimum Raman amplification, almost the same transmission performance was obtained with a doubled repeater spacing in long distance 40 Gbit/s-based WDM transmission.