The paper discusses the possibility of building semiconductor lasers whose wavelength stays nearly constant with ambient temperature variation. Several factors affecting the lasing wavelength change with temperature variation in both distributed feedback lasers and Fabry-Perot lasers are addressed and the optimum design of bandgap temperature dependence for the active layer material is discussed. It is pointed out that the most important challenge we face in building temperature-insensitive wavelength lasers is the development of a temperature-insensitive bandgap material for the active layer. Based on published data, it is speculated that such a laser could be developed using a Hg1-xCdxTe/CdTe double heterostructure. Although no data is available yet, we expect a Ga1-xInxAs1-yBiy III-V alloy semiconductor can be used for this purpose. Recently reported T1xIn1-x-yGayP III-V alloy semiconductor might be another promising candidate. Such lasers will greatly advance applications of WDM (Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing) technology to optical fiber communication systems and contribute to network innovations.

A requirement specification acquisition method combined with hypothesis-based reasoning and model reasoning is proposed for obtaining service specifications from the ambiguous and/or incomplete requirement specifications of communications services. Errors at an early stage of software development cost more to debug than those at a later stage. Specification acquisition is the most upstream development process. Nevertheless, the system support for specification acquisition is delayed compared with other development phases.' Users do not always have precise requirements. It is therefore inevitable that user requirements contain ambiguities, insufficiencies and even contradictions. Considering this, it is indispensable to support a specification completion method that derives service specifications from such problem requirements. This paper proposes a combined method to obtain consistent and complete specifications from such problem requirements. Communications service specifications can be described by specifying terminal behaviors which can be recognized from outside the communications system(s). Such specifications are described by a rule-based language. Requirement specifications usually have components that are ambiguous, incomplete, or even contradictory. They appear as rule description and/or missing rules. From such requirements, service specifications are obtained by using hypothesis-based reasoning on input requirements and existing service specifications. When existing specifications cannot be used to obtain complementary specifications, a communications service model is used to propose new rules. The proposed methods are implemented as a part of a communications software development system. The system enables non-experts in communications systems to define their own service specifications.

The millimeter wave (MMW) radar has good compromise characteristics of both microwave radar and optical sensors. It has better angular and range resolving abilities than microwave radar, and a longer penetrating range than optical sensors. We used the MMW radar to detect targets located in the sea and among sea ice clutter based on fractals, wavelets, and neural networks. The wavelets were used as feature extractors to decompose the MMW radar images and to extract the feature vectors from approximation signals at different resolution levels. Unsupervised neural classifiers with parallel computational architecture were used to classify sea ice, sea water and targets based on the competitive learning algorithm. The fractal dimensions could provide a quantitative description of the roughness of the radar image. Using these techniques, we can detect targets quickly and clearly discriminate between sea ice, sea water, and targets.

Transport-processing FPGAs have been proposed for flexible telecommunication systems. Since those FPGAs have finer granularity of logic functions to implement circuits on them, the amount of routing resources tends to increase. In order to keep routing congstion small, it is necessary to execute placement and routing simultaneously. This paper proposes a simultaneous placement and global routing algorithm for transport-processing FPGAs whose primary objective is minimizing routing congestion. The algorithm is based on hierarchical bipartition of layout regions and sets of LUTs (Look Up Tables) to be placed. It achieves bipartitioning which leads to small routing congestion by applying a network flow technique to it and computing a maximum flow and a minimum cut. If there exist connections between bipartitioned LUT sets, pairs of pseudo-terminals are introduced to preserve the connections. A sequence of pseudo-terminals represents a global route of each net. As a result, both placement of LUTs and global routing are determined when hierarchical bipartitioning procedures are finished. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and applied to practical transport-processing circuits. The experimental results demonstrate that it decreases routing congestion by an average of 37% compared with a conventional algorithm and achieves 100% routing for the circuits for which the conventional algorithm causes unrouted nets.

This paper deals with the synthesis of Petri nets. Partial languages adequately represent the concurrent behaviors of Petri nets. We first propose a construction problem for Petri nets, in which the objective is to synthesize a Petri net to exhibit the desired behavior specified as a partial language. We next discuss the solvability of this problem and last present the cutline of a solution technique.

In this paper, an exact-minimization method for an AND-EXOR expression (ESOP) using O-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDDs) is considered. The proposed method is an improvement of Sasao's MRCF-based method. From experimental results, it is shown that required ZBDD size is reduced to 1/3 in the best case compared with the MRCF-based method.

The polymer matrix for the number of N in-puts/outputs, N stages and 2x2-switches is denoted as the 1-D Spanke-Benes (SB) network. Throughout the paper, the 1-D SB-network, which equals the diamond cellular array, is extended to arbitrary dimensions by a mathematical transformation (a 1-D network provides the interconnection of 1-D data). This transformation determines the multistage architecture completely by providing size, location, geometry and wiring of the switches as well as it preserves properties of the networks, e.g., the capability of sorting. The SB-networks of dimension 3 are analysed and sorting is applied.

A design methodology of high performance deep submicron CMOS in very low voltage operation has been proposed from low power dissipation point of view. In low voltage operation, threshold voltage is restricted by performance, stability of CMOS circuits and power dissipation caused by standby and switching transient current. As a result, threshold voltage is established to be 0.15 V even at 1 V operation from these requirements. Moreover, according to this design, 0.15 µm CMOS was fabricated with reduction of parasitic effects. It achieved propagation delay time 50 psec at 1 V operation. This results confirms that this design methodology is promising to achieve high performance deep submicron CMOS devices for low power dissipation.

New fabrication process for the nano-meter order structure was developed using the STM. The process named "STM nano-oxidation process" could oxidize the titanium metal to form the few tens of nano-meter oxidized titanium line which works as an energy barrier for the electron. The electrical properties of the TiOx line are examined in detail. The single electron transistors with back gate, or side gate, and also those with multi-islands are fabricated using STM nano-oxidation process. The single electron transistor showed the clear Coulomb gap of -160 mV, and the Coulomb oscillation with 400 mV period even at room temperature.

A Si single electron transistor (SET) was fabricated by converting a one-dimensional Si wire on a SIMOX substrate into a small Si island with a tunneling barrier at each end by means of pattern-dependent oxidation. Since the size of the Si island was as small as around 10 nm owing to this novel technique, the total capacitance of the SET was reduced to a value on the order of 1 aF, which guarantees the conductance oscillation of the SET even at room temperature. Furthermore, a linear relation between the designed wire length and the gate capacitance of SETs was obtained, which clearly indicates that the single island was actually formed in the middle of the one dimensional Si wire. These results were achieved owing to the highly reproducible fabrication process based on pattern dependent oxidation of SIMOX-Si layers. In addition, the fluctuation of the electrical characteristics of the SETs Was studied in relation to the wire size fluctuations. It was found that the fluctuatian is caused predominantly by the roughness of the sidewall surface of the resist pattern.

We have previously reported studies [3], [4] of the steady state system throughput in a slotted ring network. In this paper, we analyze the transient state of packet transmission and derive several characteristics of the network.

Let SeH{0}(k) [NSeH{0}(k)] denote the class of languages over a one-letter alphabet accepted by two-way sensing deterministic [nondeterministic] k-head finite automata. This paper shows that (i) SeH{0}(2)SeH{0}(3), and (ii) NSeH{0}(2) NSeH{0}(3). This gives an affirmative answer to an open problem in Ref. [3].

A type of Lienard's equation +µf(x)+x=0, where f(x) is not an even function of x, is studied by Le Corbeiller as a model of various biological oscillations, such as breathing, and called two-stroke oscillators. A distinctive feature of this type of oscillators is that the parameter µ has the upper limit µ0 for the oscillator to have some stable limit cycle. This paper gives a numerical method for calculating this upper limit µ0.

Optical Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is an attractive multiplexing approach for exploiting optical communication technology. Although considerable progress has been made in this approach, it still suffers from numerous potential impairments, stemming from several phenomena. (i.e., laser unstability, residual temperature variations, linear and nonlinear cross talk.). Conventional serial coding technique is not practical in lightwave systems, as it changes the system's bit rate that is not desirable. In this paper a new Parallel Coded Optical Multicarrier Frequency Division Multiplexing (PCOM-FDM) technique has been investigated. The strategy of multicarriers, together with Parallel Forward Error Control (PFEC) coding, is a potentially novel approach as in this approach we have, 1) Investigated optical multicarrier communication that is effective in combating dispersion and increasing throughput, 2) Proposed PFEC coding which is different from conventional serial coding in respect that it does not change the system bit rate per carrier and prevents the effects of channel wandering. It is highly desirable in lightwave systems and thus holds a vital importance in practical high speed optical communication systems. Theoretical treatment shows that the proposed approach is promising and practical.

In this paper we present an efficient method to solve reachability problems for Petri nets based on genetic algorithms and a kind of random search which is called postpone search. Genetic algorithm is one of algorithms developed for solving several problems of optimization. We apply GAs and postpone search to approximately solving reachability problems. This approach can not determine exact solutions, however, from applicability points of view, does not directly face state space explosion problems and can extend class of Petri nets to deal with very large state space in reasonable time. First we describe how to represent reachability problems on each of GAs and postpone search. We suppose the existence of a nonnegative parickh vector which satisfies the necessary reachability condition. Possible firing sequences of transitions induced by the parickh vector is encoded on GAs. We also define fitness function to solve reachability problems. Reachability problems can be interpreted as an optimization ones on GAs. Next we introduce random reachability problems which are capable of handling state space and the number of firing sequences which enable to reach a target marking from an initial marking. State space and the number of firing sequences are considered as factors which effect on the hardness of reachability problems to solve with stochastic methods. Furthermore, by using those random reachability problems and well known dining philosophers problems as benchmark problems, we compare GAs' performance with the performance of postpone search. Finally we present empirical results that GAa is more useful method than postpone search for solving more harder reachability problems from the both points of view; reliability and efficiency.

This paper describes a circuit analysis technique that includes all circuit elements used in transistor Colpitts quartz crystal oscillators. This technique is applied to a quartz crystal oscillator that has a tank circuit for selecting the oscillation frequency. The results obtained with this technique are compared with SPICE simulation results. Good agreement in the results clearly shows the validity of our technique.

A siphon (or alternatively a structutal deadlock) of a Petri net is defined as a set S of places such that existence of any edge from a transition t to a place of S implies that there is an edge from some place of S to t. A minimal siphon is a siphon such that any proper subset is not a siphon. The results of the paper are as follows. (1) The problem of deciding whether or not a given Petri net has a minimum siphon (i.e., a minimum-cardinality minimal siphon) is NP-complete. (2) A polynomial-time algorithm to find, if any, a minimal siphon or even a maximal calss of mutually disjoint minimal siphons of a general Petri net is proposed.

We propose a method to fuse auditory information and visual information for accurate speech recognition. This method fuses two kinds of information by using Iinear combination after calculating two kinds of probabilities by HMM for each word. In addition, we use full-frame color image as visual information in order to improve the accuracy of the proposed speech recognition system. We have performed experiments comparing the proposed method with the method using either auditory information or visual information, and confirmed the validity of the proposed method.

This paper is devoted to a new design method for infinite impulse response approximate inverse system of a nonminimum phase system. The design is carried out such that the convolution of the nonminimum phase polynomial and its approximate inverse system can be represented by an approximately linear phase all-pass filter. A method for estimating the time delay and order of an approximate inverse system is also presented. Using infinite impulse response approximate inverse systems better accuracy is achieved with reduced computational complexity. Numerical examples are included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper suggests modified LZSS which is suitable for compressing Hangul data by Hangul character token and the string token with small size based on Hangul properties. The Hangul properties can be described in 2 ways. 1) The structure of a Hangul character consists of 3 letters: The first sound letter, the middle sound letter, and the last sound letter which are called Cho-seong, Jung-seong, and Jong-seong, respectively. 2) The code of Hangul is represented by 2 bytes. The first property is used for making the character token processing Hangul characters which occupies most of the unmatched characters. That is, the unmatched Hangul characters are replaced with one Hangul character token represented by Huffman codes of Cho-seong, Jung-seong, and Jong-seong in regular sequence, instead of 2 character tokens. The second property is used to shorten the size of the string token processing matched string. In other words, since more than 75% of Hangul data are Hangul and Hangul codes are constructed in 2 bytes, the addresses of the window of LZSS can be assigned in 2-byte unit. As a result, the distance field and the length field of the string token can be lessened by one bit each. After compressing Hangul data through these tokens, about 3% of improvement could be made in compression ratio.