There is general trend toward larger chip size and tighter layout due to customer requests of loading more and more functions on single chip. This trend makes yield difficult to be maintained high enough, since larger amount of defects are distributed on such large and tight-ruled chips. To overcome such a situation, RADLYS (RAnDom Logic Yield Simulator) and DD-TEG (Defect Density TEG) have been developed. DD-TEG extracts defect size distribution and its amount automatically, while RADLYS simulates defects on any layout and outputs yield based on the extracted defect size distribution. Critical layout from yield point of view can be found in this procedure. DD-TEG and RADLYS are used as a set of parameter extraction and simulation of the SPICE. In this paper, we introduce these tools and showed two application results. The predicted yield showed a good agreement with the actual yield in the first application (Optical Device A). Critical layout at the Local I/O portion was found in the second application (Random Logic portion of Memory Device B) and the layout was changed based on the RADLYS results.

A fiber optic temperature sensor using a conventional graded index multimode optical fiber is proposed. The multimode fiber is excited by two selected modes using a computer-generated holographic filter. A clear periodic signal created by interference between two modes is observed in the experiment.

A single bridging fault location technique for CMOS combinational circuits is proposed. In this technique, the cause of an error observed at the primary outputs in deduced using a diagnosis table constructed from the circuit under test and the given tests. The size of a diagnosis table is [the number of gates][the number of tests]2 bits, which is much smaller than that of the fault dictionary. The experimental results show that the number of possible bridging faults is reduced to less than 5 in several seconds, when using the tests to detect single stuck-at faults and considering only the bridging faults between physically adjacent nets.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of handoff schemes in microcellular personal communication systems (PCS) which cater to both pedestrian and vehicular users. Various performance parameters, including blocking of new calls,channel utilization, handoff blocking and call termination probabilities for each user type are evaluated. We study different queuing disciplines for handoff calls and their impact on system performance. We also study the tradeoff in handoff blocking and call termination probabilities between user types as the handoff traffic carried by the system from each user type is varied.

A novel algorithm, as an advanced Hybrid Channel Assignment strategy, for channel assignment problem in a cellular system is proposed. A difference from the conventional Hybrid Channel Assignment method is that flexible fixed channel allocations which are variable through the channel assignment can be performed in order to cope with varying traffic. This strategy utilizes the Channel Rearrangement technique using the artificial neural network algorithm in order to enhance channel occupancy on the fixed channels. The strategy is applied to two simulation models which are the spatial homogeneous and inhomogeneous systems in traffic. The simulation results show that the strategy can effectively improve blocking probability in comparison with pure dynamic channel assignment strategy only with the Channel Rearrangement.

This paper describes the imaging method for a human forearm in the microwave transmission CT at 3GHz. To improve the spatial resolution, the correction method of the diffraction effects is adopted and the high directivity antennas are used. A cross-sectional image of the human forearm is obtained in vivo.

With a view toward the improvement of life-saving rate, the advancement of emergency radio system was attempted. The telemetry technique was introduced to the mobile communication from a running ambulance. A system was newly developed which enables us to transmit the information of an emergency patient from an ambulance to an emergency room of a hospital. This system can transmit an audio signal, physiological signals such as an ECG and a blood oxygen level, as well as a color image. In the experiment, the feasibility of this technique was verified. In the test of its practical usefulness, the following points were evaluated using a mobile telephone line and an emergency radio link. With the regular condition of the communication link, the stability of signal transmission was reasonably well. The fidelity of the transmitted signal was satisfactory for the use of an emergency medicine.

In this paper, we present an analysis of a high-speed slotted ring with a single packet buffer at each station. Assuming that distances between stations affect the network performance only through the sum of themselves (this will be called the "lumpability assumption"), we introduce a model system called the lumped model in which stations are aggregated at a single point on the ring with their relative positions preserved. At the instant when each slot visits the aggregated point of the lumped model, we build a Markov chain by recording the system state of buffers and slots. From the steady state probabilities of the Markov chain, we obtain the mean waiting time and the blocking probability of each station. It will be shown analytically and by simulation that the analysis based on the lumped model yields accurate results for various network conditions.

A novel adaptive pitch-synchronous analysis method is proposed to estimate simultaneously vocal tract (formant/antiformant) and voice source parameters from speech waveforms. We use the parametric Rosenberg-Klatt (RK) model to generate a glottal waveform and an autoregressive-exogenous (ARX) model to represent voiced speech production process. The Kalman filter algorithm is used to estimate the formant/antiformant parameters from the coefficient of the ARX model, and the simulated annealing method is employed as a nonlinear optimization approach to estimate the voice source parameters. The two approaches work together in a system identification procedure to find the best set of the parameters of both the models. The new method has been compared using synthetic speech with some other approaches in terms of accuracy of estimated parameter values and has been proved to be superior. We also show that the proposed method can estimate accurately the parameters from natural speech sounds. A major application of the analysis method lies in a concatenative formant synthesizer which allows us to make flexible control of voice quality of synthetic speech.

Analysis of the specific absorption rate (SAR) of a realistic head model generated with a 1.5-tesla MRI antenna is described. It is found that the SAR of the eyeball is strongly affected by the position of the feeding point, whereas the sensitivity of the antenna is virtually independent of the feeding point.

Many methods have been proposed for constructing context-dependent phoneme models using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to improve performance. These conventional methods require previously defined contextual factors. If these factors are deficient, the method exhibit poor recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a new construction algorithm for HMnet which does not require pre-defined contextual factors. Experiments demonstrated that the new algorithm could construct the HMnet even for the case that the Successive State Splitting (SSS) algorithm could not. The new algorithm produced better phoneme recognition characteristics than the SSS algorithm.

This paper investigates a different method of speaker adaptation for Mandarin syllable recognition. Based on the minimum classification error (MCE) criterion, we use the generalized probabilistic decent (GPD) algorithm to adjust interatively the parameters of the hidden Markov models (HMM). The experiments on the multi-speaker Mandarin syllable database of Telecommunication Laboratories (T.L.) yield the following results: 1) Efficient speaker adaptation can be achieved through discriminative training using the MCE criterion and the GPD algorithm. 2) The computations required can be reduced through the use of the confusion sets in Mandarin base syllables. 3) For the discriminative training, the adjustment on the mean values of the Gaussian mixtures has the most prominent effect on speaker adaptation. 4) The discriminative training approach can be used to enhance the speaker adaptation capability of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach.

Detection of an unknown word or non-vocabulary word uttered by the user is necessary in realizing a practical spoken language user-interface. This paper describes the evaluation of an unknown word processing method for a subword unit based spoken word recognizer. We have assessed the relationship between the word recognition accuracy of a system and the detection rate of unknown words both by simulation and by experiment of the unknown word processing method. We found that the resultant detection accuracies using the unknown word processing are significantly influenced by the original word recognition accuracy while the degree of such effect depends on the vocabulary size.

A new clustering method was proposed to increase the effect of duration modeling on the HMM-based phoneme recognition. A precise observation on the temporal correspondences between a phoneme HMM with output probabilities by single Gaussian modeling and its training data indicated that there were two extreme cases, one with several types of correspondences in a phoneme class completely different from each other, and the other with only one type of correspondence. Although duration modeling was commonly used to incorporate the temporal information in the HMMs, a good modeling could not be obtained for the former case. Further observation for phoneme HMMs with output probabilities by Gaussian mixture modeling also showed that some HMMs still had multiple temporal correspondences, though the number of such phonemes was reduced as compared to the case of single Gaussian modeling. An appropriate duration modeling cannot be obtained for these phoneme HMMs by the conventional methods, where the duration distribution for each HMM state is represented by a distribution function. In order to cope with the problem, a new method was proposed which was based on the clustering of phoneme classes with plural types of temporal correspondences into sub-classes. The clustering was conducted so as to reduce the variations of the temporal correspondences in sub-classes. After the clustering, an HMM was constructed for each sub-class. Using the proposed method, speaker dependent recognition experiments were performed for phonemes segmented from isolated words. A few-percent increase was realized in the recognition rate, which was not obtained by another method based on the duration modeling with a Gaussian mixture.

The performance of coded multi-pulse pulse position modulation (MPPM) consisting of m slots and 2 pulses, denoted as (m, 2) MPPM, with imperfect slot synchronization is analyzed. Convolutional codes and Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are employed for (m, 2) MPPM, and the bit error probability of coded (m, 2) MPPM in the presence of the timing offset is derived. In each coded (m, 2) MPPM, we compare the performance of some different code rate systems. Moreover, we compare the performance of both systems at the same information bit rate. It is shown that in both coded systems, the performance of code rate-1/2 coded (m, 2) MPPM is the best when the timing offset is small. Wheji the timing offset is somewhat large, however, uncoded (m, 2) MPPM is shown to perform better than coded (m, 2) MPPM. Further, convolutional coded (m, 2) MPPM with the constraint length k7 is shown to perform better than RS coded (m, 2) MPPM for the same code rate.

Three-dimensional vocal tract shapes of a male, a female and a child subjects are measured from magnetic resonance (MR) images during sustained phonation of Japanese vowels /a, i, u, e, o/. Non-uniform dimensional differences in the vocal tract shapes of the subjects are quantitatively measured. Vocal tract area functions of the female and child subjects are normalized to those of the male on the basis of non-uniform and uniform scalings of the vocal tract length and compared with each other. A comparison is also made between the formant frequencies computed from the area functions normalized by the two different scalings. It is suggested by the comparisons that non-uniformity in the vocal tract dimensions is not essential in the normalization of the five Japanese vowels.

Multifrequency microwave radiometry for non-invasive measurement of temperature in biological objects has been investigated in our laboratory. An open-ended rectangular waveguide filled with a dielectric has been used as a contact-type antenna of a radiometer operating over a 1-4GHz range. In the radiometric measurement, the radiometer measures the thermal radiation emitted by the object via the antenna as the brightness temperature. The brightness temperature is related to the physical temperatures in the object through the radiometric weighting function. By virtue of the reciprocity of antenna, the weighting function can be derived from the field distribution induced in the object by the same antenna when it is operated in the active mode. In this paper, the FD-TD method is used to analyze the problem of coupling between the rectangular waveguide antenna and a biological object. The objects studied in this paper are a homogeneous and a four-layered lossy media. Working frequency is 1.2GHz, which is the center frequency of the lowest-frequency band of our radiometer. Numerical results are presented in the form of SAR patterns. It is found that the SAR patterns tend to spread out in the lateral directions in the bolus, skin and fat layers due to the diffraction which becomes stronger at lower frequencies. Results also suggest that the lateral spreading can be controlled to a certain extent by choosing the size elf antenna flange properly.

We discuss how to determine automatically the number of mixture components in continuous mixture density HMMs (CHMMs). A notable trend has been the use of CHMMs in recent years. One of the major problems with a CHMM is how to determine its structure, that is, how many mixture components and states it has and its optimal topology. The number of mixture components has been determined heuristically so far. To solve this problem, we first investigate the influence of the number of mixture components on model parameters and the output log likelihood value. As a result, in contrast to the mixture number uniformity" which is applied in conventional approaches to determine the number of mixture components, we propose the principle of distribution size uniformity". An algorithm is introduced for automatically determining the number of mixture components. The performance of this algorithm is shown through recognition experiments involving all Japanese phonemes. Two types of experiments are carried out. One assumes that the number of mixture components for each state is the same within a phonetic model but may vary between states belonging to different phonemes. The other assumes that each state has a variable number of mixture components. These two experiments give better results than the conventional method.

In this paper, we propose a dialogue model that reflects two important aspects of spoken dialogue system: to be robust' and to be cooperative'. For this purpose, our model has two main inference spaces: Conversational Space (CS) and Problem Solving Space (PSS). CS is a kind of dynamic Bayesian network that represents a meaning of utterance and general dialogue rule. Robust' aspect is treated in CS. PSS is a network so called Event Hierarchy that represents the structure of task domain problems. Cooperative' aspect is mainly treated in PSS. In constructing CS and making inference on PSS, system's process, from meaning understanding through response generation, is modeled by dividing into five steps. These steps are (1) meaning understanding, (2) intention understanding, (3) communicative effect, (4) reaction generation, and (5) response generation. Meaning understanding step constructs CS and response generation step composes a surface expression of system's response from the part of CS. Intention understanding step makes correspondence utterance type in CS with action in PSS. Reaction generation step selects a cooperative reaction in PSS and expands a reaction to utterance type of CS. The status of problem solving and declared user's preference are recorded in mental state by communicative effect step. Then from our point of view, cooperative problem solving dialogue is regarded as a process of constructing CS and achieving goal in PSS through these five steps.

Microwave radiometry has been investigated for non-invasive measurement of temperature in human body. Recent trends are to explore the capability of retrieving a temperature profile or map from a set of brightness temperatures measured by a multifrequency radiometer operating in a 1-6GHz range. The retrieval of temperature from the multifrequency measurement data is formulated as an inverse problem in which the number of independent measurement or data is limited (7) and the data suffer from considerably large random fluctuations. The standard deviation of the data fluctuation is given by the brightness temperature resolution of the instrument (0.04-0.1K). Solutions are prone to instabilities and large errors unless proper solution methods are used. Solution methods developed during the last few years are reviewed: singular system analysis, bio-heat transfer solution matched with radiometric data, and model-fitting combined with Monte Carlo technique. Typical results obtained by these methods are presented to indicate a crosssection of the present-state-of-the-development in the field. This review concludes with discussions on the radiometric weighting function which connects physical temperatures in object to the brightness temperature. Three-dimensional weighting functions derived by the modal analysis and the FDTD method for a rectangular waveguide antenna coupled to a four layered lossy medium are discussed. Development of temperature retrieval procedures incorporating the 3-D weighting functions is an important and challenging task for future work in this field.