In robot vision system, enormously large computation power is required to perform three-dimensional (3-D) instrumentation and object recognition. However, many kinds of complex and irregular operations are required to make accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition in the conventional method for software implementation. In this paper, a VLSI-oriented Model-Based Robot Vision (MBRV) processor is proposed for high-speed and accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition. An input image is compared with two-dimensional (2-D) silhouette images which are generated from the 3-D object models by means of perspective projection. Because the MBRV algorithm always gives the candidates for the accurate 3-D instrumentation and object recognition result with simple and regular procedures, it is suitable for the implementation of the VLSI processor. Highly parallel architecture is employed in the VLSI processor to reduce the latency between the image acquisition and the output generation of the 3-D instrumentation and object recognition results. As a result, 3-D instrumentation and object recognition can be performed 10000 times faster than a 28.5 MIPS workstation.

This paper examines the retransmission probability and throughput characteristics of slow-frequency-hopping spread spectrum transmission in Rayleigh fading indoor channels of multi-cell environments. Because signal strength in a Rayleigh fading indoor channel changes slowly, retransmission probability is little influenced by the retransmission unit length and error correction capability when retransmission unit length is shorter than the fading period. With the 83.5MHz bandwidth of the 2.4GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) band in the USA, quaternary phase shift keying (QPSK) is expected to provide a throughput of nearly 1Mbps in each cell when we assume a shadowing margin of 18.1dB and we use 4 cells, 100 hopping frequencies, a transmission power of 600mW, and a transmission distance of 20m. And also with the 26MHz bandwidth of the 2.4GHz ISM band in Japan, QPSK is expected to provide a throughput of nearly 1Mbps in each cell under similar conditions but with 26 hopping frequencies and a transmission power of 260mW.

Real-time collision detection is one of the most important intelligent processings in robotics. In collision detection, a large storage capasity is usually required to store the 3-dimensional information on the obstacles located in a workspace. Moreover, high-computational power is essential in not only coordinate transformation but also matching operation. In the proposed collision detection VLSI processor, the matching operation is drastically accelerated by using a content-addressable memory (CAM). A new obstacle representation based on a union of rectangular solids is also used to reduce the obstacle memory capacity, so that the collision detection can be performed by only magnitude comparison in parallel. Parallel architecture using several identical processor elements (PEs) is employed to perform the coordinate transformation at high speed, and each PE performs coordinate transformation at high speed based on the COordinate Rotation DIgital Computation (CORDIC) algorithms. When the 16 PEs and 144-kb CAM are used, the performance is evaluated to be 90 ms.

An asynchronous spread spectrum (SS) modem for 2.4-GHz wireless LAN has been implemented using an efficient ZnO-SiO2-Si surface acoustic wave (SAW) convolver. The design of the highly efficient SAW convolver was developed at Tohoku University and commercially manufactured by Clarion Co., Japan. The modem can operate under full-duplex transmission in the same frequency range of the 2.4-GHz SS band. The SS modem is based on a direct-sequence/code-shift-keying (DS/CSK) method for the modulation. Pseudo-noise (PN) codes are chosen from a preferred pair of 127-chip m-sequences and the code rate is 14MHz. The asynchronous demodulation is simply realized utilizing the coherent correlation characteristics of the SAW convolver. Under full-duplex transmission, the self-jamming caused by a transmitted signal in the modem itself is effectively reduced by an RF isolator and the SS processing gain. The implemented modem has been tested using a coaxial cable with attenuator. A bit error rate of 10-6 under full-duplex transmission is observed at 78.3dB of a desired to undesired signal ratio. The effective range is estimated on the basis of two-path propagation model. From self-jamming rejection of 78.3dB, the effective range under real-time full-duplex is estimated to be about 200m.

Pitch frequency is a basic characteristic of human voice, and pitch extraction is one of the most important studies for speech recognition. This paper describes a simple but effective technique to obtain correct pitch frequency from candidates (pitch candidates) extracted by the short-range autocorrelation function. The correction is performed by a neural network in consideration of the time coutinuation that is realized by referring to pitch candidates at previous frames. Since the neural network is trained by the back-propagation algorithm with training data, it adapts to any speaker and obtains good correction without sensitive adjustment and tuning. The pitch extraction was performed for 3 male and 3 female announcers, and the proposed method improves the percentage of correct pitch from 58.65% to 89.19%.

The frequency characteristics of whole-body averaged specific absorption rates (SARs) in a human model exposed to a near field of an electric dipole or a magnetic dipole are calculated, using a finite-difference time-domain method. The dependences of the characteristics on the orientation of the dipole and on the distance from the source to the model are investigated. It is shown that the resonant peak of the SAR that appears in the E-polarized far-field exposure is observed only when the source is E-polarized and is located at 80cm, while the peak vanishes or is not noted when the source is located at 40cm and 20cm nor when it is H-polarized. The relationships between the whole-body averaged SARs and the incident electromagnetic field strengths are also investigated. It is suggested that the spatially-averaged value of the dominating component between the electric field and the magnetic field over the space where a human body would occupy provides a relevant measure to estimate the whole-body averaged SAR of a body in the vicinity of a small radiation source.

The performance of parallel combinatory spread spectrum (PC/SS) communication systems in the frequency-nonselective, slowly Rayleigh fading channel is studied. Performance is evaluated by symbol error rate using numerical computation. To overcome the performance degradation caused by fading, we also studied the effects of selection diversity and Reed-Solomon coding applied to the PC/SS system. As a result, a remarkable improvement in error rate performance is achieved with Reed-Solomon coding and diversity technique. The coding rate for the maximum coding gain is almost a half of that in the additive white gaussian noise channel.

In 1985, Kues et al. (Bioelectromagnetics, 6, pp.177-188, 1985) reported that corneal endothelial abnormalities were observed after a 4-hour exposure of anesthetized monkey eyes to 2.45GHz CW. We have traced their experimental study without anesthetization. Although we irradiated with power density exceeding the threshold of 30mW/cm2 obtained by them, we could not observe the same abnormalities as they did.

An improvement of Q evaluation is discussed. The Resonance Curve Area method was confirmed to give a deviation in the order of 6104. The result was three times more accurate than the widely known Q evaluating method which utilizes the cursor function installed in a network analyzer. A discussion is also made on the physical validity of the RCA method. It is shown that the application of the RCA method improves the accuracy of the cavity perturbation method. Actual measurements have shown that the deviation of dielectric constant is less than 1% and that of the loss tangent is less than 3%, in the order of 104. The accuracy of the RCA method was estimated to be three times that of the conventional cavity perturbation technique. The consistency of the perturbation with other methods has also confirmed. The accuracy comparison to more accurate formulae derived from a rigorous solution have shown that the difference is sufficiently small.

In this paper, a new structure which is useful for the detection of multiple sinusoids is presented. The proposed structure is based on the direct form second-order IIR notch filter using simplified adaptive algorithm. It has been shown that the convergence characteristics of the proposed structure are much improved compared with the previously proposed structure. A cascaded adaptive notch filter using the proposed second-order section is also shown. It takes multiple sinusoids corrupted by white Gaussian noise and produces the individual sinusoids at each of the outputs. The results of computer simulation are shown which confirm the theoretical prediction.

This paper introduces some modelling methods of time-varying stochastic process and its linear/nonlinear adaptive identification. Time-varying models are often identified by using a least square criterion. However the criterion should assume a time invariant stochastic model and infinite observed data. In order to adjust these serious different assumptions, some windowing techniques are introduced. Although the windows are usually applied to a batch processing of parameter estimates, all adaptive methods should also consider them at difference point of view. In this paper, two typical windowing techniques are explained into adaptive processing. In addition to the use of windows, time-varying stochastic ARMA models are built with these criterions and windows. By using these criterions and models, this paper explains nonlinear parameter estimation and the property of estimation convergence. On these discussions, some approaches are introduced, i.e., sophisticated stochastic modelling and multi-rate processing.

This paper proposes a new strategy for reducing contention for a critical section in a multiprocessor system and shows that the strategy can improve CPU utilization by several percent. Using simulation and queueing theory, it also discusses when the strategy is superior to conventional ones.

This paper proposes using an adaptive array in a base station for signal reception and transmission in order to increase the spectral efficiency without decreasing the cell radius. The adaptive array controls the directivity pattern of the base station to reduce co-channel interference during reception; the same array pattern is applied during transmission to prevent unnecessary illumination. Computer simulation results show that the cluster size can be reduced to one with time division duplexing (TDD), indicating that we can reuse the same frequency group at all cells. Thus, the improvement in spectral efficiency is as much as 16 fold that of an omni-antenna. Moreover, load sharing, which is expected to improve the channel utilization for unbalanced load situations, is available by cell overlapping. Frequency division duplexing (FDD) requires a weight adjust function to be applied for transmission since the difference in frequency between signal reception and transmission causes null positioning error. However, simple LMS-adjusting can provide a cluster size of one as well as cell overlapping when the frequency deference is 5%.

This paper describes the performance analysis of a distributed antenna system which includes space and path diversity with radio channel estimation. This system is used for CDMA personal communication systems. In this paper, the performance of a diversity system is analyzed precisely considering multipath and inter-antenna interference. In a diversity system, the adaptive RAKE receiver which estimates the characteristics of a radio channel adaptively has been used for diversity combining. In the adaptive RAKE, the time-variant characteristic has been approximated by a time function. In this paper, the estimation performance of the adaptive RAKE is analyzed in cases of time functions of 0-th, first and second degrees. The performances are evaluated and compared with the differential RAKE. The adaptive RAKE is found to improve the signal quality of more than 2dB in comparison with the differential RAKE. It is also found that the optimum parameter design can be achieved flexibly for radio channel estimation by using higher degree time functions.

We discuss estimation error as a basic problem in formant estimation in the analysis of speech of very short-time duration in the glottal closure of the vowel. We also show in our simulation that good estimation of the first formant is almost impossible with the ordinary method using a waveform cutting. We propose a new method in which the cut waveform, as a discontinuous function of finite time, is mapped to a continuous function defined in the whole time domain; and we show that using this method, the estimation accuracy for low frequency formants can be greatly improved.

An adaptive method analyzing analytic speech signals is proposed in this paper. The method decreases the errors of finite precision on calculation in a method with real coefficients. It is shown from the results of experiments that the proposed method is more useful than adaptive methods with real coefficients.

To investigate the effect of alkyl chain length and adsorption time on the charge-transfer complex formation, ultraviolet-visible absorption and inelastic electron tunneling (IET) spectroscopy measurements were carried out for the tetramethylphenylenediamine (TMPD; donor molecule) adsorbed dodecyl-, pentadecyl- and octadecyl-tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ) Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films. In the optical absorption spectra, the main peak of LB films shows a red-shift depending on alkyl chain length and adsorption time. Furthermore, the dependence on alkyl chain length and adsorption time are also shown in the IET spectra. These results demonstrate that adsorption LB methods enable to control the adsorption ratio of functional molecules and the CT complex formation.

A procedure for preparing a cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrograph of a specific area is outlined. A specific area in a specimen has been very difficult to observe with TEM, because a particular small area cannot be preselected in the conventional specimen preparation technique using mechanical polishing, dimpling and ion milling. The technique in this paper uses a focused ion beam (FIB) to fabricate a cross-sectional specimen at a desired area. The applications of this specimen preparation technique are illustrated for investigations of particles in the process of fabricating devices and degraded aluminum/aluminum vias. The specimen preparation technique using FIB is useful for observing a specific area. This technique is also useful for shortening the time of specimen preparation and observing wide areas of LSI devices.

This paper proposes a buried-LATID structure featuring a peaked vertical profile around gate edge for the n- drain unlike the reported conventional LATID structure. As compared to the conventional LATID FETs, the deep-submicron buried-LATID FETs achieve improved circuit speed by 7% (50% compared to LDD FETs) due to suppressed gate-to-drain capacitance and improved lifetime by 10 times (300 times compared to LDD FETs). The buried-LATID FETs are very promising for deep-submicron MOSFETs to achieve improved performance and hot-carrier reliability at the same time.

This paper discusses how to provide selective broadcast communication for a group of multiple entities in a distributed system by using high-speed communication networks. In the group communication, protocol data units (PDUs) sent by each entity have to be delivered atomically in some order to all the destinations in the group. In distributed applications, each entity sends a PDU only to a subset rather than all the entities, and each entity needs to receive all the PDUs destined to it from every entity in the same order as they are sent. We name such a broadcast service a selective order-preserving broadcast (SP) service. In this paper, we discuss how to design a distributed, asynchronous protocol which provides the SP service for entities.