This paper presents an overview of research, development, standardization and regulation activities on ultra wideband (UWB) technologies in National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT). NICT started a project on UWB technologies since 2002, and organized UWB consortium in cooperation with more than 20 companies and 7 universities in Japan. Up to now, we have been conducting numerous UWB R&D including the following main works: i) key technology development such as MMIC chips, antennas and other devices, ii) measurement and channel modeling for UWB signal propagation, iii) standardization in international activities of IEEE 802.15, ITU-R TG1/8 as well as in a national regulatory committee of Ministry of Internal Affair and Communications (MIC). The UWB systems we have studied occupy frequency bands range from microwave band (3-5 GHz) to quasi-millimeter wave band (24-29 GHz). Various prototype UWB systems including multi-functional terminals have been developed. The output of NICT has been succeeded by industrial parties with with national and international standardization and regulation.

We have developed a spread-spectrum Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) for serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) applications. We investigated the relation between the output jitter of PLLs in serial ATA applications and ΣΔ modulators in PLLs. On the basis of this study, we developed a spread-spectrum PLL for serial ATA applications and achieved a combination of small jitter and large electromagnetic interference (EMI) peak power reduction. This was achieved using two key components: multi-bit ΣΔ-controlled PLL and voltage-controlled oscillation with cross-coupled load delay cells. Using a 0.15-µm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor process, we fabricated a complete serial ATA transceiver featuring a spread-spectrum clock generator (SSCG). We achieved a spread-spectrum PLL with 10-dB EMI reduction and 8.1 ps random jitter for use in serial ATA applications. All other measured results for SSCG performance were very good and showed that the spread-spectrum generator more than satisfies serial ATA specifications.

In this paper, we propose a new projector-based display which can perform the color simulator for print industry. The proposed color simulator can change the color of print by projecting the image onto the print. A color of print can be matched to the desired color by projecting the image which is calculated to minimize the color difference between the colors of target print and current print. This current print is measured by digital camera or digital scanner. Ideally, spectral camera or scanner is expected to be used for accurate color simulation on the current print, but it costs a lot for practical application. Therefore, in this paper, we compared two methods for color matching, one is the tristimulus-based method with XYZ tristimulus values and the other is the spectral-based method with spectral values. As the result of computer simulation, the average color difference ΔE *94 was 0.27 by the spectral-based method between the reflected radiance from the color of target print and the color of current print with projector, and the average color difference ΔE *94 was 2.09 by the tristimulus-based method. The efficiency of the proposed system is verified by the subjective evaluation between the target and current print with appropriate image projection.

This letter proposes a novel geographic channel assignment (GCA) framework for dynamic channel allocation (DCA) in broadband wireless access networks (BWANs). The proposed GCA scheme is based on the characteristics of radio propagation, which focuses on the relationship between transmission distances and communication parameters, e.g., signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) etc., and uses a signal-aware distance estimation scheme to determinate an appropriate channel for communication. This method significantly increases the capacity of the BWA system. Simulation results show that the GCA framework can yield approximate two times throughput of the IEEE 802.16 standard specifications as well as obtain significantly lower call blocking probability compared with classical channel assignment methods.

It is well known that the diversity gain attained by DCA (Dynamic Channel Allocation) is generally very high over OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing)-based broadband networks. This paper introduces a numerical approach for measuring the performance gain afforded by DCA. In the mathematical analysis, the property of order statistics is adopted to derive the upper bound of the expected throughput via the use of DCA. In the simulation, it was possible to achieve a gain of 5 dB by exploiting multi-user and spectral diversities when the number of users is 16 and the total number of subcarriers is 256.

In this paper, the performance of narrow band interference (NBI) rejection scheme for direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) is analyzed. A single-tapped complex FIR filter is used for filtering a chip code to suppress NBI. In this system, the spectrum of transmitted signal has a null at an arbitrary frequency. By choosing filter coefficients, we place this null at NBI center frequency to mitigate the effect of NBI. The performance of this scheme is theoretically analyzed and validated by simulation. We also compare the effectiveness against BPSK interference between the chip code filtering and received signal filtering. The results indicate the chip code filtering is effective against single-tone and BPSK interference, and gains better performance than the received signal filtering at certain level of SNR.

Frequency-modulated clock signals are widely used in personal computers to reduce the amplitude of the clock harmonic noise, as measured using an electromagnetic interference (EMI) test receiver. However, the power of the clock harmonics is not decreased with this technique called spread spectrum clocking (SSC). Hence, the impact of the harmonics of a frequency-modulated clock on the bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER) of a Bluetooth system is theoretically analyzed. In addition, theoretical analysis covers the effectiveness of a frequency hopping spread spectrum (FH-SS) scheme and forward error correction (FEC) in mitigating the degradation in the BER and PER caused by clock harmonic interference. The results indicate that the BER and PER strongly depend on the modulating frequency and maximum frequency deviation of the clock harmonic. They also indicate that radiated clock harmonics may considerably degrade the BER and PER when a Bluetooth receiver is very close to a personal computer. Frequency modulating the clock harmonics slightly reduces the BER while it negligibly reduces the PER.

If the signal is not Gaussian, then the power spectral density (PSD) approach is insufficient to analyze signals and we resort to estimate the higher order spectra of the signal. However, estimation of the higher order spectra is even more time consuming, for example, the complexity of trispectrum is O(N 4). This problem becomes even more serious when short time Fourier transform (STFT) is computed - computation of the trispectrum is required after every shift of the window. In this paper, a method to recursively compute trispectrum has been presented and it is shown that the computational complexity, for a window size of N, is reduced to be O(N 3) and is the same as the space complexity.

In this paper, a parallel combinatory spread spectrum (PC/SS) system using a constant amplitude signaling scheme is proposed. The amplitude of the transmitted signal from multicode transmission systems such as PC/SS systems have a large dynamic range which requires that amplifiers have a wide linearity in the transmitter. From a view point of power efficiency, however, it is reasonable to use non-linear amplifiers rather than linear ones. In that case, the bit error rate performance must degrade because of non-linear distortion. The proposed system can avoid influence of the non-linear amplifiers by making the transmitted signal have a constant amplitude. The bit error rate performance and the data transmission rate performance are investigated. They prove that the proposed system is an attractive candidate among the constant amplitude signaling systems.

We extend the sliding block code in symbolic dynamics to transform J (≥2) sequences of Markov chains with time delays. Under the assumption that the chains are irreducible and aperiodic, we prove the central limit theorem (CLT) for the normalized sums of extended sliding block codes from J sequences of Markov chains. We apply the theorem to the system analysis of asynchronous spread spectrum multiple access (SSMA) communication systems using spreading sequences of Markov chains. We find that the standard Gaussian approximation (SGA) for estimations of bit error probabilities in such systems is the 0-th order approximation of the evaluation based on the CLT. We also provide a simple theoretical evaluation of bit error probabilities in such systems, which agrees properly with the experimental results even for the systems with small number of users and low length of spreading sequences.

Breaking arcs are generated between a pair of Cu electrical contacts in a DC 42 V/10.5 A circuit, and the arc voltage, the arc current and the time-resolved arc spectral intensities near contact surfaces are simultaneously measured. The arc temperature is calculated from some spectral intensities emitted from Cu neutral atoms using the Boltzmann plot method. The arc temperatures near the cathode and anode surfaces are measured, and the following experimental results were obtained. (1) Time evolutions of the spectral intensities and the calculated arc temperature have similar characteristics. (2) The arc temperature near the anode surface is higher than that near the cathode surface, and the temperature fluctuation near the anode surface is larger than that near the cathode. (3) Just before arc extinction, the arc temperature near the cathode surface is almost constant for many breaking operations but the arc temperature near the anode surface varies.

To achieve a very high data rate within a limited frequency band in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) techniques are very promising. Moreover, if a transmitter has the channel state information (CSI), the achievable spectrum efficiency can be maximized using the eigenbeam-space division multiplexing (E-SDM). However, this scheme demands accurate channel estimation. Therefore, in a closed-loop transmission scheme, an increase in the amount of feedback is absolutely necessary for the E-SDM. This paper describes a downlink beamforming method that significantly reduces the amount of feedback needed by using the common transmission weight vectors in all sub-carriers, compared to the amount required for E-SDM. The proposed method also applies transmission diversity to compensate for the quality. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed using computer simulations in both Ricean and Rayleigh fading environments.

The convergence speed of the conventional adaptive LMS algorithms for time delay estimation (TDE) is highly dependent on the spectral distribution of the desired random source signals of interest, thus the performance of TDE might be degraded, dramatically. To solve this problem, in this letter, a DCT-transform domain constrained adaptive normalized-LMS filtering scheme, referred to as the adaptive constrained DCT-LMS algorithm, is devised for TDE. Computer simulation results verify that the proposed scheme can be used to achieve desired performance, for input random signals with different spectral distributions; it outperforms the unconstrained DCT-LMS and time-domain constrained adaptive LMS algorithms.

We propose a novel strategy to obtain a high spatio-temporal resolution video. To this end, we introduce a dual sensor camera that can capture two video sequences with the same field of view simultaneously. These sequences record high resolution with low frame rate and low resolution with high frame rate. This paper presents an algorithm to synthesize a high spatio-temporal resolution video from these two video sequences by using motion compensation and spectral fusion. We confirm that the proposed method improves the resolution and frame rate of the synthesized video.

We extend a graph spectral method for extracting clusters from graphs representing pairwise similarity between data to hypergraph data with hyperedges denoting higher order similarity between data. Our method is robust to noisy outlier data and the number of clusters can be easily determined. The unsupervised method extracts clusters sequentially in the order of the majority of clusters. We derive from the unsupervised algorithm a semi-supervised one which can extract any cluster irrespective of its majority. The performance of those methods is exemplified with synthetic toy data and real image data.

This paper proposes a gonio-spectral imaging system for measuring light reflection on an object surface by using two robot arms, a multi-band lighting system, and a monochrome digital camera. It allows four degrees of freedom in incident and viewing angles necessary for full parametrization of a reflection model function. Spectral images captured for various incident and viewing angles are warped as if they were all captured from the same viewing direction. The intensity of reflected light is thus recorded in a normalized image form for any incident and viewing directions. The normalized images are used to estimate reflection model parameters at each surface point. To ensure point-wise reflection modeling, a calibration method is also proposed based on a geometrical model of the robot arms and camera. The proposed system can deal with objects with surface texture. Experiments are done on system calibration, reflection model, and spectral estimation. The results using colored objects show the feasibility of the proposed imaging system.

In this paper, we study how a multidimensional local binary pattern (LBP) texture feature data can be visually explored and analyzed. The goal is to determine how true paper properties can be characterized with local texture features from visible light images. We utilize isometric feature mapping (Isomap) for the LBP texture feature data and perform non-linear dimensionality reduction for the data. These 2D projections are then visualized with original images to study data properties. Visualization is utilized in the manner of selecting texture models for unlabeled data and analyzing feature performance when building a training set for a classifier. The approach is experimented on with simulated image data illustrating different paper properties and on-line transilluminated paper images taken from a running paper web in the paper mill. The simulated image set is used to acquire quantitative figures on the performance while the analysis of real-world data is an example of semi-supervised learning.

In this letter we present steady-state analyses of a gradient algorithm (GA) for second-order adaptive infinite impulse response (IIR) notch filters. A method for deriving more accurate estimation mean square error (MSE) expressions than the recently proposed method is presented. The method is based on the estimation error power spectral density (PSD). Moreover, an expression for the estimation bias for the adaptive IIR notch filter with constrained poles and zeros is shown to be obtained from the estimation MSE expression. Simulations are presented to confirm the validity of the analyses.

An HEMT CCD (charge-coupled-device) matched filter for spread-spectrum communication was developed. For higher data rates, it was fabricated using a two-phase CCD based on HEMT technology. It operates at 1.6 GHz, and its calculated data rate is 100 Mbps with a PN data length of 16 bits (PN data rate is 1.6 GHz). And it attains a charge transfer efficiency (CTE) of 0.975 at 2 GHz. The HEMT CCD matched filter dissipates 173 mW from a 10-Vp-p supply, and its chip size is 0.961.03 mm. It will thus be useful for optical communication and other high-data-rate applications utilizing spread-spectrum (SS) communication.

If a logic circuit was specialized to a specific input, the derived circuit would be faster and smaller than the original. This study presents various designs of a key-specific AES encryption circuit. In our iterative design, 41% of the logic gates and 20% of RAM were reduced, while 24% more performance was derived. In our pipelined design, 54% of the logic gates and 20% of RAM were reduced, while 74% higher performance was achieved. The results on DES encryption circuits are also presented for comparison.