A method of evaluating the wavelength filter spectrum response is introduced. The increase of the crosstalk level due to the filtering and the relation between the total crosstalk and the spectral efficiency are derived in detail using the Gaussian filter. Since this method can be applied to various kinds of filter spectrum responses, the ultimate spectral efficiencies of filters are compared. In this comparison, the problem of the box-like filter, which has been considered to be desirable, is revealed, and this is improved by cascading the filter spectrum. The requirement on the rejection floor that inheres in the filter is also made clear.

We investigate the impact of symbol rate control, modulation level control, and the number of hops on the area spectral efficiency of interference-limited multihop radio networks. By controlling symbol rate and modulation level, data rate can be adapted according to received power. In addition, varying the number of hops can control received power. First, we evaluate the achievable end-to-end throughput of multihop transmission assuming symbol rate and modulation level control. Numerical results reveal that by controlling symbol rate or using multihop transmission, the end-to-end communication range can be extended at the cost of end-to-end throughput, and this may result in lower area spectral efficiency. Next, an expression for the area spectral efficiency of multihop radio networks is derived as a function of the number of hops and the end-to-end throughput. Numerical results also reveal that the resulting area spectral efficiency depends on the specific circumstances, which, however, can be increased only by using multihop transmission.

The present paper discusses a new construction of UWB pulses within the framework of soft-spectrum adaptation. The employed basis functions are B-splines having the following properties: (i) The B-splines are time-limited piecewise polynomials. (ii) The first-order B-splines are rectangular pulses and they converge band-limited functions at the limit that their order tends to infinity. (iii) There are an analog circuit and a fast digital filter for the generation of B-splines. Simple application of Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization process to the shifted B-splines results in a few basic pulses, which are well time-limited and have a broad band width, but do not comply with the FCC spectral mask. A constrained approximation technique is proposed for adaptively designing pulses so that they approximate target frequency characteristics. At the cost of using eleven shifted B-splines, an example set of four pulses comforting the FCC spectral mask is obtained.

Recently, DOAS (differential optical absorption spectroscopy) has been used for nondestructive air monitoring, in which the LS (least squares) method is used to calculate trace gas concentrations due to its computational simplicity. This paper applies the ICA (independent component analysis) method to the DOAS system of air monitoring, since the LS method is insufficient to recover the desired spectra perfectly due to sparsity characteristic. If the sparsity of reference spectra in the DOAS system imposes the assumption of independence, the ICA algorithm can be used. The proposed method is used to regress the observed spectrum on the estimates of the reference spectra. The ICA algorithm can be seen as a preprocessing method where the ICs of the references are used as the input in the regression. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in simulation studies using synthetic data.

The measured values of electromagnetic disturbances should strongly correlate with degradation in the communication quality of digital wireless communication systems. The Amplitude Probability Distribution (APD) of a disturbance represents statistical information as applicable measurement readings that meet the above requirement. In this paper, correlations between APD measurements of disturbances and the bit error rate (BER) as a quality degradation index for victim systems are quantitatively investigated. Disturbance regulation by APD measurements is discussed from the viewpoint of protecting systems from disturbances. This investigation specifically considers the situation in which a repetition pulse disturbance impacts PHS and W-CDMA systems assumed as victims. The results confirm high correlations between the APD and BER not only experimentally but also theoretically under some conditions. A disturbance regulation criterion based on APD measurements is thus proposed for compliance testing of electronic appliances with the potential to act as disturbance noise sources.

The performance of integrated segmentation and recognition of handwritten numeral strings relies on the classification accuracy and the non-character resistance of the underlying character classifier, which is variable depending on the techniques of pattern normalization, feature extraction, and classifier structure. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of 12 normalization functions and four selected feature types on numeral string recognition. Slant correction (deslant) is combined with the normalization functions and features so as to create 96 feature vectors, which are classified using two classifier structures. In experiments on numeral string images of the NIST Special Database 19, the classifiers have yielded very high string recognition accuracies. We show the superiority of moment normalization with adaptive aspect ratio mapping and the gradient direction feature, and observed that slant correction is beneficial to string recognition when combined with good normalization methods.

Since WLAN (wireless LAN) systems share the 2.4-GHz frequency band with microwave ovens, interference caused by radiated oven noise is a serious problem in practical WLAN application. To mitigate the oven noise interference in DS-SS (direct-sequence spread spectrum) WLAN systems, the use of adaptive filters is proposed. This method is based on the fact that oven noise behaves like CW (continuous wave) interference within a short duration. In contrast to previous reduction techniques for oven noise, this method can be implemented without changing any specifications of current WLAN systems. The results of numerical and experimental analyses clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive filters for improving the bit error rates of WLAN links subject to oven noise interference.

Recently, automatic speech recognition in a car has practical uses for applications like car-navigation and hands-free telephone dialers. For noise robustness, the current successes are based on the assumption that there is only a stationary cruising noise. Therefore, the recognition rate is greatly reduced when there is music or news coming from a radio or a CD player in the car. Since reference signals are available from such in-vehicle units, there is great hope that echo cancellers can eliminate the echo component in the observed noisy signals. However, previous research reported that the performance of an echo canceller is degraded in very noisy conditions. This implies it is desirable to combine the processes of echo cancellation and noise reduction. In this paper, we propose a system that uses echo cancellation and spectral subtraction simultaneously. A stationary noise component for spectral subtraction is estimated through the adaptation of an echo canceller. In our experiments, this system significantly reduced the errors in automatic speech recognition compared with the conventional combination of echo cancellation and spectral subtraction.

This paper proposes a new class of polyphase ZCZ (zero-correlation zone) sequence sets which satisfy a mathematical upper bound. The proposed ZCZ sequence sets are obtained from DFT matrices and unitary matrices. In addition, this paper discusses the cross-correlation property between different ZCZ sequence sets which belong to the proposed class.

The main contribution of this work is to present several hardware implementations of an "n choose k" counter (C(n,k) counter for short), which lists all n-bit numbers with (n-k) 0's and k 1's, and to show their applications. We first present concepts of C(n,k) counters and their efficient implementations on an FPGA. We then go on to evaluate their performance in terms of the number of used slices and the clock frequency for the Xilinx VirtexII family FPGA XC2V3000-4. As one of the real life applications, we use a C(n,k) counter to accelerate a digital halftoning method that generates a binary image reproducing an original gray-scale image. This method repeatedly replaces an image pattern in small square regions of a binary image by the best one. By the partial exhaustive search using a C(n,k) counter we succeeded in accelerating the task of finding the best image pattern and achieved a speedup factor of more than 2.5 over the simple exhaustive search.

Severe frequency-selective fading, encountered in a broadband wireless mobile communication, significantly degrades the bit error rate (BER) performance of direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) signal transmission with rake combining. In this paper, frequency-domain pre-equalization transmission, called pre-FDE transmission, is presented for orthogonal multicode DSSS signal transmission. It is confirmed by the computer simulation that pre-FDE transmission can achieve a BER performance almost identical to that attainable by FDE reception.

A systolic array is an ideal for ASICs because of its massive parallelism with a minimum communication overhead, regularity and modularity. Most of commercial FPGAs cannot handle systolic structure with fast sampling rate for their general-purpose architecture nature. This paper presents a new PLD architecture targeting a super-systolic array for application-specific arithmetic operations such as MAC. This architecture combines the high performance of ASICs with the flexibility of PLDs and it offers a significant alternative view on the programmable logic devices. The super-systolic array is ideal for a newly proposed PLD architecture when it comes to area-efficiency, P&R and clock speed.

Embedded systems are used in broad fields. They are one of the indispensable and fundamental technologies in a highly informative society in recent years. As embedded systems are large-scale and complicated, it is prosperous to design and develop a system LSI (Large Scale Integration). The structure of the system LSI has been increasing complexity every year. The degree of improvement of its design productivity has not caught up with the degree of its complexity by conventional methods or techniques. Hence, an idea for the design of a system LSI which has the flow of describing specifications of a system in UML (Unified Modeling Language) and then designing the system in a system level language has already proposed. It is important to establish how to convert from UML to a system level language in specification description or design with the idea. This paper proposes, extracts and verifies transformation rules from UML to SpecC which is one of system level languages. SpecC code has been generated actually from elements in diagrams in UML based on the rules. As an example to verify the rules, "headlights control system of a car" is adopted. SpecC code has been generated actually from elements in diagrams in UML based on the rules. It has been confirmed that the example is executed correctly in simulations. By using the transformation rules proposed in this paper, specification and implementation of a system can be connected seamlessly. Hence, it can improve the design productivity of a system LSI and the productivity of embedded systems.

It is not always possible to find a global parse for an input sentence owing to problems such as errors of a sentence, incompleteness of lexicon and grammar. Partial parsing is an alternative approach to respond to these problems. Partial parsing techniques try to recover syntactic information efficiently and reliably by sacrificing completeness and depth of analysis. One of the difficulties in partial parsing is how the grammar might be automatically extracted. In this paper we present a method of automatically extracting partial parsing rules from a tree-annotated corpus using the decision tree method. Our goal is deterministic global parsing using partial parsing rules, in other words, to extract partial parsing rules with higher accuracy and broader expansion. First, we define a rule template that enables to learn a subtree for a given substring, so that the resultant rules can be more specific and stricter to apply. Second, rule candidates extracted from a training corpus are enriched with contextual and lexical information using the decision tree method and verified through cross-validation. Last, we underspecify non-deterministic rules by merging substructures with ambiguity in those rules. The learned grammar is similar to phrase structure grammar with contextual and lexical information, but allows building structures of depth one or more. Thanks to automatic learning, the partial parsing rules can be consistent and domain-independent. Partial parsing with this grammar processes an input sentence deterministically using longest-match heuristics, and recursively applies rules to an input sentence. The experiments showed that the partial parser using automatically extracted rules is not only accurate and efficient but also achieves reasonable coverage for Korean.

A Spread Spectrum Clock Generator (SSCG) using Digital Tracking scheme (DT-SSCG) is described. Using digital tracking control outside a PLL, DT-SSCG can realize stable modulation characteristic independent of the PLL constants. Moreover, DT-SSCG can apply to various modulation profiles easily by brief change of the digital tracking parameters. A test chip has realized the fitting of 5000 ppm downspread with 6.02 dB and 8.02 dB spectrum peak reduction for triangle and Non-Linear modulation.

This paper presents a technique for reducing spurious output of balanced modulators used in transmitters and arbitrary waveform generators. Two-step upconversion is a convenient way to produce a desired single-sideband (SSB) radio-frequency (RF) signal--baseband quadrature I and Q signals (which are analog outputs of direct digital frequency synthesizers) are upconverted by mixers and local oscillators (LOs)--but mismatches between the DACs in I and Q paths cause spurious output. We propose a method of dynamically matching the I and Q paths by multiplexing two DACs between I and Q paths in a pseudo-random manner. MATLAB simulation shows that multiplexing the two DACs spreads the spurious output, caused by mismatches between the two DACs, in the frequency domain, and reduces the peak level of spurious signals.

For three-step cell search in WCDMA, a stepwise serial scheme is conventionally employed, where each step of cell search operates in serial. In order to reduce the cell search time, a stepwise parallel scheme can be considered as a candidate for cell search, where each step operates in pipelined fashion. However, in the parallel scheme where the processing time in every step is equal, excessive accumulations are caused in step (1) and step (3) because the period of a code used for step (2) is much longer than that for the other steps. And it does not provide any gain because the effect becomes easily saturated with the number of accumulations. In this paper, the performance of parallel cell search is analyzed, and compared with that of serial cell search. Finally, it is shown that the performance of parallel cell search can be improved by adjusting the processing time in each step, based on the analytic results.

This paper reports on the bending loss insensitive single mode fiber suitable for access networks, which is applicable for wide wavelength use. Excellent attenuation stability of the fiber in the full spectrum range has been confirmed even in severe conditions such as fiber handling in mid-span access at aerial closure, cable installation/handling in indoor wirings and so on. Also, applications suitable for FTTH subscribers' use have been introduced.

In this paper, the previously introduced periodic Fourier transform concept is extended to a two-dimensional case. The relations between the periodic Fourier transform, harmonic series representation and Fourier integral representation are also discussed. As a simple application of the periodic Fourier transform, the scattering of a scalar wave from a finite periodic surface with weight is studied. It is shown that the scattered wave may have an extended Floquet form, which is physically considered as the sum of diffraction beams. By the small perturbation method, the first order solution is given explicitly and the scattering cross section is calculated.

This paper proposes an effective branch folding technique which combines branch instructions with predicted instructions. This technique can be implemented using an instruction queue, which buffers prefetched instructions. Most of the instructions in the instruction queue are forwarded to the execution unit in sequence. Branch instructions, however, are combined with predicted instructions in the instruction queue and these folded instructions are forwarded to the execution unit. Miss-prediction can be recovered by flushing folded instructions without processor state recovery and by restarting from the other path. Simulation and implementation results show that both performance and power consumption are significantly improved with little additional hardware cost.