Frequency modulation (FM) noise spectroscopy with diode laser is applied to high-resolution Doppler-free spectroscopy of Cs atomic vapor near a dielectric surface with evanescent-wave pump-probe configuration. Both high resolution and high sensitivity are realized by using an extremely simple experimental setup, in which no sweep or precise tuning of laser frequency are required. Several experimental configurations of optical near-field spectroscopy are demonstrated, which is useful for an extensive study of resonant interactions of atoms and microscopic electronic systems in optical near-fields.

In this paper, we propose and describe a new synchronizer for the FFT timing applicable to multi-carrier spread-spectrum (MC-SS) communication systems. The performance of the synchronizer is evaluated in terms of false- and miss-detection probabilities in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading.

This paper describes special-purpose hardware for large-scale logic simulation, called SP2, which executes an event driven algorithm and can simulate up to sixteen million gates. SP2 was developed, in 1992, for system verification of large-scale computer designs as a successor to SP1, which was developed in 1987. SP2 provides enhanced performance, throughput, and delay accuracy over SP1. Since 1992, SP2 has been widely used for system-level simulation of mainframes, super computers, UNIX servers and microprocessors. It is used as a powerful simulator, in all stages of design verification, or in early stages, before regression testing, by using emulators.

This paper presents a novel system-level design methodology, called quality-driven design, by which application-specific optimization can be achieved; furthermore the entire functionality can be shared to maximize design reuse. As a case of study, this paper focuses on quality-driven design for video applications and introduces an output quality adaptive approach based on variable bitwidth optimization to explore a new design space. MPEG2 video is used as the driver application to illustrate the potential of the presented methodology. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the methodology.

In this paper, we clarify the properties of the contract net protocol based on its formal specification. To specify the contract net protocol, we propose a formal specification method for an agent system. In this method, agents are modeled as communicating finite state machines. To deal with the behavior of agents and its time passage explicitly, we incorporate the concept of time into the communicating finite state machine. The contract net protocol is specified based on the specification method proposed in this paper. From the specification, we analyze the possibility about agent deadlock and its avoidance solution.

This paper addresses the single channel speech enhancement method which utilizes the mean value and variance of the logarithmic noise power spectra. An important issue for single channel speech enhancement algorithm is to determine the trade-off point for the spectral distortion and residual noise. Thus the accurate discrimination between speech spectral and noise components is required. The conventional methods determine the trade-off point using parameters obtained experimentally. As a result spectral discrimination is not adequate. And the enhanced speech is deteriorated by spectral distortion or residual noise. Therefore, a criteria to determine the point is necessary. The proposed method determines the trade-off point of spectral distortion and residual noise level by discrimination between speech spectral and noise components based on statistical criteria. The spectral discrimination is performed using hypothesis testing that utilizes means and variances of the logarithmic power spectra. The discriminated spectral components are divided into speech-dominant spectral components and noise-dominant ones. For the speech-dominant ones, spectral subtraction is performed to minimize the spectral distortion. For the noise-dominant ones, attenuation is performed to reduce the noise level. The performance of the method is confirmed in terms of waveform, spectrogram, noise reduction level and speech recognition task. As a result, the noise reduction level and speech recognition rate are improved so that the method reduces the musical noise effectively and improves the enhanced speech quality.

A performance comparison is developed between a chaotic communication system and a spread spectrum system with similar features in terms of bandwidth and transceiver structure but based on more conventional Gold sequences. Comparison is made in the presence of noise and multipath contributions which degrade the channel quality. It is shown that, because of its more favourable correlation properties, the chaotic scheme exhibits lower error rates, at a parity of the bandwidth expansion factor. The same favourable correlation properties are also used to explain and show, through a numerical example, the benefits of chaotic segments in a multi-user environment.

This paper presents the transmission performance of a class-IV partial-response signaling SSB system and proposes a method that can improve its power efficiency. A line code that has no dc component has been used in the SSB transmission of digital signals. The type of line code, such as a partial-response signaling, increases the modulation states, and as a result, decreases the power efficiency. To overcome this obstacle, a new demodulation method called "re-filtering and combining" is proposed on the assumption of orthogonal phase detection. The demodulated quadrature channel is re-filtered by a Hilbert filter and is combined with the in-phase channel. It is confirmed by computer simulations that the new demodulation method improves the BER performance and a 3 dB improvement of the power efficiency is obtained.

This paper presents a detailed simulation method to estimate Doppler power spectrum and mean blood velocity using real CW Doppler transducers with twin-crystal arrangement. The method is based on dividing the sample volume into small cells and using the statistics of the Doppler power spectrum with the same Doppler shift frequency, which predicts the mean blood velocity. The acoustic fields of semicircular transducers across blood vessels were calculated and the effects of acoustical and physiological factors on Doppler power spectrum and mean blood velocity were analyzed. Results show that nonuniformity of the acoustic field of the ultrasonic beam in the blood vessel and blood velocity profiles significantly affect Doppler power spectrum and mean blood velocity. However, Doppler angle, vessel depth, and sample volume length are not sensitive functions. Comparisons between simulation and experimental results illustrated a good agreement for parabolic flow profile. These results will contribute to a better understanding of Doppler power spectrum and mean blood velocity in medical ultrasound diagnostics.

In this paper, we propose a novel higher order time-frequency distribution (GDH) for a discrete time signal. This distribution is defined over the original discrete time-frequency grids through a delicate discretization of an equivalent expression of a higher order distribution, for a continuous time signal, in [4]. We also present a constructive design method, for the kernel of the GDH, by which the distribution satisfies (i) the alias free condition as well as (ii) the marginal conditions. Numerical examples show that the proposed distributions reasonably suppress the artifacts which are observed severely in the Wigner distribution and its simple higher order generalization.

This paper presents a novel low-energy memory design technique based on variable analysis for on-chip data memory (RAM) in application-specific systems, which called VAbM technique. It targets the exploitation of both data locality and effective data width of variables to reduce energy consumed by data transfer and storage. Variables with higher access frequency and smaller effective data width are assigned into a smaller low-energy memory with fewer bit lines and word lines, placed closer the processor. Under constraints of the number of memory banks, VAbM technique use variable analysis results to perform allocating and assigning on-chip RAM into multiple banks, which have different size with different number of word lines and different number of bit lines tailored to each application requirements. Experimental results with several real embedded applications demonstrate significant energy reduction up to 64.8% over monolithic memory, and 27.7% compared to memory designed by memory banking technique.

An effective spatial resolution enhancement method for distributed strain measurement by BOTDR is proposed. An optical fiber is glued to a structure by a length less than the spatial resolution defined by the pulse width, and the Brillouin spectrum of the light scattered from the glued optical fiber is investigated theoretically. The apparent strain xp observed in the fiber is found to be proportional to the accurate strain a. The ratio r=xp/a coincides with the ratio of the glued length to the spatial resolution. Spatial resolution as small as 0.2 m is demonstrated experimentally for small strains of less than 10-3.

We consider bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes for use on non-linear channels, such as that due to a non-linear high power amplifier (HPA) in a wireless system. Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) schemes are known to perform well on such channels, because they have constant amplitude, but their bandwidth efficiency is low. N-MSK improves this by superposing two or more such signals, but this results in a non-constant amplitude. In this paper we investigate the performance of N-MSK on a non-linear channel, modelled using a travelling wave tube (TWT) non-linearity. We first consider the spectrum and the BER performance of N-MSK on a non-linear channel, making use of the Euclidean distance spectrum of the modulated signal. We then consider the effect of non-linear amplification on these properties. Signal spectrum was determined by simulation, since no closed-form expression is available when the effect of AM-PM conversion are included. We find that the spectrum is remarkably little affected, being only slightly broadened. BER is also evaluated by direct simulation, as well as from the Euclidean distance spectrum. The latter now exhibits a series of clusters, instead of discrete lines, and we find that at least the whole of the first cluster must be considered in calculating the BER, not just the minimum distance or the centroid of the cluster. The detector used in the simulation applies an inverse distortion function, then uses maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) set up for the linear channel. This is no longer optimum, because the noise is distorted, and therefore it is also compared with a true MLSE detector. We find that the BER performance is, however, somewhat degraded compared to the linear channel. We determine back-off levels from saturation to optimise overall power efficiency.

A noise suppression algorithm with high speech quality based on weighted noise estimation and MMSE STSA is proposed. The proposed algorithm continuously updates the estimated noise by weighted noisy speech in accordance with an estimated SNR. The spectral gain is modified with the estimated SNR so that it can better utilize the improvement in noise estimation. With a better noise estimate, a more correct SNR is obtained resulting in the enhanced speech with low distortion. Subjective evaluation results show that five-grade mean opinion scores of the new algorithm with and without a speech codec are improved by as much as 0.35 and 0.40 respectively, compared with either the original MMSE STSA or the EVRC noise suppression algorithm.

The prospects of electron spectroscopy of working organic electronic device structures are discussed. The experimental consideration and the result of actual measurement are presented.

In this paper, we present a new approach to the construction of a set of binary sequences with a zero-correlation zone. The set consists of n pairs of binary sequences and the length of each binary sequence is n2(m+2) for some integers m and n. The Hadamard sequences with length n are used to construct the set. Any sequence in the set has 2(m+1) subsequences, each of length 2n. The author proves that any two subsequences are orthogonal if they belong to different pairs of binary sequences in the set.

Traditional watermarking methods based on spectrum manipulation use watermark bit as a colored noise. However, those methods show poor robustness for filtering and audio compression because of only a few spectrum coefficients being modified. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for robust audio watermarking by using spectrum warping. Our watermark-embedding scheme is not based on spectrum coefficient manipulation, but based on warping spectrum that shifts a block of spectrum coefficients nonlinearly. The host audio signal is divided appropriately into small segments and then a non-orthogonal transform, such as bi-linear transform, is used for each segment to embed as well as to extract watermarks. Because the proposed scheme uses small segment length, we can afford to embed signature information many times into audio signal without severe degradation of SNR. Our multiple embedding scheme increases robustness against abnormal distortion of watermarked signal and has no bit error rate in MPEG1 Layer-3 128 kbps and 96 kbps compression as well as low/high pass filtering.

Wyner and Ziv considered the rate-distortion function for source coding with side information at the decoder (we call the Wyner-Ziv problem). In this paper we show an information-spectrum approach to the Wyner-Ziv problem for general class of nonstationary and/or nonergodic sources with side information at the decoder, where the distortion measure is arbitrary and may be nonadditive. We show that a general formula for the rate-distortion function of the Wyner-Ziv problem for general sources with the maximum distortion criterion under fixed-length coding by using the information spectrum approach.

The adsorption behavior of cytochrome c was investigated using slab optical waveguide (SOWG) absorption spectroscopy at the near ultraviolet region utilizing thin quartz plates as planar waveguides. SOWG absorption spectra of cytochrome c measured at constant time intervals showed significant influence of surface hydrophilicity and solution chemistry on the adsorption of this important heme protein in quartz surface. Being polar and typically amphoteric, the protein preferred adsorption on hydrophilic surface than on hydrophobic surface as implied by the lower absorbance data obtained in the latter than in the former. At lower ionic strength and in the absence of buffer, the protein molecules tend to adsorb on the quartz surface. Plots of near steady-state absorbance versus protein concentration follow hyperbolic pattern in the absence of buffer or at low ionic strength and become more linear as the buffer concentration is increased. The results presented here are explained in terms of the general qualitative understanding of protein adsorption at solid-aqueous interfaces and further aids in elucidating the properties of protein monolayers and films.

A novel power spectral density accumulation (PSDA) method for estimating the bandwidth of the clutter spectra is proposed, based on a priori knowledge of the shape of the clutter spectra. The comparison of the complexity and the performance between the PSDA method and the general ones is presented. It is shown that the PSDA method is effective for the short-time clutter data in the practical application.