Electron field emission from polycrystalline diamond films has been investigated. Electron emission was measured locally at randomly chosen point on a diamond film fabricated by a microwave plasma chemical deposition method. In the original film, there were some points with a large emission current where flaws were found after the measurements, some points with a small and stable emission current without any flaw, and the other points with no emission. At the point of no emission, the film was electrically broken down by applying a high voltage. After the intentional breaking down, a small and stable emission always appeared there with no flaw. The maximum emission current extracted from an emission site was usually 1µA with no structural flaw found after the measurements. By using a simple model of emission site consisting of a core conductor embedded in insulator, the limitation of emission current is estimated from heating by the current and heat transfer to the insulator.

Electron emissions from single-crystalline diamond surfaces by internally exciting electrons from the valence to conduction bands have been investigated. Monte Carlo simulations have been employed to estimate the impact ionization rates of carriers in diamond under high electric fields up to 1107V/cm. The calculations demonstrate substantial impact ionization rates which rapidly increase with increasing electric fields above 8105V/cm. Highly efficient electron emissions with high emission current efficiencies of approximate unity have been attained from a MIS-type diamond layered structure that are composed of heavily ion-implanted buried layer (M), undoped diamond (I) and hydrogenated p-type diamond (S) with an emission surface of a negative electron affinity. The highly efficient emission mechanism is discussed in relation to the field excitation of electrons from the valence band to the conduction band in the undoped diamond layer and the carrier transport to the diamond surface.

Electron field emission from diamond, diamond-like carbon, carbon nanotubes and nano-structured carbon is compared. It is found that in all practical cases, emission occurs from regions of positive electron affinity with an emission barrier of 5eV, the work function, and with a large field enhancement. The field enhancement in nanotubes arises from their geometry. In diamond, the field enhancement occurs by depletion of grain boundary states. In diamond-like carbon we propose that it occurs by the presence of sp2-rich channels formed by the soft conditioning process.

A type of carbon nanoform (carbon nanowalls: CNWs) has been successfully deposited on both Ni wafers and Ni wires using dc plasma chemical-vapor-deposition (CVD) method. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Raman spectroscopy were used to characterize CNWs' microstructure. It is found that CNWs are well crystallized, and each CNW consists of several pieces of curved graphene sheets, presenting a quasi-two-dimensional geometry. The average length and width of CNWs are about 2-4µm, while their thickness is less than 7nm. Field emission measurement showed that such CNW films exhibited the excellent electron emission efficiency, comparable to the high-grade carbon nanotube (CNT) emitters. The threshold field defined as the field to obtained 1µA/cm2 is less than 1V/µm and the electrical field for 1mA/cm2 current density is only about 1.5V/µm. Moreover, the CNWs have stable emission behaviors, and we have successfully fabricated a kind of high-brightness lamps based on the CNW coated Ni wires.

We report field emission from multilayered cathodes grown on silicon and glass substrates. The cathode consist of a layer of nanoseeded diamond and overlayers of nanocluster carbon (sp2 bonded carbon) and tetrahedral amorphous carbon (predominantly sp3 bonded carbon). These films exhibit good field emission characteristics with an electron emission current density of 1µA/cm2, at a field of 5.1V/µm. The multilayered cathodes on silicon substrates exhibit even lower emission threshold field of about 1-2V/µm for an emission current density of 1µA/cm2. The emission is influenced by the nanoseeded diamond size and concentration and the properties of the nano carbon over layer.

Field emission display (FED) is evolving as a promising technique of flat panel displays in the future. In this paper, various carbon based nanostructures are acted as cathode materials for field emission devices. Dendrite-like diamond-like carbon emitters, carbon nanotubes, carbon nanotips are synthesized by microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition. Many factors affect the performance of field emitters, such as the shape, work function and aspect ratio of emission materials. Modified process of carbon based nano-materials for enhancing field emission efficiency are included intrinsic and extrinsic process. These reformations contain the p-type and n-type doping, carburization and new ultra well-aligned carbon nano-materials. It is found that carbon nano-materials grown on micropatterned diode show higher efficiency of FED. In addition, to achieve a low- turn-on field, the novel scheme involving a new fabrication process of gated structure metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) diode by IC technology is also presented.

It is found that the supercontinuum spectrum is generated from cross-phase modulated soliton pulses which are propagated through a dispersion-flattened/decreasing fiber with low birefringence. The cross-phase modulation is achieved by exciting two orthogonally polarized modes in a birefringent fiber and the effect of input azimuth of linearly polarized pulses is discussed theoretically and numerically.

We propose a new scheme of indoor optical wireless LAN based on a special CMOS image sensor (CIS), which realizes a low-power compact communication module with large uplink capacity due to space division multiple access. In our scheme, all nodes and a hub utilize the CIS as a photoreceiver as well as a position-sensing device for finding the positions of the communication modules, while a single large photodiode is used in the conventional systems. Although conventional image sensors cannot detect modulated signals because they integrate photocurrents, our CIS has a high-speed readout function for receiving optical data from the specific pixels receiving optical signals. The advantages of the proposed scheme are 1) compact embodiment of the communication module due to no need of the bulky mechanical components for searching the other modules, 2) space division multiple access, which leads to 3) large capacity of uplink, and 4) applicability of simple modulation and coding schemes for optical signals. In our scheme, diffusive and narrow beam lights are complementally used for position detection and communication, respectively, which leads to the advantage 5) low power consumption of both light emitter and receiver circuits. To demonstrate two basic functional modes of our CIS: an IS (image sensor) mode and a COM (communication) mode, we fabricate an 88-pixel CIS by use of a 0.8µm BiCMOS technology. In the experiments, the image of a light source is successfully captured in the IS mode for integration time of 29.6msec and optical power of 1.1nW. After the functional mode of the pixel receiving the light is changed to the COM mode, the eye pattern of the modulated light is obtained from the pixel at frequency of 1MHz. We also fabricate a test pixel circuit with in-pixel amplifier, with which operation speed is improved to 100MHz.

Fingerprinting is one of the digital watermarking techniques, and is becoming more important as a copyright protection technique. Fingerprinting must resist collusion attacks. As a security index, "c-secureness" has been proposed, but it has been known that there is indeed no c-secure code. In this paper, we introduce a new index to measure the resilience of fingerprinting for collusion attacks and obtain some upper bounds and a lower bound on the index.

This paper investigates a new method for creating robust speaker models to cope with inter-session variation of a speaker in a continuous HMM-based speaker verification system. The new method estimates session-independent parameters by decomposing inter-session variations into two distinct parts: session-dependent and -independent. The parameters of the speaker models are estimated using the speaker adaptive training algorithm in conjunction with the equalization of session-dependent variation. The resultant models capture the session-independent speaker characteristics more reliably than the conventional models and their discriminative power improves accordingly. Moreover we have made our models more invariant to handset variations in a public switched telephone network (PSTN) by focusing on session-dependent variation and handset-dependent distortion separately. Text-independent speech data recorded by 20 speakers in seven sessions over 16 months was used to evaluate the new approach. The proposed method reduces the error rate by 15% relatively. When compared with the popular cepstral mean normalization, the error rate is reduced by 24% relatively when the speaker models were recreated using speech data recorded in four or more sessions.

In this paper, we propose a function that provides scalability of image quality on the basis of regions of interest for JPEG2000 coding. Functions of this type are useful in the progressive transmission of images, where the aim is to more quickly decode regions of interest than backgrounds. The conventional methods of progressive transmission have mainly been based on SNR scalability or on resolution scalability. With these conventional functions, it is impossible to achieve region-based scalability in the progressive transmission of images. The proposed methods use the ROI and SNR layer structures of JPEG2000, so the methods are suitable for the region-progressive transmission of JPEG2000 images.

A wavelet-based vector quantization scheme for image compression is introduced here. The proposed scheme obtains a better compression efficiency by the following three methods. (1) Utilizing the correlation among wavelet coefficients. (2) Placing different emphasis on wavelet coefficients at different levels. (3) Preserving the most important information of the image. In our experiments, simulation results show that this technique outperforms the recent SMVQ-ABC [1] and WTC-NIVQ [2] techniques.

In this letter, we investigate a diversity scheme which employs a simple transform, symbol interleaving and decision-feedback differential detection (DF-DD) for differential phase-shift-keying signal transmission over correlated Rayleigh fading. The proposed scheme merits instinct time diversity within each transmitted block and thus presents patent resistance to fading. It is shown that the considered technique provides significant diversity gains in a correlated Rayleigh fading channel.

In this study, wave propagation phenomena of phase differences observed in van der Pol oscillators coupled by inductors as a ladder are investigated. The phenomena are called "phase waves. " We classify the observed phenomena and analyze the difference in detail. We observe that the behavior of the phase waves generated by giving a phase difference of positive value is different from the behavior of those generated by giving a phase difference of negative value. We can also observe the generation of two pairs of phase waves. We clarify the mechanisms of these complicated phenomena. Finally, for the case of nine oscillators, we carry out both computer calculations and circuit experiments. Circuit experimental results agree well with computer calculated results qualitatively.

This study is a detailed numerical investigation on the relations between the performance of the RZ format single-channel transmission, and the chromatic dispersion of transmission fiber and pre-compensation ratio. We observed the transition from the SPM dominant low dispersion region to the intra-channel nonlinearities dominant high dispersion region, and found that the EOP is very sensitive to the pre-compensation ratio when the dispersion assumes a intermediate value. Furthermore, by analyzing the optical power-dependence of the EOP and other nonlinear impairments, we found that the amplitude fluctuation resulting from IFWM is dominant in determining the EOP in the transmission systems employing highly dispersed pulses.

Compressed video bitstreams are very sensitive to transmission errors. If we lose packets or receive them with errors during transmission, not only the current frame will be corrupted, but also errors will propagate to succeeding frames. Therefore, we need various mechanisms to protect data and reduce the effects of transmission errors. Error concealment is a data recovery technique that enables the decoder to conceal the effects of transmission errors by predicting the lost or corrupted video data from the previously reconstructed error free information. Motion vector recovery and motion compensation with the estimated motion vector is a good approach to conceal the corrupted macroblock data. In this paper, we show that it is reasonable to use the estimated motion vector to conceal the lost macroblock by providing macroblock distortion models. After we propose a new motion vector recovery algorithm based on optical flow fields, we compare its performance to those of conventional error concealment methods.

When decision-directed channel estimation is used for QAM-OFDM systems, the optimal filter shape depends on the amplitudes of the modulated symbols as well as the channel characteristics. In this letter we propose a simple channel estimation method for multi-level-amplitude-modulated systems, which can effectively suppress the estimation variances with a small filter. Using the proposed method the implementation cost can be reduced and possibly better results might be obtained by avoiding the estimation bias due to large-sized filtering.

A new analysis method for random dopant induced threshold voltage fluctuations by using Monte Carlo ion implantation were presented. The method was applied to investigate Vt fluctuations due to statistical variation of pocket dopant profile in 0.1µm MOSFET's by 3D process-device simulation system. This method is very useful to analyze a statistical fluctuation in sub-100 nm MOSFET's efficiently.

In this letter, we study the performance of the iterative receiver as applied to the space division multiplexing/orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SDM/OFDM) systems. The iterative receiver under consideration employs the soft in/soft out (SISO) decoding process, which operates iteratively in conjunction with channel estimation for performing data detection and channel estimation at the same time. As opposed to the previous studies in which the perfect channel state information is assumed, the effects of channel estimation are taken into account for evaluating the performance of the iterative receiver and it is shown that the channel estimation applied in every iteration step of the iterative receiver plays a crucial role to warrant the performance, especially at a low signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR).

This paper concerns recognizing 3-dimensional object using proposed multi-layer block model. In particular, we aim to achieve desirable recognition performance while restricting the computational load to a low level using 3-step feature extraction procedure. An input image is first precisely partitioned into hierarchical layers of blocks in the form of base blocks and overlapping blocks. The hierarchical blocks are merged into a matrix, with which abundant local feature information can be obtained. The local features extracted are then employed by the kernel based support vector machines in tournament for enhanced system recognition performance while keeping it to low dimensional feature space. The simulation results show that the proposed feature extraction method reduces the computational load by over 80% and preserves the stable recognition rate from varying illumination and noise conditions.