This paper describes a new method for verifying designs at the RTL with respect to their specifications at the functional level. The base of the verification method shown here is the translation of the specification and design representations to graph models, where the descriptions common to both representations have a symbolic representation. These symbol labeled graphs are then simplified and, by solving the all node-pair path expression problem for them, a pair of regular expressions is obtained for every two nodes in the graphs. The first regular expression in each pair represents the flow of control and the second one the flow of data between the corresponding nodes. The process of verification is carried out by checking whether or not every pair of regular expressions of the specification has a corresponding pair in the design.

This paper presents a new type of zero-voltage-switched (ZVS) push-pull dc-dc converter with two synchronous rectifiers in the secondary circuit. ZVS is realized using the magnetizing current of the transformer as a constant current source during the commutation. The output voltage is controlled by PWM with a constant switching frequency. The circuit operation is described using equivalent circuits. The steady-state and dynamic characteristics are analyzed and confirmed experimentally.

The paper considers the design of two families of binary block codes developed for controlling large numbers of errors which may occur in LSI, optical disks and other devices. The semidistance codes are capable of assuring a required signal-to-noise ratio in information retrieval; the t-symmetric error correcting/all unidirectional error detecting" (t-SyEC/AUED) codes are capable of correcting t or fewer symmetric errors and also detecting any number of unidirectional errors caused by the asymmetric nature of transmission or storage madia. The paper establishes an equivalence between these families of codes, and proposes improved methods for constructing, for any values of t, a class of nonsystematic constant weight codes as well as a class of systematic codes. The constructed codes of both classes are shown to be optimal when t is O, and of asymptotically optimal order" in general cases. The number of redundant bits of the obtained nonsystematic code is of the order of (t+1/2)log2 K bits, where K is the amount of information encoded. The obtained systematic codes have redundancy of the order of (t+1)log2 K bits.

There have been few studies on formal approaches to the specification and realization of asynchronous sequential circuits. For synchronous sequential circuits, an algebraic method is proposed as one of such approaches, but it cannot be applied to asynchronous ones directly. This paper describes an algebraic method of specifying the abstract behavior of asynchronous sequential circuits. We select an daisy chain arbiter as an example of them. In the arbiter, state transitions are caused by input changes, and all the modules do not always make state transitions simultaneously. These are main obstacles to specify it in the same way as sychronous sequential circuits. In order to remove them, we modify the meaning of input in specifications and introduce pseudo state transitions so that we can regard all the modules as if they make state transitions simultaneously. This method can be applied to most of the other asynchronous sequential circuits.

A new design method is proposed for realizing a hypercube network (HC) structured multicomputer system on a wafer using wafer-scale integration (WSI). The probability that an HC can be constructed on a wafer is higher in this method than in the conventional method; this probavility is called a construction probability. We adopt the FUSS method for the processor (PE) address allocation in our desing because it has a high success probability in the allocation. Even if the design renders the address allocation success probalility hegher, it is of no use if it makes either the maximum wiring length between PEs or the array size (wiring area) larger. A new wiring channel structure capable of connecting PEs on a wafer is proposed in this paper, where a channel, called a basic channel, is used. A one-dimensional-array sub-HC row network (RN) or column networks (CN) can be constructed using the basic channel. The sub-HC construction method, which embeds wirings into the basic channel, is also proposed. It requires almost the same wiring width as conventional method. However, it has an advantage in that maximum wiring length between PEs can be about half that of the conventional method. If PEs must be shifted in the case of PE defects, they can be shifted and connected to the basic channel using other PE shifting channels, and an RN or CN can be constructed. The maximum wiring length between PEs, array size, and construction probability will also be derived, and it will be shown that the proposed design is superior to the conventional one.

This paper describes a nonstationary spectral analysis method and its application to prognosis and diagnosis of automobiles. An instantaneous frequency spectrum is considered first at a single point of time based on the instantaneous representation of autocorrelation. The spectral distortion is then considered on two-dimensional spectrum, and the filtering is introduced into the instantaneous autocorrelations. By the above procedure, the Instantaneous Covariance method (ICOV), the Instantaneous Maximum Entropy Method (IMEM), and the Wigner method are shown and they are unified. The IMEM is used for the time-dependent spectral estimation of vibration and acoustic sound signals of automobiles. A multi-dimensional (M-D) space is composed based on the variables which are obtained by the IMEM. The M-D space is transformed into a simple two-dimensional (2-D) plane by a projection matrix chosen by the experiments. The proposed method is confirmed useful to analyze nonstationary signals, and it is expected to implement automatic supervising, prognosis and diagnosis for a traffic system.

Rate-based congestion/flow control is a promising way to achieve high throughput in high speed packet-switching networks. We consider a rate-based congestion control to aim at obtaining high throughput and fair sharing of the communication resources. In the scheme, each intermediate node informs its congestion status to the source node. Two kinds of control packets are used for this mechanism. One (a choke packet) is to throttle the rate and another (a loosen packet) is to allow increase of the rate. The source node initiates transmission with a low rate and increases the rate slowly to avoid a rapid increase of the packet queueing at an intermediate node. When the source node receives a choke packet, it decreases the rate rapidly to relieve congestion as soon as possible. The source node upon receipt a loosen packet increases the rate slowly again. We develop a queueing model to investigate the parameter settings to provide a good performance via simulation. The increasing and decreasing parameters of the rate control function are first investigated in various load conditions. We next examine the effect of the queue-length threshold value for the indication of congestion at the intermediate node. The numerical results indicate that the threshold value should be small to obtain a good performance. We finally introduce a technique which accurately recognizes congestion and inhibits an acceptable queueing of the packets at intermediate nodes.

The characteristics of voltage-resonant dc-dc converters have already been analyzed and described. However, in the conventional analysis, the inductance of the reactor is assumed to be infinity and the loss resistance of the power circuit is not taken into account. Also, in some cases, the averaging method is applied to analyze the resonant dc-dc converters as well as the pwm dc-dc converters. Consequently, the results from conventional analysis are not entirely in agreement with the experimental ones. This paper presents a general design-oriented analysis of the buck-boost type voltage-resonant dc-dc converter in the continuous and discontinuous modes of the reactor current. In this analysis, the loss resistance in each part of the power circuit, the inductance of the reactor, the effective value (not mean value) of the power loss, and the energy-balance among the input, output and internal-loss powers are taken into account. As a result, the behavior and characteristics of the buck-boost type voltage-resonant dc-dc converter are fully explained. It is also revealed that there is a useful mode in the discontinuous reactor current region, in which the output voltage can be regulated sufficiently for the load change from no load to full load and for the relatively large change of the input voltage, and then the change in the switching frequency can be kept relatively small.

A new circuit and a transformer structure is described for a high-input-voltage converter operating at a high switching frequency. The two-MOSFET forward converter is suitable for a high-input-voltage converter. To increase the switching frequency, the reset period of the transformer core flux must be reduced. There are a few methods for decreasing the reset period. Increasing the transformer flyback voltage and reducing its stray capacitance are effective in decreasing the reset period without increasing power loss. A new two-MOSFET forward converter is proposed which uset the increased flyback voltage and a transformer structure to reduce the stray capacitance. The new converter using this transformer provides the basis for a 48-V, 100-W output, 270-V input converter operating at 200kHz with high efficiency (above 95%).

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for computing the capacity of discrete memoryless channels. The algorithm uses Newton's method which is known to be quadratically convergent. First, a system of nonlinear equations termed Kuhn-Tucker equations is formulated, which has the capacity as a solution. Then Newton's method is applied to the Kuhn-Tucker equations. Since Newton's method does not guarantee global convergence, a continuation method is also introduced. It is shown that the continuation method works well and the convergence of the Newton algorithm is guaranteed. By numerical examples, effectiveness of the algorithm is verified. Since the proposed algorithm has local quadratic convergence, it is advantageous when we want to obtain a numerical solution with high accuracy.

Ac resistivity and power loss values for Mn-Zn ferrite material have been investigated by electrical and magnetic measurements. The ac resistivity shows an inductive dependency on frequency for the low dc resistive samples or for highly dc resistive ones at high temperature, while a capacitive dependency on frequency was observed for the highly resistive materials at the room temperature. These phenomena were interpreted by the dependence of ac resistivity on the dc resistivity, complex permeability and complex permittivity. The dependency of the power losses on the dc resistivity, temperature and frequence were also examined with analysis of power loss term. Dividing the power loss into hysteresis loss and eddy current loss, the frequency dependence of the eddy current loss was found to vary with the magnitude of the dc resistivity as follows: The eddy current loss of low dc resistive materials depends on the dc resistivity. On the other hand, the eddy current loss for high resistive materials is determined by the ac resistivity, contributed from dielectric loss.

A newly developed planar inductor and its application to dc-dc converters are described. The planar inductor consists of a planar spiral coil and soft magnetic sheets, it has a small size (11110.8mm), 33µH inductance and a maximum quality factor of 14. The step down chopper dc-dc converter has been developed by using planar inductor, which has small size (20154mm), 5V-2W typical output and output power/volume ratio of 1.7W/cc. The switching converter can be miniaturized by using the planar inductor.

A divided work-line scheme which uses a bipolar current-switch circuit is proposed. This structures allows high-speed and low-power operation by reducing the logic swing in the long main word lines and decreasing the current in the nonselected decoder. Two key circuits, the bipolar main decoder and the section decoder, are described in detail. These circuits, with a bipolar two-level cascode current-swich circuit, enable the SRAM to operate on a low external supply voltage. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this concept, an ECL100K interface 256-kb SRAM is designed and fabricated using 0.8-µm BiCMOS technology. A typical address access time of 5.5 ns and the power consumption of 750 mW are obtained.

This paper describes the derivation of a parallel program from a nondeterministic sequential program using a bottom-up parser as an example. The derivation procedure consists of two stages: exploitation of AND-parallelism and exploitation of OR-parallelism. An interpreter of the sequential parser BUP is first transformed so that processes for the nodes in a parsing tree can run in parallel. Then, the resultant program is transformed so that a nondeterministic search of a parsing tree can be done in parallel. The former stage is performed by hand-simulation, and the latter is accomplished by the compiler of ANDOR-, which is an AND/OR parallel logic programming language. The program finally derived, written in KL1 (Kernel Language of the FGCS Project), achieves an all-solution search without side effects. The program generated corresponds to an interpreter of PAX, a revised parallel version of BUP. This correspondence shows that the derivation method proposed in this paper is effective for creating efficient parallel programs.

A new indexing technique for rapid evaluation of nested query on composite object is propoced, reducing the overall cost for retrieval and update. An extended B+ tree is introduced in which object identifier (OID) to be searched and path information usud for update of index record are stored in leaf node and subleaf node, respectively. In this method, the retrieval oeration is applied only for OIDs in the leaf node. The index records of both leaf and subleaf nodes are updated in such a way that the path information in the subleaf node and OIDs in the leaf node are reorganized by deleting and inserting the OIDs. The techniaue presented offers advantages over currently related indexing techniques in data reorganization and index allocation. In the proposed index record, the OIDs to be reorganized are always consecutively provided, and thus only the record directory is updated when an entire page should be removed. In addition, the proposed index can be allocate to a path with the length greater than 3 without splitting the path. Comparisons under a variety of conditions are given with current indexing techniques, showing improved performance in cost, i.e., the total number of pages accessed for retrieval and update.

It has been reported that the efficiency of a low voltage power supply is improved by replacing diodes in an output-stage with synchronous rectifiers (SR). A SR consists of a bipolar junction transistor with a low-saturation voltage and a current transformer. Although the SR has low offset-voltage, its reverse recovery characteristic is usually poor. In this paper, an RCD circuit which improves the reverse recovery characteristic of the SR is proposed. This circuit is simple, and it is composed of a diode, a capacitor and a resistor. The analysis and the experimental results of the SR with the proposed RCD circuit are presented. The optimum design of the RCD to improve the reverse recovery characteristic of SR is discussed.

This paper proposes a method to estimate the waveform of a specified sound source in a noisy and reverberant environment using a sensor array. Previously, we proposed an iterative method to estimate the waveform. However, in this method the effect of reflection sound reduces to 1/M, where M is the number of microphones. Therefore, to solve the reverberation problem, we propose a new method using inverse filters of the transfer functions from the sound sources to each microphone. First, the transfer function from each sound source to each microphone is measured by the cross-spectrum technique and each inverse filter is calculated by the QR method. Then the initially estimated waveform of a sound source is the averaged signal of the inverse filter outputs. Since this waveform still contains the effects of the other sound sources, the iterative technique is adopted to estimate the waveform more precisely, reducing the effects of the other sound and the reflection sound. Some computer simulations and experiments were carried out. The results show the effectiveness of our method.

In this paper we present and analyze multi-level quorum schemes for maintaining the consistency of replicated data in the presence of concurrency and failures in a large distributed environment. The multi-level quorum method operates on a logical hierarchy of the nodes in the network and applies well known flat voting algorithms for replicated data concurrency control in a layered fashion. We show how the number of hierarchy levels, the number of logical entities per level and the voting algorithms used on each level affect the costs and the degree of availability associated with a wide range of multi-level quorum schemes. The results of the analysis are used to provide guidelines for designing the most suitable multi-level quorum strategy for a given application scenario. Comparative performance measurements in a simulated network are presented to illustrate the properties of multi-level approaches when some of the assumptions of the analytical investigation do not hold.

This paper proposes a new adaptive algorithm of the FIR type digital filter for an acoustic echo canceller and similar application fields. Unlike an echo canceller for line, an acoustic echo canceller requires a large number of taps, and it must work appropriately while it is driven by colored input signal. By controlling the filter tap length and updating filter coefficients multiple times during a single sampling interval, the proposed algorithm improves the convergence characteristics of adaptation even if colored input signal is introduced. This algorithm is maned VT-LMS after variable tap length LMS. The results of simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm not only for white noise but also for colored input signal such as speech. The VT-LMS algorithm has better convergence characteristice with very little extra computational load compared to the conventional algorithm.

Strongly Fault-Secure (SFS) circuits are known to achieve the TSC goal of producing a non-codeword as the first erroneous output due to a fault. Strongly Code-Disjoint (SCD) circuits always map non-codeword inputs to non-codeword outputs even in the presence of faults so long as the faults are undetectable. This paper presents a new generalized design method for the SFS and SCD realization of combinational circuits. The proposed design is simple, and always gives an SFS and SCD combinational circuit which implements any given logic function. The resulting SFS/SCD circuits can be connected in cascade with each other to construct a larger SFS/SCD circuit if each interface is fully exercised.