The potential of optical circuit packaging technology is discussed. Special attention is paid to introduction of "optical wiring" at the printed wiring board level (i.e., in the "last 1 meter area") to overcome the bandwidth limitations of electrical copper-based wiring. The suitability of optical surface mount technology (O-SMT) as a possible solution is reviewed. It is shown that the key to the utility of O-SMT is high efficiency and alignment-free coupling between optical wiring and optical devices. O-SMT requires a method to change the beam direction from the horizontal to the vertical and vice versa in order to couple optical wiring in an OE-board and OE-devices mounted on the board. A novel method using an "optical pin" is proposed and investigated. Furthermore, an optical coupling method using a self-written waveguide called "optical solder" is reviewed. Several applications of self-written waveguides using a green laser and a photo-mask are demonstrated.

We have studied the electrical and breakdown characteristics of 5 nm-thick HfSiOxNy (Hf/(Hf + Si)=0.43, nitrogen content=4.5-17.8 at.%) in Al-gate and NiSi-gate capacitors. For Al-gate capacitors, the flat-band shift due to positive fixed charges increases with the nitrogen content in the dielectric layer. In contrast, for NiSi-gate capacitors, the flat band is almost independent of the nitrogen content, which is presumably controlled by the quality of the interface between NiSi and the dielectric layer. The leakage current markedly increases with nitrogen content. Correspondingly, although the time-to-soft breakdown, tSBD, gradually decreases with increasing nitrogen content, the charge-to-soft breakdown, QSBD, increases with the nitrogen content. For Al-gate capacitors, the Weibull slope of time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) under constant voltage stress (CVS) remains constant at 2 for a nitrogen content of up to 12.5 at.% and then decreases to unity at 17.8 at.%. This must be a condition critical to the formation of the percolation path for breakdown. In contrast, for NiSi gate capacitors, a Weibull slope smaller than unity was obtained, suggesting that structural inhomogeneity, involving defect generation, is introduced during the NiSi gate fabrication, but this negative impact is reduced with nitrogen incorporation.

This paper describes a new criterion for speech recognition using an integrated confidence measure to minimize the word error rate (WER). The conventional criteria for WER minimization obtain the expected WER of a sentence hypothesis merely by comparing it with other hypotheses in an n-best list. The proposed criterion estimates the expected WER by using an integrated confidence measure with word posterior probabilities for a given acoustic input. The integrated confidence measure, which is implemented as a classifier based on maximum entropy (ME) modeling or support vector machines (SVMs), is used to acquire probabilities reflecting whether the word hypotheses are correct. The classifier is comprised of a variety of confidence measures and can deal with a temporal sequence of them to attain a more reliable confidence. Our proposed criterion for minimizing WER achieved a WER of 9.8% and a 3.9% reduction, relative to conventional n-best rescoring methods in transcribing Japanese broadcast news in various environments such as under noisy field and spontaneous speech conditions.

A transport layer mobility management scheme for handling seamless handoffs between appropriate networks is presented. The future mobile environment will be characterized by multimodal connectivity with dynamic switching. Many technologies have been proposed to support host mobility across diverse wireless networks, and operate in various layers of the network architecture. Our major focus is on the transport protocol that recovers packets lost during handoffs and controls transmission speed to achieve efficient communication. Majority of the existing technologies can maintain the connection by updating the information of a single connection around a handoff. Moreover, none of the studies extensively examine the handoff latencies and focus how an appropriate network is selected, during the handoff. In this paper, we first extensively investigate the various handoff latencies and discuss the limited performance of existing technologies based on the single connection. We then propose a new scheme resolving the problems by the transport protocol enabling the adaptive selection of an appropriate interface based on communication condition among all available interfaces. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme promptly and reliably selects the appropriate interface, and achieves excellent goodput performance by comparing with the existing technologies.

It is well-known that, in DS-CDMA downlink signal transmission, frequency-domain equalization (FDE) based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion can replace rake combining to achieve much improved bit error rate (BER) performance in severe frequency-selective fading channel. However, in uplink signal transmission, as each user's signal goes through a different channel, a severe multi-user interference (MUI) is produced and the uplink BER performance severely degrades compared to the downlink. When a small spreading factor is used, the uplink BER performance further degrades due to inter-chip interference (ICI). In this paper, we propose a frequency-domain multi-stage soft interference cancellation scheme for the DS-CDMA uplink and the achievable BER performance is evaluated by computer simulation. The BER performance comparison of the proposed cancellation technique and the multi-user detection (MUD) is also presented.

In this letter, we propose a novel subsampling based image watermark sequentially embedding scheme to reduce the risk of common permutation attack. The image is still perceptual after watermarking, and experimental results also show its effectiveness and robustness.

A new block coded modulation scheme with inter-level memory is proposed. The proposed code construction is based on the use of single parity check codes to concatenate a set of coded blocks. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve considerable coding gains while the decoding complexity is not too large.

In this paper we give a simple algorithm to generate all partitions of a positive integer n. The problem is one of the basic problems in combinatorics, and has been extensively studied for a long time. Our algorithm generates each partition of a given integer in constant time for each without repetition, while best known algorithm generates each partition in constant time on "average." Also, we propose some algorithms to generate all partitions of an integer with some additional property in constant time.

Ad-hoc networks do not need any preexisting network infrastructure and have been developed as temporal networks in various fields. An infostation is a system to relay information that is not delay-sensitive. In this paper, we propose an early disaster warning system built on infostations and an adhoc network composed of sensors attached to moving animals. We analyze the performance of the proposed system by simulation. The analysis results show that the proposed system will be very useful in the early detection of big forest fires which occur frequently in Korea mountain areas.

We experimentally investigated terahertz photomixing operation at room temperature in an InGaP/InGaAs/ GaAs two-dimensional plasmon-resonant photomixer incorporating grating-bicoupled dual-gate structure. Photoelectrons drifting into a high-density plasmon cavity grating from an adjacent low-density one extensively excite the plasmon resonance, resulting in emission of terahertz radiation. A vertical cavity formed between the two-dimensional plasmon grating plane and an indium-tin-oxide mirror at the back surface gains the radiation. Self-oscillation initially at around 4.5 THz excited by a dc-photo carrier component was reinforced by the photomixed differential-frequency excitation at 4.0 and 5.0 THz. This indicates a possibility of injection-locked oscillation of the photomixer in the terahertz frequency band.

Quality-of-service (QoS) is essential for multimedia applications, such as video-conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP) services, in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). A consequence of many clients accessing the Internet via the same backhaul is that throughput depends on the number of hops from the backhaul. This spatial bias problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem that considers end-to-end delay in terms of gateway selection, least-hop and load-balanced routing, and link capacity constraints. In this paper, we propose a routing algorithm for the network layer and a bandwidth allocation scheme for the medium access control (MAC) layer. The latter achieves fairness in both throughput and end-to-end delay in orthogonal mesh backbone networks with a distributed scheme, thereby minimizing the objective function. Our experiment results show that the proposed algorithm achieves throughput fairness, reduces end-to-end delay, and outperforms other general schemes and algorithms by at least 10.19%.

This report presents Dual Field-modulating-Plates (Dual-FP) technology for a 28 V operated high power GaAs heterojunction FET (HJFET) amplifier. A developed HJFET has two FP electrodes; the 1st-FP is connected to the gate and the 2nd-FP to the ground. The 2nd-FP suppresses the drain current dispersion effectively cooperating with the 1st-FP, and it can also reduce the gate-drain parasitic capacitance. The developed push-pull amplifier, with four Dual-FPFET chips, demonstrated 55.1 dBm (320 W) output power with a 14.0 dB linear gain and a drain efficiency of 62% at 2.14 GHz. Under two-carrier W-CDMA signals, it showed a high drain efficiency of 30% and low third-order Inter-modulation distortion of -37 dBc at output power of 47.5 dBm.

An 8ch, 400 GHz monolithically integrated WDM channel selector featuring an array of quantum well semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) and arrayed waveguidegrating demultiplexer is presented. Reduction of fabrication complexity was achieved by using a single step selective area MOVPE to realize the different bandgap profiles for the SOA array and passive region. The selective growth mask dimensions were optimized by simulation. Dry-etching with short bending radii of 200 µm resulted in compact device size of 7 mm2.5 mm. Static channel selection with high ON-OFF ratio of >40 dB was achieved.

The design aspects of the bulk InGaAsP semiconductor optical amplifier integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) optimized for 40 Gbps-NRZ all optical wavelength conversion are described. The dimensions of the SOA active waveguide have been optimized for fast gain recovery by maximizing the gain and adjusting the wavelength-converted NRZ waveforms. Submicron-width buried heterostructure (BH) SOA waveguides were fabricated successfully and showed little leakage current. The experimental wavelength-converted optical waveform agreed well to the numerical simulations, and mask-compliant 40 G-NRZ wavelength-converted waveform was obtained by the optimized SOA-MZI. 40 G-NRZ full C-band operation and polarization-insensitive operation of SOA-MZI were also achieved.

Blueweb is a self-organizing Bluetooth-based multihop network equipped with a scatternet formation algorithm and a modified source routing protocol. In this paper, we first review the basic Blueweb network. Then we focus on a heuristic automatic configuration algorithm which can be used to partition a large-scale Blueweb network. This algorithm contains three main functional blocks including route master selection, node assignment, and subnet number decision. The route master selection block selects new route masters at a low computation cost. The node assignment block assigns nodes to each newly configured subnet in order to minimize the average route query cost. The subnet number decision block determines the optimal number of subnet which achieves the largest system performance improvement ratio at minimum operation cost. With these three functional blocks, optimal network configuration for Blueweb routing protocol can be determined. Computer simulations show that a configured Blueweb achieves higher network capacity than an unconfigured Blueweb.

This paper proposes an event-based transition system called A-LTS. An A-LTS is a simple system consisting of two agents, a basic program and a monitor. The monitor observes the behavior of the basic program and if the behavior matches some pre-defined pattern, then the monitor interrupts the execution of the basic program and possibly triggers the execution of another specific program. An A-LTS models a common feature found in recent software technologies such as Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP), history-based access control and active database. We investigate the expressive power of A-LTS and show that it is strictly stronger than finite state machines and strictly weaker than pushdown automata (PDA). This implies that the model checking problem for A-LTS is decidable. It is also shown that the expressive power of A-LTS, linear context-free grammar and deterministic PDA are mutually incomparable. We also discuss the relationship between A-LTS and pointcut/advice in AOP.

This paper proposes a channel estimation technique for the dynamic parameter controlled--orthogonal frequency and time division multiple access (DPC-OF/TDMA) systems studied as one of the candidates of the beyond third generation (B3G) systems. In the proposed scheme, the impulse response, which represents the channel state information (CSI) is estimated using carrier interferometry (CI) which is equivalent to impulse signal transmission. Moreover, because the minimum number of subcarriers allocated to terminals is 64, in order to estimate a CSI with its spreading factor of 64, we employ a code-multiplexed CI signal for a cell search process and a time-domain-multiplexed CI signal for transmit antenna identification. Furthermore, we also propose a flexible CSI estimation scheme that supports two cases: multiple subchannel block assignment and MIMO transmission cases. Computer simulation confirms that the proposed scheme can estimate the CSI with high accuracy.

In numerical simulations of microwave structures using the alternating-direction implicit finite-difference time-domain (ADI-FDTD) method, the time marching scheme comprises two sub-iterations, where different updating schemes for evaluating E and H fields at each sub-iteration can be adopted. In this paper, the E-field implicit-updating (EFIU) and H-field implicit-updating (HFIU) schemes are compared with each other especially with regard to the implementation of local boundary conditions.

In this paper, we propose a new preemptive scheme with release message in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. In the proposed scheme, when a low priority burst is preempted at some intermediate node, two RELEASE messages are sent immediately from the intermediate node to both source and destination nodes (two-way release message transmission), and the RELEASE messages release the corresponding wavelengths for the preempted burst. We consider six wavelength selection rules for the preemption and evaluate the performances of the selection rules by simulations. Numerical examples show that our scheme utilizes wavelengths effectively and, with the optimal selection rule, can decrease the burst loss probability in a large-scale DWDM network.

Despite the importance of domain-specific resource construction for domain ontology development, few studies have sought to develop a method for automatically identifying domain ontology-relevant web pages. To address this situation, here we propose a web page filtering scheme for domain ontology that identifies domain-relevant web pages from the web based on the context of concepts. Testing of the proposed filtering scheme with a business domain ontology on YahooPicks web pages yielded promising filtering results that were superior to those obtained using the baseline system.