This paper proposes a post-layout transistor sizing method for crosstalk noise reduction. The proposed method downsizes the drivers of aggressor wires for noise reduction, utilizing the precise interconnect information extracted from the detail-routed layouts. We develop a transistor sizing algorithm for crosstalk noise reduction under delay constraints, and construct a crosstalk noise optimization method utilizing an analytic crosstalk noise model and a transistor sizing framework that have been developed. Our method exploits the transistor sizing framework that can vary transistor widths inside cells with interconnects unchanged. Our optimization method therefore never causes a new crosstalk noise problem, and does not need iterative layout optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimentally examined using 2 circuits. The maximum noise voltage is reduced by more than 50% without delay violation. These results show that the risk of crosstalk noise problems can be considerably reduced after detail-routing.

In this paper, usage of undefined states on a State Transition Graph (STG) is addressed to obtain high fault coverage, in the area of Synthesis For Testability (SFT) of synchronous sequential circuits. Basically, a given STG could be modified by adding undefined states and distinguishable transitions so that each state might be included in one strongly-connected component as much as possible. Such modification decreases the number of redundant faults caused by the existence of unreachable states on an STG. For the modification, we propose two algorithms for both incompletely-specified STGs and completely-specified STGs, respectively. In case of incompletely-specified STGs, undefined states are added using unspecified transitions of defined states. In case of completely-specified STGs, undefined states are added by changing transitions specified on an STG while preserving state equivalence. Experimental results with MCNC benchmarks show that the number of redundant faults of gate-level circuits synthesized by our modified STGs are reduced, resulting in high fault coverage as well as short test generation time

The reliability of a 266 nm cw (continuous-wave) solid-state laser under the influence of purge gas was considered. Scatterers on a mirror during long-term operation were ammonium sulfate (NH4SO4). The synthesis of ammonium sulfate was related to the amount of water in the purge gas. UV power decreased by scatterers when the purge was not conducted.

This paper presents optimum and sub-optimal designs of noise-shaping FIR filters for single- and multi-bit data converters. In the designs, only three parameters, the number of taps, oversampling ratio (OSR) and l1-norm of the filter coefficients are specified, and the in-band peak of the amplitude response is minimized under the specifications. The minimization problem is formulated with the overload-free condition, which guarantees the rigorous stability, and an overload-free converter generates no distortion in any output signals. In the optimum design, the minimization problem is directly and exactly solved, but the sub-optimal method solves this problem by iteratively utilizing the simplex method. The iterative sub-optimal method without the exact optimality is far faster and more efficient than the optimum method. In design examples, optimum and sub-optimal noise-shaping FIR filters for single- and multi-bit data converters are designed, and their optimal performance is revealed. For single-bit data converters with OSR 64, a noise-shaping FIR filter is designed and then shown to achieve a signal to noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) 107.6 [dB] in the band of interest.

Phase performance in a temperature sensor using a conventional single-mode step-index fiber is studied. Two modes are excited in a so called single-mode fiber when the wavelength of a laser source is shorter than the one suggested by the specification of a fiber. The phase shift due to the temperature change of a step-index fiber is analyzed. The intensity fluctuation by the interference of two modes is observed in the experiment and estimated in the computer simulation.

CDN (Content Delivery Networks) improves end-user performance by replicating web contents on a group of geographically distributed servers. However, repeatedly keeping the entire replica of the original objects into many content servers consumes too much server resource. This problem becomes more serious for the large-sized objects such as streaming media, e.g. high quality video. In this paper, we therefore propose an efficient replication method for layered video streams in CDN, which can reduce user response delays and storage costs simultaneously. Based on an analytical formulation of the cooperative replication of layers and segments of each video stream, we derive a replication algorithm which solves next three problems quantitatively. (1) How many servers should be selected to replicate a given video stream? (2) For a single video stream, how many layers and segments should be stored in a given server? (3) After selecting a group of servers for each video stream, how do we allocate the replication priority (i.e. order) to each server? Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm efficiently resolves the above problems and provides much better performance than conventional methods.

In this paper, a compact and wideband printed monopole antenna is proposed. The proposed antenna is fed by CPW line and has two stubs for impedance matching. A simple monopole element has resonance frequency of 2.5 GHz (low resonance frequency). High resonance frequency of 5.5 GHz and wideband characteristic can be achieved by adjusting the position and size of stubs. The designed antenna has dimension of 0.125 λ0 height and 0.16 λ0 width where λ0 is the free-space wavelength at 2.5 GHz. The measured bandwidth of the antenna is 3.56 GHz (2.47-6.03 GHz) for S11 less than -10 dB. FDTD method is used to analyze the proposed antenna with wideband characteristic.

This paper proposes a novel dual-mode ring bandpass filter (BPF) using defect ground structure (DGS). The proposed filter provides wide stopband characteristic resulted from the bandgap characteristic of DGS for suppressing spurious response of the dual-mode ring BPF. The H shaped DGS cell is modeled as a parallel LC resonator and the equivalent circuit parameters are extracted. The relationship between bandgap characteristic and design parameters of DGS dimension is discussed and the bandgap characteristic of DGS on the filter performance is also investigated. The novel proposed filter has the frequency characteristics with a central frequency f0 = 7.7 GHz, a 3-dB bandwidth of 4.5% and wider stopband from 9 to 15.5 GHz at the level of -35 GHz. Measured results of experimental filter has good agreement with the theoretical simulation results.

In this paper, we consider a data mining problem for semi-structured data. Modeling semi-structured data as labeled ordered trees, we present an efficient algorithm for discovering frequent substructures from a large collection of semi-structured data. By extending the enumeration technique developed by Bayardo (SIGMOD'98) for discovering long itemsets, our algorithm scales almost linearly in the total size of maximal tree patterns contained in an input collection depending mildly on the size of the longest pattern. We also developed several pruning techniques that significantly speed-up the search. Experiments on Web data show that our algorithm runs efficiently on real-life datasets combined with proposed pruning techniques in the wide range of parameters.

We have developed a high-power organic radical battery for information technology equipment such as personal computers (PCs). The battery provides several minutes of backup power without an external uninterrupted power source. Since the built-in battery makes energy conversion from AC to DC, or DC to AC, unnecessary, it protects equipment from power failure with no loss of energy. The fabricated battery shows a high power density of 1 kW/L and is capable of driving a desktop PC for several minutes. The use of purely organic polyradicals, poly (2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinyloxy mathacrylate), for the cathode active material opens up a new field of high power density, environmentally friendly batteries.

With the growing design complexity of contemporary embedded systems, real-time operating systems (RTOSs) have become one of important components of such complex embedded systems. This paper presents an RTOS-centric hardware/software cosimulator which we have developed for embedded system design. One of the most remarkable features in our cosimulator is that it has a complete simulation model of an RTOS which is widely used in industry, so that application tasks including RTOS service calls are natively executed on a host computer. Our cosimulator also features cosimulation with functional simulation models of hardware written in C/C++ and cosimulation with HDL simulators. A case study with a JPEG decoder application demonstrates the effectiveness of our cosimulator.

As audio and video applications have proliferated on the Internet, transcoding proxy caching has been considered as an important technique for improving network performance, especially for mobile networks. Due to several new emerging factors in the transcoding proxy, existing methods for proxy placement for web caching cannot be simply applied to solve the problem of proxy placement for transcoding proxy caching. This paper addresses the problem of proxy placement for coordinated en-route transcoding proxy caching for tree networks. We propose a model for this problem by including the new emerging factors in the transcoding proxy and present optimal solutions for this problem with/without constraints on the number of transcoding proxies using dynamic programming. Finally, we implement our algorithm and evaluate our model on various performance metrics through extensive simulation experiments. The implementation results show that our model outperforms the existing model for transcoding proxy placement for linear topology, as well as the random proxy placement model. The average improvements of our model over the other models are about 7.2 percent and 21.4 percent in terms of all the performance metrics considered.

This innovative traffic-monitoring-system makes it possible to observe data-communication traffic on an oscilloscope-style display. It provides an efficient way of evaluating streaming-data quality. The monitoring system has a high time-resolution traffic value sampling function and a real-time data representation/recording mechanism that operate in synchrony. The user can directly evaluate the traffic shape with the monitoring system. In this paper, after describing the concept of the traffic monitoring system, we will describe a prototype built with programmable network equipment called A-BOX. We will then review a performance evaluation and other experimental results to prove that our monitoring system is suitable for video streaming.

In this paper, we have proposed to apply a combinatorial approach to investigate the Schottky diode based on electrochemically polymerized conjugated polymer. The concept of combinatorial approach was emerged in the biochemical field and lately used in the materials science to screen a number of experimental conditions efficiently. Some tips for designing the polymerization bath suitable for our purpose, such as the way to suppress the interference of polymerization currents, have been described. In the case of Schottky diodes based on poly (3-methylthiophene), the system chosen to test our idea, the effects of polymer thickness and the supporting salt on the device characteristics have been surveyed clearly and rapidly. The map or library of the relationship between the polymerization condition and device characteristic may be useful to tune the device characteristics as desired. Our preliminary result has shown that the combinatorial approach proposed here can be a powerful tool to investigate the conjugated polymer devices by electrochemical polymerization such as electrochromic devices.

Recently, flexible and lightweight optical devices are desired from the practical viewpoint. We demonstrated roll-to-roll type Anti Reflection (AR) film fabricated by layer-by-layer (LBL) adsorption process. When deposition time was 2.5 min and repeating cycle was 8 cycles, refractive index of LBL layer was 1.499 at 632 nm and thickness was 93.1 nm, which are almost the same as those of batch type LBL layer. The minimum reflectance was about 0.6% at 600 nm and transmittance was over 75% at visible region. However as compared with batch type, roll type AR film has lower reflectance and transmittance. This reason is that the flow of solution and rinse and quantity of rinse was smaller, a number of bathes of roll type was lower than that of batch type. Furthermore, comparing the deposition time and film speed, LBL layer was fabricated clearly long deposition time and slow film speed. The roll-to-roll film had a problem of peeling off during the deposition process. By increasing the contact area between film and guided roll, vertical pressure was decrease and friction force was decreased. Furthermore, as rotational speed of guided roll and film speed was decreased, LBL layer was not peeled by friction force between film and guided roll. Because rotational speed of guided rolls and films were almost same in the range of less than about 30 mm/min. There was the problem that polymer complexes were likely to appear on the substrate when the surface was dried during moving between solution and rinse bath. This phenomenon was observed during the roll-to-roll as well as batch process. The quality of roll-to-roll LBL process was depending on deposition time and film speed and drying at moving process critically compared with batch type. It is necessary to design the roll-to-roll machine with care: important points are deposition time and film speed, drying at moving process.

In recent years the size of transformer in a DC-DC converter becomes smaller and thinner for power module type application. It results in the increase of the leakage inductances because the number of turns of the secondary winding becomes smaller. This paper presents the analysis of static and dynamic characteristics of the novel flyback converter proposed before, and clarifies that the transformer's leakage inductances deteriorate the static load regulation, but improve the dynamic stability by increasing the dumping factor.

This paper presents CrtSmile--a CAD tool for the automatic extraction of layout-dependent substrate effects for RF MOSFET modeling. CrtSmile incorporates a new scalable substrate model, which depends not only on the geometric layout information of a transistor (the number of gate fingers, finger width, channel length and bulk contact location), but also on the transistor layout and bulk patterns. We show that this model is simple to extract and has good agreement with measured data for a 0.35 µm CMOS process. CrtSmile reads in the layout information of RF transistors in the CIF/GDSII format, performs a pattern-based layout extraction to recognize the transistor layout and bulk patterns. A scalable layout-dependent substrate model is automatically generated and attached to the standard BSIM3 device model as a sub-circuit for use in circuit simulation. A low noise amplifier is evaluated with the proposed CrtSmile tool, showing the importance of layout effects for RF transistor substrate modeling.

This paper presents a performance comparison between carrier interferometry coded OFDM (CI/COFDM) and typical coded OFDM (COFDM) using multiple receive antennas. The feature of CI/COFDM with diversity reception is to combine the time diversity benefit introduced by channel coding with the frequency and space diversity benefits created by frequency-domain equalization (FDE). Simulation results for QPSK showed that, at the perfect channel estimation, CI/COFDM outperforms COFDM under frequency and time selective fading channels because of the powerful time diversity benefit introduced by channel coding with time interleaving. However, at the imperfect channel estimation, this advantage of CI/COFDM over COFDM becomes very limited.

In this paper, a test architecture optimization for system-on-a-chip under floorplanning constraints is proposed. The models of previous test architecture optimizations were too ideal to be applied to industrial SOCs. To make matters worse, they couldn't treat topological locality of cores, that is, floorplanning constraints. The optimization proposed in this paper can avoid long wires for TAMs in consideration of floorplanning constraints and finish optimizing test architectures within reasonable computation time.

A stability of the cascade two-stage Power-Factor-Correction converter is investigated. The first stage is boost PFC converter to achieve a near unity power factor and the second stage is forward converter to regulate the output voltage. Previous researches studied the system using linear analysis. However, PFC boost converter is a nonlinear circuit due to the existence of the multiplier and the large variation of the duty cycle. Moreover, the effect of the second stage DC/DC converter on the first stage PFC converter adds more complexity to the nonlinear circuit. In this issue, low-frequency instability has been detected in the two-stage PFC converter assuring the limitation of the prior linear models. Therefore, nonlinear model is proposed to detected and explain these instabilities. The borderlines between stable and unstable operation has been made clear. It is cleared that feedback gains of the first stage PFC and the second stage DC/DC converters are the main affected parts to the total system stability. Then, a simplified nonlinear model is provided. Experiment confirm the two models with a good agreement. These nonlinear models have introduced new PFC design scheme by choosing the minimum required output capacitor and the feedback loop design.