This paper discusses the orbital motion and elevation properties of a quasi-zenith satellite system using circular orbits. The satellites are deployed on inclined geosynchronous orbits with identical sub-satellite loci on earth. The satellites trace the locus at even intervals. This satellite system can provide mobile satellite communications and navigation services at very high elevations to middle-latitude regions. In general, the orbital parameters of the satellite system are determined by numerical simulation to maximize the minimum elevation angle in areas where satellite services are to be provided. However, an understanding of the properties of the orbit and consequent elevation properties are important for efficient constellation design. This paper formulates the orbital motion of inclined geosynchronous circular orbits, including the relative motion to the rotating earth. Although elliptical orbit constellations are also possible and can gain higher elevation, only circular orbits, which can be accurately formulated without using an analytically unsolvable Kepler's equation, are discussed in this paper. Elevation properties are evaluated using the geocentric angle between the sub-satellite point and an arbitrary point in the intended service area. This angle is a typical parameter that can be derived as a single-valued function of the elevation at a specific point. Optimum orbital parameters for an intended service area can be easily estimated without numerical simulation using the results of the evaluation described in this paper. These results can also be used to infer whether a circular-orbit constellation is applicable to an intended service area.

This letter describes consecutive zero and one bits detection circuits designed for a 1.25 Gbit/s burst mode laser driver realized in a SiGe 0.35 µm BiCMOS technology with 3.3 V power supply. The architecture is based on a frequency divider and a delay line counting per four consecutive zero or one bits. The detector was designed with high-speed split-output stage flip-flops modified to have a reset input. Experimental results validate the design of the detector.

This paper presents a novel blind multiple access interference (MAI) suppression filter in DS/CDMA systems. The filter is adaptively updated by parallel projections onto a series of convex sets. These sets are defined based on the received signal as well as a priori knowledge about the desired user's signature. In order to achieve fast convergence and good performance at steady state, the adaptive projected subgradient method (Yamada et al., 2003) is applied. The proposed scheme also jointly estimates the desired signal amplitude and the filter coefficients based on an approximation of an EM type algorithm, following the original idea proposed by Park and Doherty, 1997. Simulation results highlight the fast convergence behavior and good performance at steady state of the proposed scheme.

A Generalized Symbol-rate-increased (GSRI) Pragmatic Trellis coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ based on a Selective-Repeat (SR) ARQ with multicopy (MC) retransmission (SR+MC scheme) for high speed mobile satellite communication system is analyzed. The SR+MC ARQ is a suitable scheme for mobile satellite systems and further improvement of the throughput performance can be expected by an additional combination of an error control coding. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the SR+MC scheme employing GSRI Pragmatic TCM. GSRI TC-MPSK can arbitrarily set the bandwidth expansion ratio keeping higher coding gain than conventional TCM scheme. Also Pragmatic TCM has an advantage in that the modulation level can be easily changeable. By changing the modulation level and the bandwidth expansion ratio, this scheme can optimize the performance according to the channel conditions. Numerical and simulation results show that the GSRI Trellis Coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ presents better performance than conventional Pragmatic Trellis Coded Type-I Hybrid ARQ.

For detecting the anomalous behavior of a user effectively, most researches have concentrated on statistical techniques. However, since statistical techniques mainly analyze the average behavior of a user's activities, some anomalies can be detected inaccurately. In addition, it is difficult to model intermittent activities performed periodically. In order to model the normal behavior of a user closely, a set of various features can be employed. Given an activity of a user, the values of those features that are related to the activity represent the behavior of the activity. Furthermore, activities performed in a session of a user can be regarded as a semantically atomic transaction. Although it is possible to apply clustering technique to these values to extract the normal behavior of a user, most of conventional clustering algorithms do not consider any transactional boundary in a data set. In this paper, a transaction-based clustering algorithm for modeling the normal behavior of a user is proposed. Based on the activities of the past transactions, a set of clusters for each feature can be found to represent the normal behavior of a user as a concise profile. As a result, any anomalous behavior in an online transaction of the user can be effectively detected based on the profile of the user.

We report a flexible and lightweight wearable microstrip antenna that can be sewn into clothing and hats. This antenna is composed of felt and a conductive woven fabric. Experimental results clearly show that this antenna operates normally as a conventional microstrip antenna, and is practical and feasible for personal satellite communications.

A new and fast fingerprint classification method based on direction patterns is presented in this paper. This method is developed to be applicable to today's embedded fingerprint authentication system, in which small area sensors are widely used. Direction patterns are well treated in the direction map at block level, where each block consists of 88 pixels. It is demonstrated that the search of directions pattern in specific area, generally called as pattern area, is able to classify fingerprints clearly and quickly. With our algorithm, the classification accuracy of 89% is achieved over 4000 images in the NIST-4 database, slightly lower than the conventional approaches. However, the classification speed is improved tremendously up to about 10 times as fast as conventional singular point approaches.

The three major failures of electrical contacts for automotive relay applications are: contact welding (or contact sticking), high contact resistance and severe contact erosion due to switching arcing. With the demand of high power and multiple functions of automotive vehicles, the switching current has be dramatically increased, it results in higher failing rate, in particular for contact welding. On the other hand, the miniaturization of electromechanical relays has lead to the reduction of mechanical spring force. This not only results in the earlier contact welding but also makes the relay more susceptible to the contact resistance and arc erosion failures. This paper is a review of most recent studies on these three failure aspects. It describes the progress in the understanding of contact welding caused by short arcing and high contact resistance due to contamination of particles and films in relay manufacturing process and also it review the material transfer due to switching arcing. At the end, the brief considerations of electromechanical relays used in 42 volts have also been given.

A high-attenuation waveguide filter using electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) substrates is introduced. With a simple design modification on the EBG covers, the waveguide filter produced an almost full Ku-band rejection bandwidth showing better than 20 dB input-to-output isolation from 12.3 to 17.2 GHz.

Based on Radon transform, a novel method for registering a periodic (self-referencing) watermark is presented. Although the periodic watermark is widely used as a countermeasure for affine transformation, there is no known efficient method to register it. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for registering the watermark from an image that had undergone both affine transformations and severe lossy compression.

In this letter, adaptive multi-stage parallel interference cancellation (PIC) receiver is considered for multi-rate DS-CDMA system. In each stage of the adaptive multi-stage PIC receiver, multiple access interference (MAI) estimates are obtained by the sub-bit estimates from the previous stage and the adaptive weights for the sub-bit estimates. The adaptive weights are obtained by minimizing the mean squared error between the received signal and its estimate through normalized least mean square (LMS) algorithm. It is shown that the adaptive multi-stage PIC receiver achieves smaller BER than the matched filter receiver, multi-stage PIC receiver, and multi-stage partial PIC receiver for the multi-rate DS-CDMA system in a Rayleigh fading channel.

The DAPDNA®-2 is the world's first general purpose dynamically reconfigurable processor for commercial usage. It is a dual-core processor consisting of a custom RISC core called the Digital Application Processor (DAP), and a two dimensional array of dynamically reconfigurable processing elements referred to as the Distributed Network Architecture (DNA). The DAP has a 32 bit instruction set architecture with an 8 KB instruction cache and 8 KB data cache that can be accessed in one clock cycle. It has an interrupt control function to detect data processing completion in the DNA-Matrix. The DNA-Matrix has different types of data processing elements such as ALU, delay, and memory elements to process fully parallel computations. The DNA-Matrix includes 32 independent 16 KB high speed SRAM elements (in total 512 KB). The DNA-Matrix, even with its parallel computational capability, can be synchronized and co-work at the same clock frequency as the DAP. The processor operates at a 166 MHz working frequency and fabricated with a 0.11 µm CMOS process. The DAPDNA-2 device can be connected directly with up to 16 units with linear scalability in processing performance, provided the bandwidth requirement is within the maximum communication speed between DNAs, which is 32 Gbps. The DAPDNA-2 performs at a level that is two orders of magnitude higher than conventional high performance processors.

By modelling the quantization error as additive white noise in the transform domain, Wiener filter is used to reduce quantization noise for DCT coded images in DCT domain. Instead of deriving the spectrum of the transform coefficient, a DPCM loop is used to whiten the quantized DCT coefficients. The DPCM loop predicts the mean for each coefficient. By subtracting the mean, the quantized DCT coefficient is converted into the sum of prediction error and quantization noise. After the DPCM loop, the prediction error can be assumed uncorrelated to make the design of the subsequent Wiener filter easy. The Wiener filter is applied to remove the quantization noise to restore the prediction error. The original coefficient is reconstructed by adding the DPCM predicted mean with the restored prediction error. To increase the prediction accuracy, the decimated DCT coefficients in each subband are interpolated from the overlapped blocks.

Ag(40 wt%)-Pd(60 wt%) alloy has been widely applied to contact materials installed in various electromechanical devices. However, in application to the down sized relays, failure due to contact resistance is caused easily by both growth of oxide film on the contact surface and low contact force. To solve the increase in contact resistance, an overlay of thin Au or thin Au-Ag (8-10 wt%) has been used on the alloy. Despite this, cleanliness and low hardness of these overlays cause adhesion, or sticking, at contact interface. Increase in contact resistance and sticking are contrary to each other. In order to eliminate these contrary properties, the author studied improving the Ag-Pd alloy with a dopant. Low level of contact resistance for both static and dynamic contacts of Ag-Pd with Mg doping was found even if the contact surface was covered with an oxide contaminant film. This paper presents the excellent contact resistance and adhesion behaviors of Ag-Pd-Mg alloy and their mechanisms, and also presents in the later part, surface contamination behaviors for organic gases.

A new indirect approach for designing low-order linear-phase IIR filters is presented in this paper. Given an FIR filter, we utilize a new Krylov subspace projection method, called the rational Arnoldi method with adaptive orders, to synthesize an approximated IIR filter with small orders. The synthesized IIR filter can truly reflect essential dynamical features of the original FIR filter and indeed satisfies the design specifications. Also, from simulation results, it can be observed that the linear-phase property in the passband is stilled retained. This indirect approach is accomplished using the state-space realization of FIR filters, multi-point Pade approximations, the Arnoldi algorithm, and an intelligent scheme to select expansion points in the frequency domain. Such methods are quite efficient in terms of computational complexity. Fundamental developments of the proposed method will be discussed in details. Numerical results will demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of this two-step indirect method.

A simple millimeter-wave quasi-maximal-ratio-combin-ing antenna diversity system based on the millimeter-wave self-heterodyne transmission technique is described. The millimeter-wave self-heterodyne transmission technique is useful for developing millimeter-wave systems with enhanced characteristics in regard to system miniaturization, development and fabrication cost, and the frequency stability of the signal transmission. We also show that applying this technique with an antenna diversity receiver configuration can easily solve a problem peculiar to millimeter-wave systems--the fact that the transmission link always requires a line-of-sight path--without requiring hardware designed with millimeter-scale precision. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the operating principle of a combining antenna diversity system based on the millimeter-wave self-heterodyne transmission technique. We further prove that we can obtain a diversity gain in accordance with that of a maximal-ratio combining diversity system without resorting to any complicated control of the received signal envelope and phase. Our experiments using the simplest two-branch diversity structure have validated the operating principle derived in our theoretical analysis. Our results show that a received CNR improvement of 3 dB is obtained as a diversity gain. We also demonstrate that circuit precision corresponding to the wavelength of the intermediate frequency, rather than to the millimeter wavelength, is sufficient to obtain the diversity effect when we control the signal phase or delay in combining the received signals.

The enlargement of the left lobe of the liver and the shrinkage of the right lobe are helpful signs at MR imaging in diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver. To investigate whether the volume ratio of left-to-whole (LTW) is effective to differentiate cirrhosis from a normal liver, we developed an automatic algorithm for three-dimensional (3D) segmentation and volume calculation of the liver region in multi-detector row CT scans and MR imaging. From one manually selected slice that contains a large liver area, two edge operators are applied to obtain the initial liver area, from which the mean gray value is calculated as threshold value in order to eliminate the connected organs or tissues. The final contour is re-confirmed by using thresholding technique. The liver region in the next slice is generated by referring to the result from the last slice. After continuous procedure of this segmentation on each slice, the 3D liver is reconstructed from all the extracted slices and the surface image can be displayed from different view points by using the volume rendering technique. The liver is then separated into the left and the right lobe by drawing an inter-segmental plane manually, and the volume in each part is calculated slice by slice. The degree of cirrhosis can be defined as the ratio of volume in these two lobes. Four cases including normal and cirrhotic liver with MR and CT slices are used for 3D segmentation and visualization. The volume ratio of LTW was relatively higher in cirrhosis than in the normal cases in both MR and CT cases. The average error rate on liver segmentation was within 5.6% after employing in 30 MR cases. These results demonstrate that the performance in our 3D segmentation was satisfied and the LTW ratio may be effective to differentiate cirrhosis.

In order to get the knowledge of gas dynamics in interruption process of molded case circuit breakers, a quenching chamber model with gas-driven arc is proposed. The two-dimensional optical fiber digital testing system has been used to measure the arc current, arc voltage, pressure in the quenching chamber, and the movement of the arc when interrupting the 10 kA prospective current in different conditions. The influence of venting conditions, the configuration of splitter plates and gassing material characteristics on the performance of gas-driven arc has investigated. It demonstrates that the performance can be improved effectively by the ways of closing the bottom venting, adopting shorter splitter plate configuration, and POM and Nylon gassing materials.

A large body of research in the measurement of software complexity at code level has been conducted, but little effort has been made to measure the architectural-level complexity of a software system. In this paper, we propose some architectural-level metrics which are appropriate for evaluating the architectural attributes of a software system. The main feature of our approach is to assess the architectural-level complexity of a software system by analyzing its formal architectural specification, and therefore the process of metric computation can be automated completely.

In this article, it is shown that Unified Complex Hadamard Transform (UCHT) can be derived from Walsh functions and through direct matrix operation. Unique properties of UCHT are analyzed. Recursive relations through Kronecker product can be applied to the basic matrices to obtain higher dimensions. These relations are the basis for the flow diagram of a constant-geometry iterative VLSI hardware architecture. New Normalized Complex Hadamard Transform (NCHT) matrices are introduced which are another class of complex Hadamard matrices. Relations of UCHT and NCHT with other discrete transforms are discussed.