This paper describes the design of a 2.7 V operational, 200 MS/s, 14-bit CMOS D/A converter (DAC). The DAC consists of 63 current cells in matrix form for an upper 6-bit sub-DAC, and 8 current cells and R-2R ladder resistors for a lower 8-bit sub-DAC. A source degeneration resistor, for which a transistor in the triode operational region is used, is connected to the source of a MOS current source transistor in a current cell in order to reduce the influence of threshold voltage (Vth) variation and to satisfy the differential nonlinearity error specification as a 14-bit DAC. In conventional high-speed and high-resolution DACs that have the same design specifications described here, spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) characteristics commonly deteriorate drastically as the frequency of the reconstructed waveform increases. The causes of this deterioration were carefully examined in the present study, finding that the deterioration is caused in part by the input-data-dependent time-constant change at the output terminal. Unexpected current flow in parasitic capacitors associated with current sources causes the change in the output current depending on the input data, resulting in time-constant change. In order to solve this problem, we propose a new output circuit to fix the voltage at the node where the outputs of the current sources are combined. SPICE circuit simulation demonstrates that 63 dB of SFDR characteristics for the 90 MHz reconstructed waveform at the output can be realizable when the supply voltage is 2.7 V, the clock rate is 200 MS/s, and the power dissipation is estimated to be 300 mW.

An effective method for lossless video compression using intra-frame coding algorithms is described. Intra-frame coding is mainly used for still image compression and does not exploit a temporal correlation in video sequences. With the proposed method, multiple frames are combined into one large picture by interleaving all pixel data. In a large generated picture, the temporal correlation of the video sequence is transformed into a spatial correlation. A large picture enables images to be coded more efficiently and decreases the bitrate for lossless coding using intra-frame coding. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this method by encoding video sequences using JPEG 2000 and JPEG-LS.

In recent years, sliding electric contacts came to be often used under very severe conditions such as high temperature, extremely low temperature, high vacuum, etc. Conventionally, solid lubricants having excellent properties in lubricating performance are generally used compositely with a metal of high electric conductivity, because of their high electrical resistivity. In the present study, we proved that more excellent sliding electrical contacts can be produced with a design made by controlling the distribution on contact surface of a solid lubricant having excellent lubricating performance and of a metal with high electric conductivity through expansion of Greenwood's theory.

The interrupting characteristics of low voltage current limiting circuit breakers have directly relationship with the magnitude and distribution of magnetic field produced by contact system and splitter plates. In order to analyze the influence of configuration of contact system on current limiting characteristics, 3D magnetic field of arc chamber (including contact system, arc, splitter plates) is calculated. Furthermore, the electromagnetic repulsion force of movable contact is also calculated. The results can be used to improve configuration of arc quenching chamber. The cooperation between operating mechanism and electromagnetic repulsion force is also analyzed in this paper.

In this paper, we propose an efficient requantization method for transcoding of MPEG video. Transcoding is the process of converting a compressed video format to another different compressed video format. We propose an simple and efficient transcoding by requantization in which MPEG coded video at high bit-rate is converted into MPEG bitstream at lower bit-rate. To reduce a image quality degradation, we use HVS (Human Visual System). By using this effect, the part of image in high activity region is coarsely quantized without seriously degrading the image quality. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide good performance.

A bi-directional and multi-channel wireless telemetry capsule, 11 mm in diameter, is presented that can transmit video images from inside the human body and receive a control signal from an external control unit. The proposed telemetry capsule includes transmitting and receiving antennas, a demodulator, decoder, four LEDs, and CMOS image sensor, along with their driving circuits. The receiver demodulates the received signal radiated from the external control unit. Next, the decoder receives the stream of control signals and interprets five of the binary digits as an address code. Thereafter, the remaining signal is interpreted as four bits of binary data. Consequently, the proposed telemetry module can demodulate external signals so as to control the behavior of the camera and four LEDs during the transmission of video images. The proposed telemetry capsule can simultaneously transmit a video signal and receive a control signal determining the behavior of the capsule itself. As a result, the total power consumption of the telemetry capsule can be reduced by turning off the camera power during dead time and separately controlling the LEDs for proper illumination of the intestine.

This paper describes two methods to construct fuzzy inference rules by the simplified fuzzy reasoning. The present methods have a construction mechanism of the rule unit that is applicable in two parameters: the central value and the width of the membership function in the antecedent part. The first approach is to create a rule unit near the selected rule which has the nearest position from the central input space for the central value. The second is to create a rule unit near the selected rule which has the minimum width for the width. Experimental results are presented in order to show that the proposed methods are effective in difference on the inference error and the number of learning iterations.

Arc duration of silver contacts was measured with fixed short gap under the condition of different constant gaps and different constant currents, which are close to the minimum arc current of the contact material. The results indicated that the arc occurred even at the current less than the minimum arc current. The arc duration varies in different operations at the same testing condition and it distributes exponentially in the time range up to 100 microseconds. The time constant τ and the extinction rate λ of the distribution were calculated, and related to the arc current. It was assured by silver electrode arc that, even below the so-called minimum arc current, arc ignition may occur but, in this case, the arc duration is momentary, and, as the arc current decreases, the arc extinction rate becomes large.

An experimental equation of V-I characteristics of breaking arc was investigated in the air at atmospheric pressure. Material of the contact pair is Ag, Au, Cu and Ni. Supply voltage is set to 42, 48 and 54 V. The electrical resistance of experimental circuit is 5 Ω. The time evolutions of arc voltage, arc current and gap length were measured, simultaneously. V-I characteristics were obtained from those measured values. The dependence of the arc voltage on the gap length was represented by an approximate formula as a straight line in order to obtain the experimental equation. And the dependence of the strength of electric field of arc column on the supply voltage was approximated to a straight line. Using these approximate formulae, the experimental equation of the dependence of the arc voltage on the arc current was obtained with the gap length as a parameter. It was shown that the experimental equation agreed with experimental data in the experimental conditions for each contact material.

In traditional file systems, data clustering and grouping have improved small file performance. These schemes make it possible for file systems to use large data transfers in accessing small files, reducing disk I/Os. However, as file systems age, disks become too fragmented to support the grouping and clustering. To offer a solution to this problem, we describe a De-Fragmented File System (DFFS), which gradually alleviates fragmentation of small files. By using data cached in memory, DFFS dynamically relocates blocks of small fragmented files, clustering them on the disks contiguously. In addition, DFFS relocates small related files in the same directory, grouping them at contiguous disk locations.

Design patterns can be regarded as an approach to encapsulate and reuse good design practices. However, most design patterns are specified using informal text and examples. To obtain all of the benefits of patterns, formal specification and tool support are indispensable. This paper proposes a Design Pattern Specification Language (DPSL) that is both manageable and effective. The DPSL provides software developers with the capability to treat design patterns as concrete design units without lowering abstraction. To demonstrate the usability of our DPSL and its application in design modeling, we have developed a prototype tool that supports the DPSL in UML diagrams. This prototype allows us to demonstrate the tool's support possibilities and the usability of patterns for software development applications.

Due to the rapid development of computer and information technology, 3D modeling and rendering capabilities are becoming increasingly important in many applications, including industrial design, architecture, CAD/CAM, video games, and medical imaging. Since 3D mesh models often have huge amounts of the data, it is time-consuming to retrieve from a storage device or to download from the network. Most 3D viewing applications need to obtain the entire file of a 3D model in order to display the model, even when the user is interested only in a low-resolution version of the model. Therefore, progressive coding that enables multiresolution transmission of 3D models is desired. In this paper, we propose the progressive coding scheme of 3D meshes with texture, in which we convert irregular meshes to semi-regular using texture coordinates, map them on planes, and apply 2D image coding algorithm to mesh compression. As our method uses the wavelet transform, the encoded bitstream has a progressive nature. We gain high compression rate with the same visual quality as original models.

In this letter, we evaluate the performance of several adaptive and non-adaptive AQM schemes for congestion control in a dynamic network environment with variable bandwidth links. The AQM schemes examined are RED, BLUE, Adaptive RED, REM, AVQ and PI controller. We compare their queueing performance and show that none of them can derive stable queue length and low packet drop rate simultaneously in networks where both input traffic and available output bandwidth are time varying. Adaptive and efficient algorithms should be designed and applied in order to improve the adaptiveness and robustness of congestion control in dynamic networks such as Internet.

A content-based switch makes forwarding decisions (server selections) based on an application layer information and forwards data in the application layer. After making forwarding decisions, existing content-based switches improve their forwarding performance by TCP splicing, which releases them from maintaining TCP endpoints and allows them to forward data by packet forwarding. However, once content-based switches invoke TCP splicing, they are unable to use the application layer information for forwarding decisions. Thus the existing content-based switches cannot perform a handoff of pipelined HTTP transactions, which can greatly reduce client perceived latencies. This paper proposes an asymmetric TCP splicing and a method to perform the handoff of HTTP transactions between servers. Asymmetric TCP splicing allows the content-based switches to use all the application layer information in the TCP data stream from clients to servers, although it allows the switches to forward the TCP data stream from servers to clients by packet forwarding. The proposed handoff method content-based switches support pipelined HTTP transactions in combination with asymmetric TCP splicing. In the proposed method, the content-based switch utilizes the common function of TCP (TCP half-close) to detect the end of the series of responses from the currently selected server, and it changes the forwarding destination after the client finishes receiving a series of responses from the server. Our evaluation validates that the content-based switch which supports pipelined HTTP transactions by our method can reduce client-perceived latencies when there is a large correlation between destinations of any two consecutive requests.

A new fuzzy logic-based buffer management scheme (BMS) called fuzzy early detection (FED) is presented to improve transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over the unspecified bit rate (UBR) service of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. FED uses early congestion detection and selective packet discard (ECD/SPD) strategies to achieve its design goals, and adopts early packet discard (EPD) to prevent frequent buffer overflows. Two variants of FED are constructed for comparison purposes. FED performance is then evaluated against those of its variants, pure EPD and P-random early detection (P-RED) through various simulations. The effects of TCP implementation, TCP maximum segment size (MSS), network's propagation delay (PD) and switch buffer size (SBS) on their performances are studied. The overall result shows that FED is superior to the other BMSs when the criteria of efficiency, fairness, scalability and switch buffer requirement are considered collectively.

The equidistortion principle[1] has recently been proposed as a basic principle for design of an optimal vector quantization (VQ) codebook. The equidistortion principle adjusts all codebook vectors such that they have the same contribution to quantization error. This paper introduces a novel VQ codebook design algorithm based on the equidistortion principle. The proposed algorithm is a variant of the law-of-the-jungle algorithm (LOJ), which duplicates useful codebook vectors and removes useless vectors. Due to the LOJ mechanism, the proposed algorithm can establish the equidistortion condition without wasting learning steps. This is significantly effective in preventing performance degradation caused when initial states of codebook vectors are improper to find an optimal codebook. Therefore, even in the case of improper initialization, the proposed algorithm can achieve minimization of quantization error based on the equidistortion principle. Performance of the proposed algorithm is discussed through experimental results.

This paper proposes an IPv6-based network service control architecture for providing a variety of customized services to both stationary and mobile users in a unified manner. Recent trends in the Internet indicate its evolution into a combination of broadband and mobile-aware networks. One means of providing users with cost-efficient customized services in such large-scale IP networks is to introduce flexible network intelligence capabilities for managing network resources and services. The purpose of the proposed network architecture is to upgrade the Internet so that it functions more intelligently by using service profiles (data sets containing the service specifications of individual users) and mechanisms for their distribution. It is possible to make network services intelligent by using network application programming interfaces (APIs), which have been under study in international standardization groups. We apply the open API concept to our proposed architecture to produce a wide variety of services. We also propose a new open API to support Web content adaptation services, which add value to Web access.

Two implementation schemes for a two-step SOVA (Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm) decoder are proposed and verified in a chip. One uses the combination of trace back (TB) logic to find the survivor state and double trace back logic to find the weighting factor of a two-step SOVA. The other is that the reliability values are divided by a scaling factor in order to compensate for the distortion brought by overestimating those values in SOVA. We introduced a fixed scaling factor of 0.25 or 0.33 for a rate 1/3 and designed an 8-state Turbo decoder with a 256-bit frame size to lower the reliability values. The implemented architecture of the two-step SOVA decoder allows important savings in area and high-speed processing compared with the one-step SOVA decoder using register exchange (RE) or trace-back (TB) method. The chip is fabricated using 0.65 µm gate array at Samsung Electronics and it shows higher SNR performance by 2 dB at the BER 10-4 than that of a two-step SOVA decoder without a scaling factor.

The demand for wireless mobile communications has grown at a very high rate, recently. In order to solve the non-uniform traffic rates, the use of cell splits is unavoidable for balancing the traffic rate and maximizing total system capacity. For cell planning, a DS-CDMA cellular system can be comprise of different cell sizes because of different demands and population density of the service area. In this paper, we develop a general model to study the forward link capacity and outage probability of a DS-CDMA cellular system with mixed cell sizes. The analysis of outage probability is carried out using the log-normal approximation. When a macrocell is split into the three microcells, as an example, we calculate the multi-cross interferences between macrocells and microcells, and the forward link capacities for the microcells and the neighboring macrocells. The maximum allowable capacity plane for macrocell and microcell is also investigated. The numerical results and discussions with previous published results of reverse link are summarized.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) systems transmit and receive via a common frequency band. In this band, signals of other wireless applications operate on a WLAN beamformer as interferences, and so the problem in adaptive antenna is increasing the canceling performance in the presence of moving interference sources. The performance of conventional adaptive beamformer is severely degraded and the robust adaptive beamformer must be equipped with additional sensors to obtain desired performances. Therefore, in order to avoid having to install additional sensors, an efficient algorithm is necessary. In this paper, we introduce a fast adaptive algorithm with variable forgetting factor, which does not require any further additional modifications. Through computer simulations, we can obtain better performances than those of other techniques under a variety of operating conditions.