The resistive-fuse network for early vision was studied using circuit simulation to clarify the potential of implementation with resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs). To over-come the fundamental problem of the RTD network, i.e., the RTDs cannot perform simulated annealing (SA), pseudo SAs were proposed. These methods are based on the time-variation of the input signal strength, and are found to be effective in restoring images. A resistive-fuse network is shown to be one of the most promising applications of RTDs.

This paper proposes a novel Doppler frequency shift compensation technique to achieve terrestrial and low earth orbit (LEO) satellite dual mode DS/CDMA terminals robust to high Doppler shift and multipath fading. In order to satisfy the requirements of wide dynamic range and high accuracy simultaneously, the proposed scheme employs two stage compensation scheme, i.e., coarse compensation to keep dynamic range of about 100 kHz and fine compensation to satisfy its resolution of about 30 Hz, using block demodulation technique. Computer simulation results show that the proposed scheme can sufficiently compensate for the offset frequency up to the range of about 100 kHz at the terrestrial and LEO satellite combined mobile communication systems.

This paper concerns a Petri-net-based model for describing reactive and concurrent systems. Although many high-level Petri nets have been proposed, they are insufficiently practical to describe reactive and concurrent systems in the detail modeling, design and implementation phases. They are mainly intended to describe concurrent systems in the rough modeling phase and lack in several important features (e.g., concurrent tasks, task communication/synchronization, I/O interface, task scheduling) which the most actual implementations of reactive and concurrent systems have. Therefore it is impossible to simulate and analyze the systems accurately without explicitly modeling these features. On the other hand, programming languages based on Petri nets are deeply dependent on their execution environments and not sophisticated as modeling and specification languages. This paper proposes MENDEL net which is a high-level Petri net extended by incorporating concurrent tasks, task communication/synchronization, I/O interface, and task scheduling in a sophisticated manner. MENDEL nets are a wide-spectrum modeling language, that is, they are suitable for not only modeling but also designing and implementing reactive and concurrent systems.

In this paper, we propose a new design algorithm for nearly linear phase IIR digital filters with prescribed log magnitude response. The error function used here is the sum of the weighted log magnitude-squared error and phase -squared error, and so it is possible to control log magnitude and phase response directly. The gradient vector of the proposed error function is easily calculated as the closed form solution because of its nature, in which the real and imaginary part of the logarithm of a complex transfer transfer function corresponds to the log magnitude and phase response, respectively. This algorithm is simple and converges quickly. Finally, we show the validity of the proposed algorithm with some examples.

We study individual carrier traps in a GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs heterostructure by observing random telegraph signals. A narrow channel, which is formed in a split gate device, is shifted by independently controlling the voltage applied to each part of the split gate. RTSs can be observed only when the traps are close to the channel and the energy levels of the traps are within a few kBT of the Fermi level. This type of measurement reveals the locations and the energy distributions of the traps. We also discuss the situation in which two trap levels are at the Fermi level simultaneously. In this condition the two RTSs do not occur at the same time, but they do interact with each other. This implies that there is an electrostatic interaction between the two trappings.

Fairness is one of the important notion for programming language, such as process algebras like CCS, that includes concurrency (or parallelism) and nondeterminism. This ensures that while repeatedly choosing among a set of alternatives, no alternative will be postponed forever. However, the fairness does not mention at what frequency these alternatives are selected. In this paper, we propose a quantitative fairness, which is called economic-oriented fairness, to each alternatives. This fairness ensures that the expected number of selection for each alternatives are same. We give a condition for probability assignment of selection of each alternative to be satisfied for economic-oriented fairness. First we show a simple probability assignment rule. In this assignment, between any two alternatives, if an alternative is selected n times and the other m times then the probability to select the former alternative is (m + 1)/(n + 1) times the probability for the latter. We prove that this assignment satisfies the condition of economic-oriented fairness. For a model of the economic-oriented fairness, we adopt a probabilistic process algebra. Finally, we elaborate with two process models of the economic-oriented fairness. The first one is a server and client model, where each client communicates only with the server, but not among them. In this model, the expected number of communication by each client are equal. The second model considers communication between two processes. In practice, a process has several subprocesses. Each subprocess communicates via a communication port, In the second model, there is economic-oriented fairness where the expected number of communications via each communication port are equal.

A Si single electron transistor (SET) was fabricated by converting a one-dimensional Si wire on a SIMOX substrate into a small Si island with a tunneling barrier at each end by means of pattern-dependent oxidation. Since the size of the Si island was as small as around 10 nm owing to this novel technique, the total capacitance of the SET was reduced to a value on the order of 1 aF, which guarantees the conductance oscillation of the SET even at room temperature. Furthermore, a linear relation between the designed wire length and the gate capacitance of SETs was obtained, which clearly indicates that the single island was actually formed in the middle of the one dimensional Si wire. These results were achieved owing to the highly reproducible fabrication process based on pattern dependent oxidation of SIMOX-Si layers. In addition, the fluctuation of the electrical characteristics of the SETs Was studied in relation to the wire size fluctuations. It was found that the fluctuatian is caused predominantly by the roughness of the sidewall surface of the resist pattern.

This letter demonstrates that, under certain condition, the harmonic content of a rectangular pulse train is reduced by a considerable extent in the presence of another equal frequency pulse train of opposite polarity. The condition for maximum harmonic rejection is derived. It is also shown that this technique can, very effectively, be applied to reduce the harmonic content of a sequential phase detector (PD) output. This letter also presents the experimental performance of a sequential PD, incorporating this technique, in a single-loop synthesizer.

This paper describes the properties of a TE10 metal waveguide filter using two polycrystalline ferrite chips at millimeter wave frequencies. The frequency response of the filter has been analyzed using the mode-matching technique, and optimized by the computer technique. The bandpass filter characteristics with high dynamic range more than 30dB was obtained with insertion loss of 1.5dB and good magnetically tunable response is observed with a quality factor of 200, which agrees considerably well with predicted values.

The performance improvement of the partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) system for (1, 7) run-length limited (RLL) code is studied. As a new PRML system, PR (1, 1, 0, 1, 1) system called modified E2PR4 (ME2PR4 ) followed by Viterbi detector for (1, 7) RLL code is proposed. At first, a determination method of the tap weights in transversal filter to equalize to PR (1, 1, 0, 1, 1) characteristic taking account of a noise correlation is described. And the equalization characteristics of the transversal filter are evaluated. Then, a Viterbi detector for ME2PR4 utilizing the constraint of run-length of (1, 7) RLL code is presented. Finally, the bit-error rate is obtained by computer simulation and the performance is compared with that of the conventional PRML systems called PR4, EPR4 and E2PR4 systems with Viterbi detector. The results show that among these systems our system exhibits the best performance and the SNR improvement increases with the increase in the linear density.

In order to improve the sensitivity of micromachined sensors applied with electrostatic fields and increase their actuated force of electrostatic micromachined actuators, "electrets," which are dielectrics carrying non equilibrium permanent space charges of polarization distribution, are very important. In this paper, positively corona charged silicon dioxide electrets, which are deposited by Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition (PCVD) and thermally oxidized, are investigated. Physical studies will be described, in which the charge stability is correlated to Thermally Stimulated Current (TSC) measurements and to Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) analysis. Some intrinsic differences have been observed between materials. The electrets with superior long-term charge stability contain 10,000 times as much E' center (Si3 as the ones with inferior long-term charge stability. Finally, some investigations on the long-term charge storage mechanism of the positively charged silicon dioxide electret will be described.

While high compression ratio has been achieved using recently developed image coding algorithm, the noise removal technique is considered as an important subject. This still holds for very low bitrate video coding, that is, MPEG-4 has defined it as a core experiment which is mainly concerned with block based discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding such as H.263 and MPEG-1. This paper describes a novel and practical technique which attempts to accomplish both noise suppression and detail preservation at the same time. Some of the conventional adaptive filters are designed to search a homogeneous region among the predetermined polygonal subregions, then to apply a smoothing operation within the selected subregion. It shall be, however noted that sometimes the predetermined subregion finally selected may still be hererogeneous. This fact leads us to a novel idea; instead of examining the predetermined regions, define a lot more flexible region likely to be homogeneous. In order to achieve this, we introduce the binary index. each pixel is classified into either the lower intensity group or higher intensity group based on a local statistics. Then a smoothing operation is applied within the pixels having the same group index as the pixel to be processed. Thus our scheme can search a homogeneous region appropriately. The adaptive smoothing adopted in the proposed scheme is also designed to be consistent with an important property of human visual system, i.e., the spatial masking. noise visibility decreases at spatial details such as edges and textures. Another advantage is that it can be realized with significantly low computations. The simulation results show that his approach can suppress the visible artifacts while retaining the fine details such as edge and texture.

This paper presents a new Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) demodulation method using the Short Time-Discrete Fourier Transform (ST-DFT) analysis to combat large frequency offset with time variation in low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications systems. This demodulation method can demodulate the received signal only by searching for the instantaneous spectrum energy peaks without complicated carrier recovery. In addition, it is insensitive to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) degradation caused by the excessively wide bandwidth of the receiver front-end band pass filter. Furthermore, the ST-DFT analysis combined with a differential encoding scheme gives FSK demodulation method a potential robustness against large and fast time-varying frequency offset.

Moving-picture transmission through narrow band and high bit error rate communication channels, such as a mobile communication channel, requires improved compression rate and enhanced error resilience. Variable-length codes are one of the essential techniques of compressing digital video information. This technique is used in various video coding schemes although a bit error in the channel impairs the synchronization of variable-length codewords, resulting in propagation of the error. With a hybrid video coding method in particular, which combines motion-compensation and transform coding, once an error is detected in the coded data, subsequent data cannot be decoded. Consequently, even an error-free portion of any data received must be discarded. To minimize the influence of an error in a channel on coded video data, this paper proposes a new video coding syntax which makes the best use of the self synchronizing characteristic of variable-length Huffman codes. Owing to the Huffman code's characteristic, the proposed coding syntax enables a decoder to decode the data portion that cannot be decoded, due to an error, by the conventional syntax without adding any redundancy. Computer simulation has verified the effectiveness of this proposed syntax in video coding with a very low bitrate and erroneous communication channel.

For very low bit-rate video coding such as under 64 kbps, it is unreasonable to encode and transmit all the information. Thus, it is very important to choose the "important" information and encode it efficiently. In this paper, we first propose an image separation-composition method to solve this problem. At the encoder, an image is separated into a low-frequency part and two (horizontal and vertical) edge parts, which are considered as "important" information for human visualization. The low-frequency part is encoded by using block DCT and linear quantization. And the edges are selected by their values and encoded by using Chain coding to remain the most of the important parts for human visualization. At the decoder, the image is reconstructed by first generating the high-frequency parts from the horizontal and vertical edge parts, respectively, and then applying the inverse wavelet transform to the low frequency part and high frequency parts. This composition algorithm has less computational complexity than the conventional analytic/synthetic algorithms because it is not based on iterating approach. Moreover, to reduce the temporal redundancy efficiently, we propose a hierarchical motion detection and a motion interpolation /extrapolation algorithm. We detect motion vectors and motion regions between two reconstructed images and then predict the motion vectors of the current image from the previous detected motion vectors and motion regions by using the interpolation/extrapolation both at the encoder and at the decoder. Therefore, it is unnecessary to transmit the motion vectors and motion regions. This algorithm reduces not only the temporal redundancy but also bit-rates for coding side information . Furthermore, because the motion detection is completely syntax independent, any type of motion detection can be used. We show some simulation results of the proposed video coding algorithm with the coding bit-rate down to 24 kbps and 10 kbps.

Spread-spectrum (SS) sharing with comb spectrum structure in a microcell/macrocell cellular architecture in order to increase spectral efficiency is proposed. Such method employs a filter in the code division multiple access (CDMA) transmitter to feature comb spectrum structure, and suppress interference with a narrowband time division multiple access (TDMA) system in using together in SS sharing. The relationship between microcellular capacity and macrocellular capacity of the system is explored and compared to those of conventional SS sharing and orthogonal sharing. To be concrete, we investigate two cases, i.e., using no power control and ideal power control in the TDMA system. In both cases, the proposed SS sharing gives better capacity results than the conventional SS sharing and in the comparison when ideal power control is used in th. TDMA system, it even has the property to oppose the orthogonal sharing in ideal condition without interference.

An approach to design for testability using register-transfer level (RTL) partial scan selection is described. We define an RTL circuit model which enables efficient description in an electronic system design automation (ESDA) tool and testability analysis which leads to effective partial scan selection for RTL design including data path circuits and control circuits such as state machines. We also introduced a method of partial scan selection at RTL which selects critical registers and state machines based on RTL testability analysis. DFT techniques using gate level testability measures have been studied and concluded that they are not successful in achieving high fault coverage [15]. However, we started this work for the following reasons, 1) In sequential ATPG procedure, more than two memory elements belonging to a functional units such as registers and state machines are often required to be justified at a time. At RTL, state machines and registers are explicitly described and recognized as functional units while gate level memory elements are scattered over the circuit. 2) As discussed in [6], if the circuit is modified so that the test sequence which causes state transition between initial and final states of sequential ATPG can be easily obtained, ATPG results can be also improved. Complex state machines can be identified at RTL. According to the experimental results, our gate level DFT achieves high fault coverage comparable with the previously published most successful DFT methods, and DFT at RTL resulted in higher fault coverage than gate level DFT at much shorter CPU time.

A method is presented for reconstructing the surface profile of a two dimensional rough surface boundary from the scattered far field data. The proposed inversion algorithm is based on the Kirchhoff approximation and in order to determine the surface profile, the numerical results illustrating the method are presented.

Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) analysis is performed to evaluate the distributions of specific absorption rate (SAR) in a human head during use of a handheld portable telephone. A heterogeneous head model has been assumed which is comprised of 273 108 cubic cells 2.5 mm on a side, with the electrical properties of anatomical equivalents. A handset model has been assumed to be a metal box with either a quarter-wavelength monopole or a half-wavelength dipole operating at 900 MHz or 1.5 GHz. The maximum local SARs in the head are evaluated under various exposure conditions. The dependence of the maximum local SARs on the difference in the structures or parameters of the model, i.e. the distance between the antenna and the head, the heterogeneity of the head, the antenna type, the volume of the smoothing region of the local SAR value, skin electrical constants, and the presence or absence of auricles, are examined. It is shown that the heterogeneity of the head barely affect the maximum local SAR when the telephone is located sufficiently close to the head. It is also shown that the electrical constants of skin which has lower conductivity provide the lower maximum local SAR in the head while the maximum local SAR within the brain is not significantly affected. The auricle which lies in closest proximity to the antenna is shown to have significant effect on the maximum local SAR. It is suggested that the presence of the auricle enhances the maximum local SAR by a factor that is 1.7-2.4 larger than the model without auricles.

This paper verifies the accuracy of PO as applied to the scattering of dipole waves by a finite size reflector which is composed of strips on a grounded dielectric slab. By using the closed form expressions of reflected waves from the surface, PO calculation can be conducted straightforwardly. The calculated results are compared with the experimental ones for vertical and horizontal dipoles over a circular reflector.