Protective layers in AC plasma display panels (PDP) are usually formed by vacuum vapor deposition or sputtering. It is important to study the protective MgO layer by means of screen-printing for fabricating a large size PDP and reducing its cost. With the objectives of enlarging the panel size and reducing cost, we studied the fabrication of the protective MgO layer by means of screen-printing. In this study, we succeeded in lowering the drive voltage by using a MgO powder prepared by vapor phase oxidation instead of conventional decomposition of the magnesium salt. Further, by adding a MgO liquid binder, we attained a good luminous efficiency twice as high as that attained with a sputtered protective layer and lowered the drive voltage. When this protective layer was combined with He-Xe gas enclosure, the half-life of luminance was 5,000 hours. With Ne-Xe gas, the luminance deteriorated no more than 40% after 5,000 hours. A screen-printed protective MgO layer containing no MgO liquid binder showed a short half-life of 800 hours even with the use of Ne-Xe gas. In this case, the discharge voltage changed greatly and some cells did not discharge. It is concluded that the combination of an ultrafine MgO powder prepared by vapor phase oxidation and a MgO liquid binder can clear the way for making AC PDPs with a long lifetime, high efficiency, and low voltage a practical reality.

This paper concerns multiple-valued logical function realized by asynchronous circuit that may have feed-back loops and its completeness problems. The first aim is to give mathematical definition of an asynchronous circuit over multiple-valued logical functions and of the realization of multiple-valued logical function by means of an asynchronous circuit. For asynchronous element, the definition of circuit construction and initialization are very sensitive. A slight modification may have a considerable influence on the completeness. We consider three types of completeness (LF-, GS-, NS-completeness) for a set of multiple-valued logical functions. The LF-completeness means completeness of logical functions realized loop-free cirucit. The GS-completeness means completeness under general initialization assumption. The NS-completeness measn completeness under initialization by input assumption. The second aim is to give a completeness criterion for each type of completeness. This aim is realized for LF-completeness in general case and GS-completeness in ternary case. A completeness criteria for GS-completeness and NS-completeness are given under strong conditions.

The local moment functions for discrete Wigner trispectrum are examined in ambiguity and in time-frequency domain. A concept of multiple and multidimensional circular convolution in frequency domain is introduced into the discrete Wigner higher order time-frequency signal representation of any order. It is shown that this concept based on the 1st order spectra of the signal offers an insight into the properties of inconsistent local moment functions and their representation both in ambiguity and time-frequency domain. It allows to prove that midfrequency crossterms of a multicomponent signal can not be removed by any generalized 4th order ambiguity function which employ kernel function in the ambiguity domain. It is shown, that the concept of multiple convolution in frequency domain can lead to the crossterm-reduced discete time-frequency representations of any order

This paper investigates Available Bit Rate (ABR) traffic control based on the Explicit Forward Congestion Indication (EFCI). A flow control mechanism is specified for ABR service to control the source rate. Resource Management (RM) cells are used to convey feedback. A source sends a forward RM cell for at least every N cells sent. At the destination, a forward RM cell turns around as a backward RM cell and returns to the source. A data cell has EFCI-bit in its header field. A network element sets EFCI-bit if it is congested. A destination indicates congestion status of networks by using RM cells based on the value of the EFCI-bit of the data cells. A one-bit feedback scheme is used by the ATM Forum. However, indication schemes have also been proposed which use explicit indication of source rate based both on values of the EFCI-bit of data cells and on other information contained in a forward RM cell. We evaluated explicit indication schemes as well as a one-bit scheme by simulation. Simulation study showed explicit cell rate indication gives superior performance than one-bit indication especially for long round trip distances. In this paper, we report the results with brief discussion.

Induced noises from breaking contact arc discharge and sliding contact discharge of dc motor are measured by pick up coil and current probe. Statistical properties, amplitude distribution probability (APD), of induced noise waveform are analyzed by simple method using intermediate frequency of spectrum analyzer. It is shown that APD characteristics can be used to estimate statistical characteristics and peak value of induced noise. Simulation model of the noise made by the combination of Gaussian noise is mentioned. The model called the composite noise generator (CNG) can be good fit to the real characteristics of both noises from breaking arc and dc motor. Applications of the CNG for noise filter using toroidal coil shows that the CNG is useful to realize the test of noise suppression characteristics. What parameters of the CNG should be considered is described for further applications.

This paper discusses the design of a small sensing device for EMI measurement which has equivalent characteristics to the absorbing clamp method, and reports the results on evaluation of the device. The device can be applied to the inspection apparatus for products such as power tools to examine conformance to EMI regulations of electromagnetic radiation spectrum. For reducing the scale of the EMI inspection apparatus, new matching circuit being replaced with the absorbing clamp method is adopted in the sensing device. Length of the sensing device is smaller than one twelfth of a wavelength of the measuring frequency in order to regard the sensing device as a concentrated constant circuit. The matching circuit is a resonant circuit which consists of a coaxial coupled transformer and a variable capacitor, and the transformer is a spiral copper tube in which a pair of AC power line wires passes. Resonant frequency of the circuit is tuned to the measuring frequency by adjusting the variable capacitor so that the circuit would terminate the power line by impedance zero. Thus interference current propagating along the power line from a product is absorbed, and observed by means of a VHF current probe which is settled in the matching circuit. A simple circuit for measurement of noise amplitude distribution (NAD) of interference current was developed as well as an equation to estimate quasi-peak value from the NAD. Result of measurement by the sensing device and proposed procedure confirmed good correlation with the standard absorbing clamp method, and deviation was within 3dB. Measurement time was reduced to 25 s per product, and the in-line EMI checker with new sensing device can be employed in a mass production line.

It is known that an anticausal IIR filter can be realized in real time by using the time reversed section technique. When combined with a casual IIR filter, the overall transfer function can yield exact linear phase characteristic in theory. This paper presents a new method for designing complex IIR digital filters with exact linear phase. The design problem of IIR filters with exact linear phase can be reduced to magnitude-only filter design. The proposed procedure is based on the formulation of an eigenvalue problem by using Remez exchange algorithm. By solving the eigenvalue problem to compute the real maximum eigenvalue, the solution of the rational interpolation problem can be achieved. Therefore, the optimal filter coefficients are easily obtained through a few iterations. The proposed design algorithm not only retains the speed inherent in Remez exchange algorithm, but also Simplifies the interpolation step because is has been reduced to the computation of the real maximum eigenvalue. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Among three factors mainly affecting the cache access time, i. e., hit access time, miss rate and miss penalty, previous approaches were focused on reducing the hit access time and miss rate. In this paper, we propose a scheme called MPC (Miss-Predicting Cache) which achives additional reduction of the average instruction cache access time through reducing the miss penalty. The MPC scheme which predicts cache miss and starts cache miss operations in advance, therefore, is supplementary to previous cache schemes targeted for reducing the miss rate and/or hit access time. Performance of the MPC scheme was evaluated using dinero, a trace-driven cache simulator, with the estimation of silicon area using 0.8 µm CMOS standard cell library.

For the purpose of automatic speech recognition, language models (LMs) are used to predict possible succeeding words for a given partial word sequence and thereby to reduce the search space. In this paper several kinds of stochastic language models (SLMs) are evaluated-bigram, trigram, hidden Markov model (HMM), bigram-HMM, stochastic context-free grammar (SCFG) and hand-written Bunsetsu Grammar. To compare the predictive power of these SLMs, the evaluation was conducted from two points of views: (1) relationship between the number of model parameters and entropy, (2) predictive rate of succeeding part of speech (POS) and succeeding word. We propose a new type of bigram-HMM and compare it with the other models. Two kinds of approximations are tried and examined through experiments. Results based on both of English Brown-Corpus and Japanese ATR dialog database showed that the extended bigram-HMM had better performance than the others and was more suitable to be a language model.

This paper investigates some fundamental properties of alternating one-way (or two-way) pushdown automata (pda's) with sublogarithmic space. We first show that strongly (weakly) sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way alternating pda's are more powerful than one-way alternating pda's with the same space-bound. Then, we show that weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way (one-way) alternating pda's are more powerful than two-way (one-way) nondeterministic pda's and alternating pda's with only universal states using the same space, and we also show that weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded one-way nondeterministic Turing machines are incomparable with one-way alternating Turing machines with only universal states using the same space. Furthermore, we investigate several fundamental closure properties, and show that the class of languages accepted by weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded one-way alternating pda's and the class of languages accepted by sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way deterministic pda's (nondeterministic pda's, alternating pda's with only universal states) are not closed under concatenation, Kleene closure, and length preserving homomorphism. Finally, we briefly investigate a relationship between 'strongly' and 'weakly'.

An ordered binary decision diagram (OBDD) is a directed acyclic graph for representing a Boolean function. OBDDs are widely used in various areas which require Boolean function manipulation, since they can represent efficiently many practical Boolean functions and have other desirable properties. However, there is very little theoretical research on the complexity of constructing an OBDD. In this paper, we prove that the optimal variable ordering problem of a shared BDD is NP-complete, and briefly discuss the approximation hardness of this problem and related OBDD problems.

A two-waveguide tapered velocity coupler is presented for a variable divider of optical beams. The coupler consists of one tapered slab waveguide in dimension and the other slab waveguide with a constant film thickness. It is assumed that the device is fabricated on a LiNbO3 substrate, with a push/pull external electric field parallel with the optic axis applied only in the film regions of the coupler. Various numerical simulations through the finite difference beam propagation analysis show that a wide range of dividing ratios from - 15 dB to 15 dB or more can be achieved with considerably small values of driving-voltage electrode-length product and that the dividing characteristics are stable over a wide range of frequencies.

We propose a new algorithm for minimizing the number of vertices of an approximate curve by keeping the error within a given bound (min-# problem) with the parallel-strip error criterion. The best existing algorithm which solves this problem has O (n2 log n) time complexity. Our algorithm which uses the Cone Intersection Method does not have an improved time complexity, but does have a high efficiency. In particular, for practical data such as those which represent the boundaries or the skeletons of an object, the new algorithm can solve the min-# problem in nearly O(n2) time.

It is demonstrated with the Berlekamp-Massey shift-register synthesis algorithm that the linear complexity value of binary complementary sequences is at least 3/4 of the sequence length. For some sequence pairs the linear complexity value can be even 0.98 times the sequence length. In the light of these results strongly non-linear complementary sequences are considered suitable for information security applications employing the spread-spectrum (SS) technique.

A Q-band high gain and low noise Variable Gain Amplifier (VGA) module using dual gate AlGaAs/InGaAs pseudomorphic HEMTs has been developed. The dual gate HEMT can be fabricated by the same process of the single gate HEMT which has the gate length of 0.15 µm. The Q-band VGA module consists of a 1-stage low noise amplifier (LNA) MMIC using a single gate HEMT and a 2-stage VGA MMIC using dual gate HEMTs. During the design, an accurate noise modeling is introduced to achieve low noise performance. A fully passivated film is employed to achieve reliability. The VGA module has a gain of more than 20 dB from 41 GHz to 52 GHz and a maximum gain of 24.5 dB at 50 GHz. A gain control range of more than 30 dB is achieved in the same frequency range. A phase deviation is less than 10 degrees in 10 dB gain control range. A minimum noise figure of 1.8 dB with an associated gain of 22 dB is achieved at 43 GHz and the noise figure is less than 2.5 dB with associated gain of more than 20 dB from 41 GHz to 46 GHz when biased for low noise figure. This performance is comparable with the best data ever reported for LNAs at Q-band including both GaAs based HEMTs and InP based HEMTs.

A new superresolution technique is proposed for high-resolution estimation of the scattering analysis. For complicated multipath propagation environment, it is not enough to estimate only the delay-times of the signals. Some other information should be required to identify the signal path. The proposed method can estimate the frequency characteristic of each signal in addition to its delay-time. One method called modified (Root) MUSIC algorithm is known as a technique that can treat both of the parameters (frequency characteristic and delay-time). However, the method is based on some approximations in the signal decorrelation, that sometimes make problems. Therefore, further modification should be needed to apply the method to the complicated scattering analysis. In this paper, we propose to apply a time-domain null filtering scheme to reduce some of the dominant signal components. It can be shown by a simple experiment that the new technique can enhance estimation accuracy of the frequency characteristic in the Root-MUSIC algorithm.

The coupling response of an external transient electromagnetic field to a transmission line is considered. An experiment has been conducted to verify the line equations for a transmission line excited externally by a transient near field. The model field is generated by a monopole antenna installed in the vicinity of the transmission line and driven by a step waveform. The waveform is analyzed into discrete spectrum components using a Fourier transform. The frequency-domain field components affecting the transmission line are estimated by the moment method, and then the induced frequency-domain voltage at the terminal load is converted into a time-domain voltage using an inverse Fourier transform. Comparison between the measured and the computed values provides verification of the line equations. The coupling mechanism is discussed from the experimental results. It seems equivalently that the transmission line picks up the field, generated at the feed point and the top point of the monopole antenna, at both terminal ends.

This paper presents a parallel move generation of a Chess machine system for achieving the purpose of reducing the number of move generation cycles. The parallel system is composed of five move generation modules which share the move generating cycles to reduce the time of building a game tree. Simulation results show that the proposed parallel move generation architecture takes about half of the number of move generation cycles to build a game tree that is the same as the one built by a sequential move generation module.

A high speed and low power consumption SCFL circuit design with low supply voltage is proposed. Focusing on the relationship between logic swing and supply voltage, the lower limit for the supply voltage is presented. Theoretical analysis and circuit simulation indicates that the logic swing needs to be optimized to maintain high average gm within the swing. An SCFL D-FF fabricated using a 0.25 µm n-AlGaAs/i-InGaAs HJFET process operates at up to 10 Gbps with power consumption as low as 19 mW at a supply voltage of 1.3 V.

Lightning surge protection semiconductor devices have been developed for subscriber telecommunication equipment that utilize transient thermal and low energy dissipation designs to improve surge-handling capability. A fabricated eight-cell device based on transient thermal design and a four-cell device with a thin substrate based on low energy dissipation design have a 1.83 and 1.80 times higher surge-handling capability, respectively, than a conventional device for lightning surge current waveforms of (1.5/30) µs.