This work presents a further development of the approach to modelling thermal (i.e. carrier-velocity-fluctuation) noise in semiconductor devices proposed in papers by the present authors. The basic idea of the approach is to apply classical theory of Ito's stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and stochastic diffusion processes to describe noise in devices and circuits. This innovative combination enables to form consistent mathematical basis of the noise research and involve a great variety of results and methods of the well-known mathematical theory in device/circuit design. The above combination also makes our approach completely different, on the one hand, from standard engineering formulae which are not associated with any consistent mathematical modelling and, on the other hand, from the treatments in theoretical physics which are not aimed at device/circuit models and design. (Both these directions are discussed in more detail in Sect. 1). The present work considers the bipolar transistor compact model derived in Ref. [2] according to theory of Ito's SDEs and stochastic diffusion processes (including celebrated Kolmogorov's equations). It is shown that the compact model is transformed into the Ito SDE system. An iterative method to determine noisy currents as entries of the stationary stochastic process corresponding to the above Ito system is proposed.

A new multiple-valued current-mode (MVCM) integrated circuit using a switched current-source control technique is proposed for a 1.5 V-supply high-speed arithmetic circuit with low-power dissipation. The use of a differential logic circuit (DLC) with a pair of dual-rail inputs makes the input voltage swing small, which results in a high driving capability at a lower supply voltage, while having large static power dissipation. In the proposed DLC using a switched current control technique, the static power dissipation can be greatly reduced because current sources in non-active circuit blocks are turned off. Since the gate of each current source is directly controlled by using a multiphase clock whose technique has been already used in dynamic circuit design, no additional transistors are required for currentsource control. As a typical example of arithmetic circuits, a new 1.5 V-supply 5454-bit multiplier based on a 0.8µm standard CMOS technology is also designed. Its performance is about 1.3 times faster than that of a binary fastest multiplier under the normalized power dissipation. A prototype chip is also fabricated to confirm the basic operation of the proposed MVCM integrated circuit.

The technique of common-multiplicand multiplication, CMM, is modified and the similar approach is utilized to enhance the performance of a recently proposed fast exponentiation algorithm by exponent decomposition. On average, the improved exponentiation, its original version, and the traditional right to left binary exponentiation algorithm take 1.292m+11,1.375m+3, and 1.5m multiplications, respectively where m is the bit length of the exponent. Finally, it is shown how to improve the overall performance of an exponentiation by employing the improved exponentiation algorithm, the improved CMM algorithm , and any general purpose fast multiplication algorithm.

In this letter, we obtain the absolute exponential stability result of neural networks with globally Lipschitz continuous, increasing and bounded activation functions under a sufficient condition which can unify some relevant sufficient ones for absolute stability in the literature. The obtained absolute exponential stability result generalizes the existing ones about absolute stability of neural networks. Moreover, it is demonstrated, by a mathematically rigorous proof, that the network time constant is inversely proportional to the global exponential convergence rate of the network trajectories to the unique equilibrium. A numerical simulation example is also presented to illustrate the analysis results.

This paper describes a concept of the quasioptical spatial power combining technique and its demonstration of active integrated antenna arrays with strong coupling as an actual example of high efficient combiner in high frequencies. Some configurations of the arrays such as a 3-element linear array and a 33 array are designed with a circuit and electromagnetic simulator. In order to predict the operating frequencies, large signal FET model parameters are determined from measured small signal S-parameters.

We study state feedback control of discrete event systems described by the Golaszewski-Ramadge model. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a balanced state feedback controller under partial observations.

A new linearization technique of a transconductor is presented. The linearization is realized by using a differential current amplifier with an emitter-coupled pair. A specific value of the linearization parameter gives a maximally flat or an equiripple characteristic. Deviations from the theoretical characteristic can be adjusted by tuning the tail current of the emitter-coupled pair. The proposed technique is demonstrated by PSPICE simulation.

The number of DRAMs that have adopted hierarchical word-line architecture has increased as developed DRAM memory capacity has increased to more than 64 Mb. Use of the architecture enhances many kinds of DRAM performances, such as access time and fabrication process margin. However, the architecture does cause some problems. This paper describes some kinds of hierarchical word-line circuitries that have been proposed. It also describes a partial subarray activation scheme that is combined with hierarchical word-line and data-line architectures and discusses their potential and required specifications for future multi-giga bit DRAMs.

A 3-dimensional beam propagation method is described for the analysis of nonlinear optical fibers, where the finite element and finite difference methods are, respectively, utilized for discretizing the fiber cross section and the propagation direction. For efficient evaluation of wide-angle beam propagation, Pade approximation is applied to the differential operator along the propagation direction. In order to improve accuracy of solutions, isoparametric elements and numerical integration formulae derived by Hammer et al. are introduced. The propagation characteristics of nonlinear optical fibers with linear core and nonlinear cladding are analyzed, and unique features of nonlinear guided-wave propagation, such as spatial soliton emission, are investigated.

We present a new class of trellis-codes for partial-response channel. Our code configuration is based on the coded 1 - D scheme due to Wolf and Ungerboeck. However, no precoder between a convolutional encoder and the partialresponse channel is used. A new lower bound on the minimum free squared Euclidean distance of channel code is shown. The bound is available for any PR channel with a finite response. New codes for 1 - D and (1 - D) (1 + D)2 channels are found by computer code search using the lower bound. Some of the new codes have excellent properties: a significant d2free and a small decoding complexity.

Partial capture effect for multi-carrier radio packet communication network is evaluated in frequency selective fading channel. In multi-carrier modulation (MCM) network where each terminal uses several sub-carriers for transmission,the terminals have different instantaneous frequency responses because of its location, fading pattern, and other various factors. This generates the difference of received power in frequency domain, then partial capture effect can be considered at each sub-carrier. Moreover these partially captured packets are not damaged by inter symbol interference (ISI) caused by frequency selective fading, which seriously degrades single-carrier modulation (SCM) network. From this point of view we present the partial capture effect for the MCM network in the frequency selective fading environment. The results show that the MCM network with partial capture has more advantages than the MCM network without partial capture in terms of the throughput and the average number of transmissions.

Effective collaboration in ComputerSupported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments is nowadays an important research topic. It deals with two main problems: the configuration of an appropriate learning group and the intelligent task distribution in the practice of domain knowledge. In order to have effective collaboration in a CSCL environment, we have proposed a set of software agents that assist the learners to select their learning tasks, according to their capabilities and the possibilities of collaboration between them. In this paper the cooperation among software agents is presented as the key point for effective collaboration in CSCL environments. In this kind of environments the learner must have enough collaboration and learning possibilities, being motivated with the experience of social knowledge construction. We have been working on the problem of effective collaboration in CSCL environments, based on the cooperation between software agents developed for GRACILE, our Japanese Grammar CSCL environment. Before, we have proposed intelligent agents that assist the learners. Our next step has been the design of the cooperation between agents in order to create possibilities of effective collaboration in a virtual community of practice. In order to evaluate the performance of our agents we made several simulations. The results obtained from these simulations of diverse types of learning groups provided us with guidelines for the configuration of groups in CSCL environments, where effective collaboration is possible.

A quantitative study is made on performance of neutron penumbral imaging with a toroidal-segment aperture, and it focused on isoplanaticity of aperture point spread function and effect of the non-isoplanaticity on the reconstructed images. The results show that the aperture point spread function is satisfactorily isoplanatic for a small field of view, while for a large field of view the point spread function is not satisfactorily isoplanatic resulting in some distortion in the reconstructed image and reduction of resolution.

Weakness of a block cipher, which has provable immunity against linear cryptanalysis, is investigated. To this end, the round transformation used in MISTY, which is a data encryption algorithm recently proposed by M. Matsui from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, is compared to the round transformation of DES from the point of view of pseudrandom generation. An important property of the MISTY cipher is that, in terms of theoretically provable resistance against linear and differential cryptanalysis, which are the most powerful cryptanalytic attacks known to date, it is more robust than the Data Encryption Standard or DES. This property can be attributed to the application of a new round transform in the MISTY cipher, which is obtained by changing the location of the basic round-function in a transform used in DES. Cryptograohic roles of the transform used in the MISTY cipher are the main focus of this paper. Our research reveals that when used for constructiong pseudorandom permutations, the transform employed by the MISTY cipher is inferior to the transform in DES, though the former is superior to the latter in terms of strength against linear and differential attacks. More specifically, we show that a 3-round (4-round, respectively) concatenation of transforms used in the MISTY cipher is not a pseudorandom (super pseudorandom, respectively) permutation.

With the scale-down of VLSI chip size and the reduction of switching time of logic gates, crosstalk faults become an important problem in testing of VLSI. For synchronous sequential circuits, the crosstalk pulses on data lines will be considered to be harmless, because they can be invalidated by a clocking phase. However, crosstalk pulses generated on clock lines or reset lines will cause an erroneous operation. In this work, we have analyzed a crosstalk fault scheme, and developed a fault simulator based on the scheme. Throughout this work, we considered the crosstalk fault as unexpected strong capacitive coupling between one data line and one clock line. Since we must consider timing in addition to a logic value, the unit delay model is used in our fault simulation. Our experiments on some benchmark circuits show that fault activation rates and fault detection rates vary widely depending on circuit characteristics. Fault detection rates of up to 80% are obtained from our simulation with test vectors generated at random.

We have investigated the BER performance of TC 8PSK with 2 branch SC and MRC diversities on spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channel. The upper bounds using the transfer function bounding technique are derived several numerical results are shown. Although the correlation between branches causes signal-to-noise (SNR) loss (relative to uncorrelated fading case) for SC and MRC diversities, the diversity can lead to achieve the diversity gain compared to the system without diversity. It is found that the diversity gain of 4-state TC 8PSK is larger than 8-state TC 8PSK. It is also shown that the BER performance of TC 8PSK is decreased as the antenna separation is decreased.

The convergence characteristics of the adaptive beamformer with the RLS algorithm are analyzed in this paper. In case of the RLS adaptive beamformer, the convergence characteristics are significantly affected by the spatial characteristics of the signals/noises in the environment. The purpose of this paper is to show how these physical parameters affect the convergence characteristics. In this paper, a typical environment where a few directional noises are accompanied by background noise is assumed, and the influence of each component of the environment is analyzed separately using rank analysis of the correlation matrix. For directional components, the convergence speed is faster for a smaller number of noise sources since the effective rank of the input correlation matrix is reduced. In the presence of background noise, the convergence speed is slowed down due to the increase of the effective rank. However, the convergence speed can be improved by controlling the initial matrix of the RLS algorithm. The latter section of this paper focuses on the physical interpretation of this initial matrix, in an attempt to elucidate the mechanism of the convergence characterisitics.

This paper presents a method of multiple fault diagnosis in sequential circuits by input-sequence pairs having sensitizing input pairs. We, first, introduce an input-sequence pair having sensitizing input pairs to diagnose multiple faults in a sequential circuit represented by a combinational array model. We call such input-sequence pair the sensitizing sequence pair in this paper. Next, we describe a diagnostic method for multiple faults in sequential circuits by the sensitizing sequence pair. From a relation between a sensitizing path generated by a sensitizing sequence pair and a subcircuit, the proposed method deduces the suspected faults for the subcircuits, one by one, based on the responses observed at primary outputs without probing any internal line. Experimental results show that our diagnostic method identifies fault locations within small numbers of suspected faults.

A new learning algorithm is proposed to enhance fault tolerance ability of the feedforward neural networks. The algorithm focuses on the links (weights) that may cause errors at the output when they are open faults. The relevances of the synaptic weights to the output error (i.e. the sensitivity of the output error to the weight fault) are estimated in each training cycle of the standard backpropagation using the Taylor expansion of the output around fault-free weights. Then the weight giving the maximum relevance is decreased. The approach taken by the algorithm described in this paper is to prevent the weights from having large relevances. The simulation results indicate that the network trained with the proposed algorithm do have significantly better fault tolerance than the network trained with the standard backpropagation algorithm. The simulation results show that the fault tolerance and the generalization abilities are improved.

Nyberg and Knudsen proved that the maximum average of differential probability (ADPmax) and the maximum average of linear probability (ALPmax) of Feistel cipher with over 4 rounds can be evaluated as ADPmax 2DCP2max and ALPmax 2LCP2max using the maximum of defferential characteristic probability (DCPmax) and the maximum of linear characteristic probability (LCPmax) per round. This paper shows ADPmax DCP2max and ALPmax LCP2max if the F function is a bijection and the Feistel cipher has more than 3 rounds. The results prove that Feistel ciphers are stronger against differential and linear cryptanalyses than previously thought. Combining this result with that of Luby and Rackoff, the implication is that the 3-round Feistel cipher could be used as a building block cipher for the construction of provable secure block cipher algorithm.