This paper presents a methodology for optimizing the layout of on-chip spiral inductors using structural parameters and design frequency in a response surface method. The proposed method uses scattering parameters (S-parameter) to express inductor characteristics, and hence is independent of spiral geometries and equivalent circuit models. The procedure of inductor optimization is described, and a design example is presented.

In this paper, the effects of visual information on associated auditory information were investigated when presented simultaneously under dynamic conditions on a wide screen. Experiments of an auditory-visual stimulus presentation using a computer graphics movie of a moving patrol car and its siren sound, which were combined in various locations, were performed in 19 subjects. The experimental results showed the following: the visual stimulus at the beginning of the presentation captured the sound image stronger than that at the end (i.e., beginning effect), the sound image separated from the visual image even when both stimulus locations were exactly at the same place and then when both stimuli moved in opposite directions from each other, the visual stimulus tended to capture the sound image stronger in the peripheral visual field than in the central visual field, and the visual stimulus moving toward the sound source captured the sound image stronger than that moving away from the sound source.

Commercial breaks are often placed at the climax of stories in recent TV programs in Japan, which may cause some serious effects on audiences, especially children, since this practice disturbs the concentrations. The experiment measured the psycho-physiological state of four children before and after commercials. The results showed that the next peak of attention is delayed by distracting the attention.

In recent years, studies on multi-hop wireless networks have been made by many brilliant researchers. Such a network consists of a set of mobile nodes having wireless communication devices, and is constructed by the nodes autonomously. The most serious problem on the network is the difficulty of network topology management. All nodes are freely movable and their topology is dynamically changing continuously, so it is difficult to determine the paths to any nodes in the network. Although a classical flooding algorithm is a robust algorithm in that situation, the number of retransmitting nodes increases beyond what is necessary. In this paper, a new and more efficient information dissemination algorithm called WDD is proposed, which can substitute for various broadcasting algorithms by just selecting an appropriate waiting-time function. The algorithm is implemented and its applicability is evaluated on a network simulator.

In the last few years we have seen an explosion in the number of notebook computers and in the growth of the Internet. Mobile users expect to access the Internet's information resources and to communicate with other Internet users. The concept of Mobile IP is proposed to satisfy these demands. Using the base Mobile IP protocol, all datagrams destined for a mobile node are routed through that mobile node's home agent, which intercepts and tunnels each datagram to the mobile node's current location. This tunneling scheme creates a triangle routing problem, causing packets to travel through the home agent. In this paper, we propose that a Proxy Home Router (PHR) for routing performance improvement in a Mobile IP environment. One or more of Intermediate Systems (IS) on the route path between the correspondent node (CN) and the home agent (HA) are established as a PHR which then delivers packet instead of the home agent (HA). This PHR route optimization (PHR-RO) scheme has the following features. It is compatible with the base Mobile IP with existing Internet computers, and applications. Also, it is unnecessary for a CN to be modified in the proposed architecture. We also define Route Optimization messages in order to optimize route to a mobile node. Using these protocol extensions, a PHR may cache the binding information of a mobile node, and then tunnel their datagrams for the mobile node (MN) directly to the care-of address (CoA), bypassing the mobile node's home agent (HA). To analyze the performance of our PHR route optimization (PHR-RO) scheme, we propose a simulation model and show how to improve routing performance. Through this performance analysis, we conclude that the route optimization with a proxy home router (PHR) has better performance in terms of the end-to-end delay and TCP throughput.

The accuracy of channel estimation significantly affects the performance of coherent rake receiver in DS-CDMA systems. It is desirable for improved channel estimation to employ a channel estimation filter (CEF) whose bandwidth is adjustable to the channel condition. In this paper, we consider the use of moving average (MA) FIR filters as the CEF since it is simple to implement and can provide relatively good receiver performance. First, we optimize the tap size of the MA FIR CEF so as to minimize the mean squared error of the estimated channel impulse response. For practical applications, we propose a low-complexity adaptive channel estimator (ACE), where the tap size of the MA FIR CEF is adjusted based on the estimated channel condition by exploiting the correlation characteristics of the received pilot signal. Numerical results show that the use of the proposed ACE can provide the receiver performance comparable to that of Wiener CEF without exact a priori information on the operating condition.

Integral equation method is used to compute three-dimension-structure capacitance in this paper. Since some multi-conductor structures present regular periodic property, the periodic cell is used to reduce the computational domain with adding appropriate magnetic and electric walls. The periodic Green's function in the integral equation method is represented in the form of infinite series with slow convergence. In this paper, Shanks transformation is used to accelerate the convergence. Numerical examples show that the proposed method is accurate with a much higher efficiency in capacitance extraction for 3-D periodic structures.

A high-speed bipolar ECL comparator circuit with a latch is described. The spike noise generated by charging the base-to-emitter diffusion capacitor on the transition of differential transistors' switching in a sample-and-latch circuit is reduced by inserting the emitter degeneration resistors so that neither of them becomes completely cut off. The frequency bandwidth of a pre-amplifier is increased by using coupled inductors as differential loads. As a result, -3 dB frequency bandwidth of a pre-amplifier becomes 10 GHz, and 4 GS/s operation with 6-bit equivalent precision from a 3.3 V power supply is confirmed by the circuit simulation using device parameters from the 25 GHz silicon bipolar process.

This letter discusses the performance of online SNR estimation including fading parameter estimation for parallel combinatorial SS (PC/SS) systems. The PC/SS systems are partial-code-parallel multicode SS systems, which have high-rate data transmission capability. Nakagami-m distribution is assumed as fading channel model to cover a wide range of fading conditions. The SNR and fading parameter estimation considered in this letter is based on only a statistical ratio of correlator outputs at the receiver. Numerical results show that SNR estimation performance with fading parameter estimation is close to the one in the case of perfect fading parameter information, if the number of transmitting PN codes is less than a half of assigned PN codes.

There has recently been considerable interest in research on wearable non-grounded force display. However, there have been no developments for the communication of nonverbal information (ex. tennis and golf swing). We propose a small and lightweight wearable force display to present motion timing and direction. The display outputs a torque using rotational moment and mechanical brakes. We explain the principle of this device, and describe an actual measurement of the torque and torque sensitivity experiments.

This paper presents the improvement of the transient response and stability for a two-stage DC-DC converter by removing the output inductor. The conventional two-stage converter consists of a buck converter used as the first stage and a half-bridge converter used as the second stage. The proposed circuit topology removing the output inductor and the conventional topology are compared. Removing the output inductor results in the system-order reduction of the transfer function. As a result, the stability is improved, and the crossover frequency of the open-loop transfer function becomes higher. The effectiveness of the proposed circuit topology was experimentally confirmed.

We have proposed a new low-IF transceiver architecture to simultaneously achieve both a small chip area and good minimum input sensitivity. The distinctive point of the receiver architecture is that we replace the complicated high-order analog filter for channel selection with the combination of a simple low-order analog filter and a sharp digital band-pass filter. We also proposed a high-speed convergence AGC (automatic gain controller) and a demodulation block to realize the proposed digital architecture. For the transceiver, we further reduce the chip area by applying a new form of direct modulation for the VCO. Since conventional VCO direct modulation tends to suffer from variation of the modulation index with frequency, we have developed a new compensation technique that minimizes this variation, and designed the low-phase noise VCO with a new biasing method to achieve large PSRR (power-supply rejection ratio) for oscillation frequency. The test chip was fabricated in 0.35-µm BiCMOS. The chip size was 3 3 mm2; this very small area was realized by the advantages of the proposed transceiver architecture. The transceiver also achieved good minimum input sensitivity of -85 dBm and showed interference performance that satisfied the requirements of the Bluetooth standard.

Conventional authentication methods, proposed mainly for gray-scale and color images, are not appropriate for palette images, which usually contain simple contents with a limited number of colors. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to verify the integrity of palette images and to locate tampered regions without re-quantization and re-indexing processes. The proposed approach is based on a combined use of both the fragile watermarking and the digital signature approaches, taking the advantages of both approaches and avoiding their drawbacks. To protect a block of an image, authentication signals are first generated according to a secret key. Based on an embeddability property defined in the study, the pixels of each block are classified as embeddable or non-embeddable. Only the former ones are used to embed the authentication signals. A corresponding digital signature is generated as well to compensate the possibly limited embedding capacity of the embeddable pixels that are insufficient in number. To authenticate a block, the recovered authentication signals, yielded from the extracted watermark and the received digital signature, are compared with the one generated according to the correct secret key, to prove the block's legitimacy. The effectiveness and the security of the proposed method are analyzed and tested with a variety of palette images. The results indicate that the proposed method can offer high authentication accuracy as well as maintain a good tradeoff between the authentication signal portability and the resulting image quality.

The threshold voltage mismatch of FD (Fully depleted) SOI (Silicon on insulator) devices have been studied. Floating body MOSFETs operating at high drain voltage show a large mismatch in the threshold voltage compared with body-tied MOSFETs. Those experimental data under different drain voltages indicate that both floating body effect and DIBL (Drain induced barrier lowering) are involved in the threshold voltage mismatch of floating body MOSFETs.

This paper presents the realization of the radio frequency (RF) power and data transmission for implantable microstimulators. This implantable device composes an internal RF front-end circuit, a control circuit, and a microstimulator. A 2 MHz AM-modulated signal including the power and data necessary for the implantable device is received, and a stable dc voltage and digital data will be extracted to further stimulate neuromuscular stimulation. In this implantable stimulator, the digital part is implemented by field programmable gate array (FPGA), and the analog part is implemented in a standard single-poly fifth-metal 0.25 µm CMOS process. The latter occupies a silicon area smaller than 0.00638 mm2 and produces an output current with 5-bit resolution for stimulations. The measuring stimulating current is 2.77 mA while the stimulation frequency is from 20 Hz to 2 kHz and the pulse width of stimulation current is from 100 µs to 450 µs. In addition, the simulation results of the RF front-end circuit and the verification of the control logic circuit are also presented in this paper.

A compact low-voltage CMOS exponential current-to-voltage converter free from transconductance parameter matching between NMOS and PMOS is proposed. The circuit is composed of level shift circuits and current mirrors. The SPICE simulation results show a 27 dB linear range with a linearity error of less than 1 dB.

In this letter, we propose an effective cooperative caching system under the assumption that each web object is accessed randomly. Under this assumption, the access frequency per unit time is given by Poisson distribution and the probability distribution of the web object in the future is derived. Based on this probability distribution, one can obtain the criterion to allocate the web objects with more access expected to the cache servers closer to clients. It is also shown that there is a tradeoff between the precision to allocate objects and the efficiency of caching.

It is generally believed that one major function of the immune system is helping to protect multicellular organisms from foreign pathogens, especially replicating pathogens such as viruses, bacteria and parasites. The relevant events in the immune system are not only the molecules, but also their interactions. The immune cells can respond either positively or negatively to the recognition signal. A positive response would result in cell proliferation, activation and antibody secretion, while a negative response would lead to tolerance and suppression. Depending upon these immune mechanisms, an immune network model (here, we call it the binary immune network) based on the biological immune response network was proposed in our previous work. However, there are some problems like that input and memory were all binary and it did not consider the antigen diversity of immune system. To improve these problems, in this paper we propose a fuzzy immune network model by considering the antigen diversity of immune system that is the most important property to be exhibited in the immune system. As an application, the proposed fuzzy immune network is applied to pattern recognition problem. Computer simulations illustrate that the proposed fuzzy immune network model not only can improve the problems existing in the binary immune network but also is capable of clustering arbitrary sequences of large-scale analog input patterns into stable recognition categories.

The present paper proposes differential transmission line structures on Si ULSI. Interconnect structures are examined using numerical results from a two-dimensional electromagnetic simulation (Ansoft, 2D Extractor). The co-planar and diagonal-pair lines are found to have superior characteristics for gigahertz signal propagation through long interconnects. The proposed diagonal-pair line can reduce the crosstalk noise and interconnect resource concurrently.

Recently, Ma and Chen proposed a new authenticated encryption scheme with public verifiability. The signer can generate a signature with message recovery for a specified recipient. With a dispute, the recipient has ability to convert the signature into an ordinary one that can be verified by anyone without divulging her/his private key and the message. However, we point out that any adversary can forge a converted signature in this article.