A nonlinear circuit described by the forced Duffing's equation is known to display a rich variety of dynamical behavior. Coupling two Duffing's circuits by a linear resistor, we conclude that combinatorial resonances occur on weak coupling condition. In a coupled system, although symmetrical properties are usually observed, breaking of symmetry can lead to much more complex nonlinear resonant phenomena. In this paper, we discuss asymmetry in four cases of perturbation on parameters. Many bifurcation diagrams are presented. Comparing with symmetrical cases, we analyze the combinatorial resonances in coupled Duffing's circuit completely.

Affine arithmetic is a kind of interval arithmetic defined by Stolfi et al. In affine arithmetic, it is difficult to realize the efficient nonlinear binomial operations. The purpose of this letter is to propose a new dividing method which is able to supply more suitable evaluation than the old dividing method. And this letter also shows the efficiency of the new dividing method by numerical examples.

A microstrip array antenna with 45-degree inclined linear polarization is proposed for automotive radars. The proposed antenna has the advantages of high aperture efficiency, low profile and ease of manufacture. The rectangular radiating elements inclined at 45 degrees to the straight microstrip line are directly connected to it at their corners in the proposed array antenna. The radiating element has a feature that radiation conductance for co-polarization is controlled widely enough to set desired amplitude distribution keeping excited mode for cross-polarization negligibly small. The feed line loss of the linear array antenna having 15 wavelengths is estimated 0.9 dB in the design taking the loss of the microstrip line into account. The performance of two types of developed antennas, for electrical and mechanical scanning radars, is presented. The fan beam subarray antenna for electrical scanning radars has an aperture efficiency of 53% with gain of 22.5 dBi at 76.5 GHz. For mechanical scanning radars, the two-stage series feeding circuit is also proposed for lower feed line loss and setting desired amplitude distribution. The pencil beam array antenna has an aperture efficiency of 39% with gain of 32.2 dBi at 76.5 GHz.

Nominalization is a linguistic phenomenon in which events usually described in terms of clauses are expressed in the form of noun phrases. Extracting event structures is an important task in text mining applications. To achieve this goal, clauses are parsed and the argument structure of main verbs are extracted from the parsed results. This kind of preprocessing has been commonly done in the past research. In order to extract event structure from nominalized phrases as well, we need to establish a technique to transform nominalized phrases into clauses. In this paper, we propose a method to transform nominalized phrases into clauses by using corpus-based approach. The proposed method first enumerates possible predicate/argument structures by referring to a nominalized phrase (noun phrase) and makes their ranking based on the frequency of each argument in the corpus. The algorithm based on this method was evaluated using a corpus consisting of 24,626 aviation safety reports in English and it achieved a 78% accuracy in transformation. The algorithm was also evaluated by applying a text mining application to extract events and their cause-effect relations from the texts. This application produced an improvement in the text mining application's performance.

Competition of two-photon and one-photon absorption in Si-APD was studied. Device should be cooled down in order to clearly observe two-photon absorption at low illumination intensity. Passive Geiger mode operation was studied to sensitively detect small number of carriers generated by two-photon absorption. The illumination intensity dependence of the photocurrent pulse count number is well explained by taking into account the two absorption mechanisms and a dead time period that depends on bias voltage.

Let us introduce n ( 2) nonlinear mappings fi (i = 1,2,,n) defined on complete linear metric spaces (Xi-1,ρ) (i = 1,2,,n), respectively, and let fi: Xi-1 Xi be completely continuous on bounded convex closed subsets Xi-1,(i = 1,2,,n 0), such that fi() . Moreover, let us introduce n fuzzy-set-valued nonlinear mappings Fi: Xi-1 Xi {a family of all non-empty closed compact fuzzy subsets of Xi}. Here, we have a fixed point theorem on the recurrent system of β-level fuzzy-set-valued mapping equations: xi Fiβ(xi-1,fi(xi-1)), (i = 1,2,,n 0), where the fuzzy set Fi is characterized by a membership function µFi(xi): Xi [0,1], and the β-level set Fiβ of the fuzzy set Fi is defined as Fiβ {ξi Xi | µFi(ξi) β}, for any constant β (0,1]. This theorem can be applied immediately to discussion for characteristics of ring nonlinear network systems disturbed by undesirable uncertain fluctuations and to fine estimation of available behaviors of those disturbed systems. In this paper, its mathematical situation and proof are discussed, in detail.

The crucial handover elements in wireless ATM networks are handover delay and handover efficiency. Since the research about the handover in wireless ATM has until now focused mainly on minimizing handover delay, the results have shown the inefficiency of network resources. In broadband wireless ATM networks, handover efficiency is critical to network capacity. In this paper, we propose a new handover scheme based on a partial path rerouting scheme called the delay limited best-fit backtracking scheme. The scheme searches for the crossover switch that limits handover delay and at the same time maximizes handover efficiency. It uses a new crossover switch searching method, which is an adaptive backtracking searching method that uses a best-fit search manner, to search for the optimal crossover switch that satisfies the given crossover switch condition. We evaluated the performance of proposed handover scheme, and show that the suggested scheme can improve handover efficiency more than other handover schemes.

In this paper, we propose new physical design techniques to reduce crosstalk noise and crosstalk-induced delay variations caused in a nanometer-scale system-on-a-chip (SoC). We have almost eliminated the coupling effect between signal wires by simply optimizing parameters for the automatic place and route methodology. Our approach consists of two techniques, (1) A 3-D optimization technique for tuning the routing grid configuration both in the horizontal and vertical directions. (2) A co-optimization technique for tuning the cell utilization ratio and the routing grid simultaneously. Experiments on the design of an image processing circuit fabricated in a 0.13 µm CMOS process with six layers of copper interconnect show that crosstalk noise is almost eliminated. From the results of a static timing analysis considering the worst-case crosstalk condition, the longest path delay is decreased by about 15% maximum if technique (1) is used, and by about 7% maximum if technique (2) is used. The 7-15% delay reduction has been achieved without process improvement, and this reduction corresponds to between 1/4 and 1/2 generation of process progress.

Multicasting is an efficient communication tool for use in multi-point applications such as conferencing and information distribution. In ad hoc networks, node mobility causes frequent changes of network topology, and re-construction of the multicast tree in an efficient and effective manner becomes a critical issues. In case of link breakage, most of the multicast tree construction protocols available presently require either a total re-build of the tree or to reconnect a disjoined node back to the multicast tree via the shortest path which may disrupt the optimising factors, such as energy consumption, delay or cost, used in the building of the original tree. In this paper, we introduce a computationally efficient recovery algorithm which will also minimise the power consumption on the tree.

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of pilot channel-aided channel estimation for multicarrier direct-sequence (DS) code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system as proposed by Kondo and Milstein . We consider a multicarrier DS-CDMA system with different number of pilot and data channels. We investigate the optimum number of pilot channels for various coherence bandwidths and different number of subchannels. Keeping the total transmit bandwidth fixed, an optimum number of total subchannels and pilot channels exists under specific channel environment and transmitted energy. As the number of pilot channels increases, more accurate channel estimation is possible but the number of data channels decreases resulting a smaller diversity gain. We show that there is a tradeoff between the number of pilot channels and data subchannels, thereby requiring differing numbers of optimum pilot channels according to channel conditions.

A minimum feedback node set in a graph is a minimum node subset whose deletion makes the graph acyclic. Its detection in a dependency graph is important to recover from a deadlock configuration. A livelock configuration is also avoidable if a check point is set in each node in the minimum feedback node set. Hence, its detection is very important to establish dependable network systems. In this letter, we give a minimum feedback node set in a trivalent Cayley graph. Assuming that each word has n bits, for any node, we can judge if it is included in the set or not in constant time.

Co-containing ferrite thin-film/Mn-Zn ferrite thin-film double-layered perpendicular media were prepared using reactive ECR sputtering and magnetron sputtering methods, and their magnetic and structural properties and recording characteristics were studied. The Mn-Zn ferrite thin-film backlayer had saturation magnetization of 3.5 kG and coercivity of 60 Oe. Reproduced voltage for the Co-containing ferrite thin-film/Mn-Zn ferrite thin-film double-layered medium was about twice of that for the Co-containing ferrite single-layer medium.

A framework is described for a peer-to-peer information exchange system, and a collaborative information retrieval (IR) scheme for the system is proposed. The aims of the system include smooth knowledge and information management to activate organizations or communities. Conventional server-centric systems are weak because they create information-providing bottlenecks. Accordingly, the proposed framework targets the collaborative inter-working of personal repositories that accumulate per-user information, and accept and service requests. Issues concerning the framework are addressed. One issue is the retrieval of information from another's personal repository; the retrieval criteria of a system are tightly personalized for its user. The system is assumed to employ a vector space model with a concept-base as its IR mechanism. The vector space on one system is very different from that on another system. Another issue is the automated control of the information-providing criteria. This paper presents solutions to the first problem. To achieve IR that provides satisfactory results to a user requiring information from another's personal repository, we need vector space equalization to compensate for the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. The paper presents a vector space equalization scheme, the automated relevance feedback scheme, that compensates the differences in the vector spaces of the personal repositories. We implement the scheme as a system and evaluate its performance using documents on the Internet.

Determining indexing strings is an important factor in information retrieval. Ideally, the strings should be words that represent documents or queries. Although any single word may be the first candidate for indexing strings for an English corpus, it may not be ideal due to the existence of compound nouns, which are often good indexing strings, and which often depend on the genre of the corpus used. The situation is even worse in Japanese or Chinese where the words are not separated by spaces. In this paper, we propose a method of determining indexing strings based on statistical analysis. The novel features of our method are to make the most of the statistical measure called "adaptation" and not to use language-dependent resources such as dictionaries and stop word lists. In evaluating our method using a Japanese test collection, we found that it actually improves the precision of information retrieval systems.

We have developed an ultrahigh-sensitivity "New Super-HARP" handheld camera, which has a sensitivity that is about 100 times as great as that of a CCD camera. The sensitivity of TV cameras is determined by the performance of the imaging device. We developed the world's first imaging device that achieves high sensitivity and high picture quality by using the avalanche multiplication phenomenon in an amorphous selenium photoconductive target. This "Super-HARP" pickup tube, which has already been used in TV production, has a selenium target 8-µm thick. It is about 10 times as sensitive as CCDs. We have now developed a greatly improved version of the Super-HARP tube with a target 25-µm thick. This improved version, called the New Super-HARP pickup tube, is about 10 times as sensitive as the Super-HARP pickup tube. The New Super-HARP handheld camera equipped with the new tubes has a maximum sensitivity of 11 lx at F8. This camera is a powerful tool for reporting breaking news at night and other low-light conditions, the production of scientific programs, and numerous other applications.

Retrieval effectiveness depends on both the retrieval model and how terms are extracted and indexed. For Chinese, Japanese and Korea text, there are no spaces to delimit words. Indexing using hybrid terms (i.e. words and bigrams) was found to be effective and efficient using the 2-Poisson model in NTCIR-III open evaluation workshop. Here, we explore another Okapi weight, BM25, based on the 2-Poisson model and compared their performances with bigram and word indexing strategies. Results show that word indexing is the most efficient in terms of indexing time and storage but hybrid term indexing requires the least amount of retrieval time per query. Without pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF), our BM25 appeared to yield better retrieval effectiveness performance for short queries. With PRF, our implementation of the BM11 weights, which are a simplified version of BM25, with hybrid term indexing remains the most effective combination for retrieval in this study.

Several 2 nm seed layers were sputtered to increase coercivity (Hc) and anisotropy (Ku) of CoCrPt/Ti perpendicular recording media. Among them 2 nm Ag seed layer was very effective to increase Hc of (Co78Cr22)100-xPtx/Ti (x = 14, 20). However, the effect was more pronounced when (Co78Cr22)100-xPtx/Ti became thinner. In addition α[=4π(dM/dH)Hc] decreased when the Ag layer was used. The film thickness below which the seed Ag layer was effective was reduced with decreasing Pt content. However, the Ag seed layer did not promote (0002) texture of Ti and CoCrPt layers. Domain size was reduced when the Ag seed layer was used. The effects of Ag seed layer are thought to be due to change of exchange constant of the grains, for which the grain boundary plays an important role. Effects of film thickness and Pt content can also be explained successfully by the variation of exchange constant due to grain boundary. Some experimental evidence as well as crude mode for exchange constant variation are given.

This paper proposes a novel CMOS built-in current sensor (BICS) for on-line current testing. Proposed BICS detects abnormal current in circuit under test (CUT) and makes a Pass/Fail signal through comparison between the CUT current and the duplicated inverter current. This circuit consists of two current-to-voltage conversion transistors, a full swing generator, a voltage comparator, and an inverter block. It requires 16 transistors. Since this BICS does not require the extra clock, the added extra pin is only one output pin. Furthermore, the BICS does not require test mode selection. Therefore the BICS can be applied to on-line current testing. The validity and effectiveness are verified through the HSPICE simulation of circuits with defects. When the CUT is an 8 8 parallel multiplier, the area overhead of the BICS is about 4.34%.

In this paper, a novel algorithm is presented for blind estimation of the symbol timing and frequency offset for OFDM systems. Time-varying frequency-selective Rayleigh fading multipath channel is considered, which is characterized by the power delay profile and time-varying scattering function and has high reliability for real-world mobile environment. The estimators exploit the intrinsic structures of OFDM signals and rely on the second-order moment rather than the probability distribution function of the received signals. They are totally optimum in sense of minimum mean-square-error and can be implemented easily. In addition, we have presented an improved approach which not only preserves the merits of previously proposed method, but also makes the estimation range of the frequency offset cover the entire subcarrier spacing of OFDM signals and the timing estimator be independent of the frequency offset.

An ultra-high-sensitivity HDTV color camcorder (camera with VTR) has been developed featuring image intensifiers with GaAsP photocathodes, which provide very high quantum efficiency. To achieve superior performance and a compact camera body, we combined three 1-inch image intensifiers with a 2/3-inch taking lens and three 2/3-inch CCDs by means of a new optical system capable of enlarging and reducing images. The camcorder provides excellent color reproducibility even under low light level conditions (0.2 lx) at an iris setting of f/2, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 55 dB at pedestal level. Its sensitivity is about 400 times greater than that of current HDTV CCD camcorders, making it particularly well suited for capturing images of faint objects in space, aurora, etc., filming the nocturnal activities of animals in their natural settings, and reporting breaking news at night.