The vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) is becoming a key device in high-speed optical local-area networks (LANs) and even wide-area networks (WANs). This device is also enabling ultra parallel data transfer in equipment and computer systems. In this paper, we will review its physics and the progress of technology covering the spectral band from infrared to ultraviolet by featuring materials, fabrication technology, and performances such as threshold, output power, polarization, modulation and reliability. Lastly, we will touch on its future prospects.

An algorithm based on the wavelet transform (WT) was developed to analyze the QRS complex in a three-dimensional magnetocardiogram (3-D MCG) recorded from 3 normal subjects and 1 patient with anterior myocardial infarction (MI). By using a wavelet equivalent filter constructed with the WT algorithm, the high frequency components of the QRS complex related to the late fields (LF) were detected for the patient with anterior MI at different scale. We quantified the high frequency components of the QRS complex by calculating root-mean-square (RMS) value at different scale. The LF mainly existed in the frequency band of about 35.5 to 110.5 Hz with the amplitude of about 0.1 to 0.4 pT for Bx, By, and Bz components. In order to discuss the activities of the heart between the normal subject and the patient with anterior MI, we have also evaluated the spatial energy distribution (SED) of the QRS complex by displaying isoenergy contour maps at different scale. Being different from the normal subject, the patient with anterior MI represented different the pattern of the SED in various frequency band for the ST segment of the QRS complex of Bx, By, and Bz components. It is efficient to use the WT algorithm for analyzing the QRS complex in the 3-D MCG.

Finding DC operating-points of nonlinear circuits is an important and difficult task. The Newton-Raphson method employed in the SPICE-like simulators often fails to converge to a solution. To overcome this convergence problem, homotopy methods have been studied from various viewpoints. The fixed-point homotopy method is one of the excellent methods. However, from the viewpoint of implementation, it is important to study it further so that the method can be easily and widely used by many circuit designers. This paper presents a practical method to implement the fixed-point homotopy method. A special circuit called the solution-tracing circuit for the fixed-point homotopy method is proposed. By using this circuit, the solution curves of homotopy equations can be traced by performing the SPICE transient analysis. Therefore, no modification to the existing programs is necessary. Moreover, it is proved that the proposed method is globally convergent. Numerical examples show that the proposed technique is effective and can be easily implemented. By the proposed technique, many SPICE users can easily implement the fixed-point homotopy method.

We propose a call admission control (CAC) scheme for the reverse link of direct sequence-code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems with multi-class traffic, in which the admissibility of the set of requested channels is decided by checking the outage probability of the total composite power at a cell-site receiver. The reverse link capacities under various traffic conditions are evaluated. From numerical results, we see that the proposed scheme can utilize a given radio resource more effectively as compared with the existing scheme using constraints on the individual power levels.

We have developed a 200-channel imaging system that enables measurement of changes in oxygenation and blood volume and that covers a wider area (45 cm 15 cm) than that covered by conventional systems. This system consisted of 40 probes of five channels, a light-emitting diode (LED) driver, multiplexers and a personal computer. Each probe was cross-shaped and consisted of an LED, five photo diodes, and a current-to-voltage (I-V) converter. Lighting of the LEDs and acquisition of 200-channel data were time-multiplexed. The minimum data acquisition time for 200 channels, including the time required for calculation of oxygenation and monitoring of a few traces of oxygenation on a computer display, was about 0.2 s. We carried out exercise tests and measured the changes in oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin concentrations in the thigh. Working muscles in exercises could be clearly imaged, and spatio-temporal changes in muscle oxygenation during exercise and recovery were also shown. These results demonstrated that the 200-channel imaging system enables observation of the distribution of muscle metabolism and localization of muscle function.

Image processing in transform domain has many advantages but it could be suffered from local effects such as a blocking artifact. In this paper, an image processing is performed by weighting coefficients in the compressed domain, i.e., filtering coefficients are appropriately selected according to the processing. Since we find the appropriate factors according to global image enhancement, blocking artifacts are reduced between inter-blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed technique has the advantages of simple computation and easy implementation.

We will discuss a novel non-contact removal technique of optical fiber coating in continuous and uninterrupted manner with hot air stream. We observed little degradation of the tensile strength of the optical fiber after removing the protective polymer coating and the mean breaking tensile strength of the stripped optical fiber using non-contact removal method was 5.1 GPa.

We investigate the engineering of the impurity bands in photonic crystals (PCs) for realizing high-efficiency wave guiding, all-optical switching and optical delay for ultrashort optical pulses. It is found that quasi-flat impurity bands suitable for the transmission of ultrashort pulses can be achieved by properly controlling the configuration of coupled cavity waveguides (CCWs). At sharp corners, high bending efficiency is obtained over the entire impurity band. All-optical switching can be realized by creating a dynamical band gap at the center of an impurity band. The concentration of electromagnetic wave at defect regions leads to high switching efficiency while the tunable feature of PC defects makes all-optical control possible. It is also revealed that CCWs with quasi-flat impurity bands provide efficient group delay for ultrashort pulses with negligible attenuation and distortion. From the viewpoint of practical fabrication, the effect of disorder on the transmission property of impurity bands is discussed and the criterion for localization transition is determined.

Progress on a single wavelength channel OTDM terabit/s transmission is described. In particular, we focus on 1.28 Tbit/s OTDM transmission over 70 km which we realized recently. A pre-chirping technique using a high speed phase modulator is emphasized to simultaneously compensate for third- and fourth-order dispersion. The input pulse width was 380 fs, and the pulse broadening after a 70 km transmission was as small as 20 fs. All 128 channels time-division-demultiplexed to 10 Gbit/s had a bit error rate of less than 110-9, in which we employed a lot of new technique for pulse generation, dispersion compensation and demultiplexing. These techniques help pave the path for OTDM technology of the 21 century.

We fabricated ultrafast nonlinear optical films of squarylium J-aggregates and studied their properties including the absorption spectrum, the refractive index, the third-order nonlinear optical coefficients, the extent of absorption saturation, and the recovery of absorption saturation. The transmittance of the film was increased by 30% due to absorption saturation at a pump energy of several hundreds fJ/µm2/pulse. The half decay time constant of absorption saturation was found to be approximately 100 fs for off-resonant excitation. Two-dimensional demultiplexing was demonstrated using the squarylium film as a switching material. From a train of 8 optical pulses with 100 fs duration and 1 ps interval corresponding to a bit rate of 1 Tbps, 24 spatially resolved spots were obained.

Spatial dynamic pattern formations or trails by organisms attract us, which remind us chaos and fractal. They seem to show the emergence of co-operation, job separation, or division of territories when genetic programming controls the reproduction, mutation, crossing over of the organisms. Recent research in social insect behavior suggests that swarm intelligence comes from pheromone or chemical trails, and models based on self-organization can help explain how colony-level behavior emerges out of interactions among individual insects. We try to explain the co-operative behaviors of social insect by means of density of organisms and their interaction with environment in simple simulations. We also study that MDL-based fitness evaluation is effective for improvement of generalization of genetic programming. At last, interspecific and intraspecific mathematical models are examined to expand our research into interspecific evolution.

In the magnetic stimulation of the peripheral nerve fiber with the figure-of-eight coil, the nerve fiber beneath the figure-of-eight coil is considered to be stimulated with the lowest intensity when it is parallel to the junction of the figure-of-eight coil. However, some experimental studies with the magnetic peripheral stimulation showed that the large compound muscle action potential is elicited with the figure-of-eight coil oriented in the other directions. In the present study, we try to explain the cause of such a discrepancy with the analysis of the model of the magnetic nerve stimulation, and confirm the validity of the result obtained from the model analysis by the experimental study of the magnetic peripheral nerve stimulation. We show that the threshold for the nerve excitation become lowest not only when the junction of the figure-of-eight coil is parallel to the nerve fiber but also when that is perpendicular to the nerve fiber.

LiNbO3 optical modulators for band-operation with a resonant modulating electrode are investigated in this paper. We propose an asymmetric resonant structure consisting of two arms of modulating electrodes, where one arm is open-ended and the other arm is short-ended. The voltage standingwave was enhanced by the resonance of the electrodes, so that effective optical modulation was achieved, while the length of the modulating electrode was much shorter than the conventional travelingwave-type electrodes. The optical response at 6.2 GHz of a resonant modulator designed by maximizing the normalized induced phase was 4.94 of the response at dc with a non-resonant modulator.

In order to navigate a mobile robot or an autonomous vehicle in indoor environment, which includes several kinds of obstacles such as walls, furniture, and humans, the distance between the mobile robot and the obstacles have to be determined. These obstacles can be considered as walls with complicated edges. This paper proposes a mobile-robot-navigation method by using the polar coordinate transformation from an omnidirectional image. The omnidirectional image is obtained from a hyperboloidal mirror, which has the prominent feature in sensing the surrounding image at the same time. When the wall image from the camera is transformed by the transformation, the straight lines between the wall and the floor appear in the curve line after transformation. The peak point represents the distance and the direction between the robot and the wall. In addition, the wall types can be classified by the pattern and number of peak points. They are one side wall, corridor and corner. To navigate the mobile robot, in this paper, it starts with comparing a peak point obtained from the real image with the reference point determined by designed distance and direction. If there is a difference between the two points, the system will compute appropriate wheel angle to adjust the distance and direction against the wall by keeping the peak point in the same position as the reference point. The experiments are performed on the prototype mobile robot. The results show that for the determining distance from the robot to the wall between 70-290 cm, the average error is 6.23 percent. For three types of the wall classification, this method can correctly classify 86.67 percent of 15 image samples. In the robot movement alongside the wall, the system approximately consumes the 3 frame/s processing time at 10 cm/s motion speed. The mobile robot can maintain its motion alongside the wall with the average error 12 cm from reference distance.

Very reliable mode-locked semiconductor lasers have been developed. These devices provide high signal-to-noise ratio optical clock pulses of a few picoseconds temporal width in the 1.5-micrometer wavelength region. Potential applications of these lasers for high-bit-rate optical communication systems operating at over 40 Gbps including all-optical signal processing, and for very high-speed measurement systems are described.

Low-crosstalk 1.3-µm Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD) and photodiode (PD) arrays are developed. The arrays are fabricated on semi-insulating substrates and their anodes and cathodes are separated channel by channel to suppress inter-channel electrical crosstalk at high frequency. Crosstalk of less than -30 dB is achieved between neighboring LDs at 3.125 GHz. This is low enough for BER characteristics observed under asynchronous operation of a 4-channel LD array to be no worse than those under single-channel operation. Excellent uniformity of both LD and PD characteristics, high-temperature operation of the LD array, and low-voltage operation of the PD array are also attained. These arrays are suitable for low-cost high-bit-rate parallel optical communications.

Several gateway-based congestion control mechanisms have been proposed to support an end-to-end congestion control mechanism of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). One of promising gateway-based congestion control mechanisms is a RED (Random Early Detection) gateway. Although effectiveness of the RED gateway is fully dependent on a choice of control parameters, it has not been fully investigated how to configure its control parameters. In this paper, we analyze the steady state behavior of the RED gateway by explicitly modeling the congestion control mechanism of TCP. We first derive the equilibrium values of the TCP window size and the buffer occupancy of the RED gateway. Also derived are the stability condition and the transient performance index of the network using a control theoretic approach. Numerical examples as well as simulation results are presented to clearly show relations between control parameters and the steady state behavior.

This paper studies effect of packet scheduling algorithms at routers on media synchronization quality in live audio and video transmission by experiment. In the experiment, we deal with four packet scheduling algorithms: First-In First-Out, Priority Queueing, Class-Based Queueing and Weighted Fair Queueing. We assess the synchronization quality of both intra-stream and inter-stream with and without media synchronization control. The paper clarifies the features of each algorithm from a media synchronization point of view. A comparison of the experimental results shows that Weighted Fair Queueing is the most efficient packet scheduling algorithm for continuous media among the four.

This letter proposes a new approach for feature extraction using steerable filters. This approach is based on the concept of orientation-energy histogram which yields the local direction of dominant orientation. The testing is carried out using a training set of 1000 and a set of 300 unknown 40 40 hand-written digits. As a result of the simulations, 92% correct recognition is provided.

The function of a message authentication code (MAC) is to verify the validity of a whole message. The disadvantage of usual MACs is that a receiver can not check its validity until the receipt of a message is finished. Hence, usual MACs are not suitable for verifying a large amount of data such as video and audio (called stream). In this letter, we propose a MAC such that the validity of a stream can be consecutively verified without waiting for the end of the reception. In addition, we show its implementations: one is based on practical hash functions, and the other is based on universal hash functions.