This paper proposes a new robust adaptive beamformer applicable to microphone arrays. The proposed beamformer is a generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) with a variable blocking matrix using coefficient-constrained adaptive filters (CCAFs). The CCAFs, whose common input signal is the output of a fixed beamformer, minimize leakage of the target signal into the interference path of the GSC. Each coefficient of the CCAFs is constrained to avoid mistracking. In the multiple-input canceller, leaky adaptive filters are used to decrease undesirable target-signal cancellation. The proposed beamformer can allow large look-direction error with almost no degradation in interference-reduction performance and can be implemented with a small number of microphones. The maximum allowable look-direction error can be specified by the user. Simulation results show that the proposed beamformer, when designed to allow about 20of look-direction error, can suppress interference by more than 17 dB.

The self-healing capability against network failure is one of indispensable features for the B-ISDN infrastructure. One problem in realizing such self-healing backbone network is the inefficient utilization of the large spare capacity designed for the failure-restoration purpose since it will be used only in the failure time that does not occur frequently. "Pool-capacity" is the concept that allows some VPs (virtual paths) to efficiently utilize this spare capacity part. Although the total capacity can be saved by using the "Pool Capacity," it is paid by less reliability of VPs caused by the emerging influence of indirect-failure. Thus, this influence of indirect-failure has to be considered in the capacity designing process so that network-designers can trade off the saving of capacity with the reliability level of VPs in their self-healing networks. In this paper, Damage Rate:DR which is the index to indicate the level of the influence caused by indirect-failure is defined and the pool-capacity design scheme with DR consideration is proposed. By the proposed scheme, the self-healing network with different cost (pool-capacity) can be designed according to the reliability level of VPs.

Packet contention is one of the fundamental problems that must be overcome in designing packet switches. In banyan network, which has multistage interconnection structure of many small switch elements, we must be concerned with output port conflicts and internal collisions. Dilated banyan network which provides multiple path for internal link can reduce packet loss due to internal collisions in loss system. However, under hot-spot traffic higher packet loss probability is measured at the hot-spot port and the ports close to the hot-spot as coefficient h increases due to the heavy traffic to hot-spot port. In order to moderate the packet loss probability at the hot-spot port we propose the method to disperse the packets which concentrate on the hot-spot route by altering address field of a half of incoming packets. These packets are switched along detour routes. Thus, the traffic concentration toward hot-spot is mitigated and the packet loss probability at the hot-spot port is moderated.

This paper proposes a phase-rotating phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation and shows that its narrow-band version is suitable for Viterbi equalization. The proposed PSK has the following features: 1) a spectrum shaping of the transmit/receive filters does not need to be restricted to the Nyquist criterion; 2) the transmitted data sequence is rotated for every symbol in order to reduce noise-correlation at the receiver. First, this paper discusses a performance degradation of bit error rate of Viterbi equalizers in the presence of the sampling timing offset or under time-dispersive frequency selective fading. Next, computer simulation confirms that π/2-shifted binary PSK with narrow-band spectrum shaping filter, which includes offset QPSK for its special case, solves the above mentioned performance degradation, keeping good spectrum efficiency equal to M-ary PSK.

The frequency offset estimation is used to correct any frequency error of the local reference oscillator. In this letter, a frequency offset estimation algorithm utilizing the peak phase error detection and frequency offset smoother is proposed for burst data transmission. The basic idea of frequency offset estimator is to use a curve fitting method. The proposed peak phase error detection avoids a large phase error which yields a bad value for FOE. In order to control the AFC, frequency offset smoother by a simple filter is used. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is adequate for frequency offset estimation of burst data transmission.

We proposed Reversible Energy Recovery Logic (RERL) using an 8-phase clocking scheme, which is a dual-rail reversible adiabatic logic for ultra-low-energy applications. Because we eliminated non-adiabatic energy loss in RERL by using the concept of reversible logic, RERL has only adiabatic and leakage losses. In this paper we explain its operation and logic design and present its simulation and experimental results. We also present an energy-efficient 8-phase, clocked power generator that uses an off-chip inductor. With simulation results for the full adder, we confirmed that the RERL circuit consumed substantially less energy than other logic circuits at low-speed operation. We evaluated a test chip implemented with a 0.6-µm CMOS technology, which integrated a chain of inverters with a clocked power generator. In the experimental results, the RERL circuit consumed only 4.5% of the dissipated energy of a static CMOS circuit at an optimal operating speed of 40 kHz. In conclusion, RERL is suitable for the applications that do not require high performance but low-energy consumption because its energy consumption can be decreased to the minimum by reducing the operating frequency until adiabatic and leakage losses are equal.

This paper proposes a traffic-adaptive dynamic routing method, which we have named RAG, for connectionless packet networks. Conventional traffic control methods discard the packets which cause congestion. Furthermore, conventional routing methods propagate control messages all over the network for gathering global topology information, and this causes more congestion. In contrast, RAG estimates traffic conditions all over a network without any communication between nodes and makes the best use of free links so that packets make detours to avoid congestive sites. RAG adopts distributed control based on game theory (non-communication, non-zero-sum, two-person). With RAG, nodes play a packet-forwarding game without any communication with each other, and each node controls ordering and routing of the forwarding packets based on the node's individual payoff table which is dynamically reconstructed by observation of surrounding nodes. Nodes cooperate with each other, except for punishment for disloyalty. Repetition of these local operations in nodes aims at the emergence of the gradual network-global traffic balancing. The results of experiments in comparison with the conventional shortest path first (SPF) routing method show that the throughput is about 1.58 times higher with the new method.

In the basic user/network interface of ISDN (ITU-T Recommendation I. 430), the D-channel is shared by up to 8 terminals for signal and data packets. An analytical model is proposed to reveal the performance characteristics of the access control scheme for the D-channel. Numerical and simulation results are shown to demonstrate the performance differentiation of the terminals with different priorities. It is observed that the mean signal delay at low load may become large because of long service time for packets, and that the priority mechanism may not work properly when the loads at terminals are very asymmetric.

An optimun design for N(arbitrary)-sheet capacitive Jaumann elctromagnetic (EM) wave absorber, using genetic algorithm will be presented. This algorithm is a random optimization method based on the genetic relation in the human being. We show the bandwidth for two-sheet capacitive Jaumann absorber can be expanded even more than 108% showed by knott, by using this algorithm and without imposing the double-notch design criteria. We also show that our results approaches knott's results when we restrict the characteristic impedances and lengths of the lines to vary within a very short range. We also design one-sheet and three-sheet capacitive Jaumann absorbers. The only restriction used here is about the meaningful range for the design variables. The goal of this algorithm is that we can impose arbitrary restriction about the range of the variation of the variables. So we can see the performance behaviour with the range dimension of the variables, and we can obtain different optimum results for different ranges. Finally we obtain a 20-dB attenuation bandwidth more than 145% for one-sheet, 173% for two-sheet (compare with 108% obtained in [1]) and 193% for three-sheet capacitive Jaumann EM absorbers, with some acceptable short range for the variables. We design the one-sheet and two-sheet capacitive Jaumann absorbers at low frequency and the three-sheet at high frequency. The 20-dB attenuation bandwidth obtained for the one-sheet and two-sheet capacitive Jaumann absorbers are respectively, from 10 to 77 MHz and, from 4 to 61 MHz. For the three-sheet capacitive Jaumann absorber the 20-dB attenuation bandwidth obtained is, from 0.8 GHz to 280 GHz.

In this paper we present a complete methodology for efficient electro-mechanical characterization of a CMOS compatible MEMS technology. Using an original test structure, the so-called "U-shape cantilever beam," we are able to determine all mechanical characteristics of force sensors constituted with elementary beams in a given technology. A complete set of electro-mechanical relations for the design of Microsystems have also been developed.

In order that the speech recognition system might have a high performance in the noisy environment, the directional microphone arrays at the input of the system have been broadly investigated. The purpose of this study is to develop a new wide-band directional microphone system in view of advancing to an adaptive one afterwards. In the proposed system, three microphones are arranged on a straight line and the beamforming is accomplished in such a way that the output value of the middle microphone is added to the integrated value of the difference between two microphones at both sides. In this study, the signal processing of microphone outputs is implemented by using active RC circuits. Finally, the objective directivity can be experimentally obtained in wide frequency ranges required for the speech recognition.

A new simple method for extracting the capacitance coupling coefficients of sub-0.5-µm flash memory cells is proposed. Different from the previously proposed methods, this method is not affected by a dopant profile of source region because a band-to-band tunneling current from the interface between the drain and the substrate is probed. Use of a reference device eliminates the necessity to make assumptions concerning the electron transport mechanism. Comparison with the other methods shows that the proposed method is simple and accurate.

This paper proposes an adaptive microphone array using blind deconvolution. The method realizes an signal enhancement based on the combination of blind deconvolution, synchronized summation and DSA (Delay-and-Sum Array) method. The proposed method improves performance of estimation by the iterative operation of blind deconvolution using a cost-function based on the coherency function.

A new method using new test structure, which is connected 15.4 million MOS transistor, for evaluating extrinsic oxide breakdown is proposed. The active gate area which is needed to predict reliability will be shown. And by using this new method, activation energy not only for the intrinsic breakdown but also for the extrinsic breakdown are obtained.

Today, many kinds of real-time applications are available over IP networks. It is important to measure the network performance for such applications before making use of real applications. Authors developed the general purpose traffic measurement tool for IP networks. This system can generate any kinds of traffic flexibly and calculate the network performance such as throughput, delay and loss ratio according to received packets. In this paper, the concept of this traffic measurement tool is described in detail, and several examples of network measurements are shown.

In this paper, we propose a new competitive learning algorithm for training single-layer neural networks to cluster data. The proposed algorithm adopts a new measure based on the idea of "symmetry" so that neurons compete with each other based on the symmetrical distance instead of the Euclidean distance. The detected clusters may be a set of clusters of different geometrical structures. Four data sets are tested to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.

Multicasting has become an important part of current networking technologies. To accommodate the multicasting traffic, switches in ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) networks need to be able to support multicasting. In multicast ATM switches, usually there are many cells contending for the same output port resources at the same time. This may lead to serious performance degradation. In the past, many special output port components are proposed to solve this problem. However, most of these approaches alleviate the output port overflowing problem without considering the output port congestion or the internal routing blocking problem. Especially when the switch fabric is based on the banyan-like network, these two problems will seriously degrade the switch performance. In this paper, we propose a pre-scheduling mechanism to precede the multicast switch. This mechanism will completely eliminate the problems mentioned above. Two architectures are designed to implement this mechanism. Analysis and simulations show that our design performs quite well.

We present a new method for estimation of spectrum transition of nonstationary signals in cases of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Instead of the basic functions employed in the previously proposed time-varying autoregressive (AR) modeling, we introduce a spectrum transition constraint into the cost function described by the partial correlation (PARCORR) coefficients so that the method is applicable to noisy nonstationary signals of which spectrum transition patterns are complex. By applying this method to the analysis of vibration signals on the interventricular septum (IVS) of the heart, noninvasively measured by the novel method developed in our laboratory using ultrasonics, the spectrum transition pattern is clearly obtained during one cardiac cycle for normal subjects and a patient with cardiomyopathy.

We have investigated the operation of a reflection type magnetostatic wave signal-to-noise enhancer in detail. It has good enhancement characteristics, low insertion loss, and low operating power. It is also composed of a transducer using a ceramic substrate having a high dielectric constant and an LaGa-YIG film with low saturation magnetization to enable direct operation in the 400-MHz band (the IF band of current DBS receivers). Enhancement of 8 dB was achieved over a 40-MHz bandwidth. Although its operating frequency range depends critically on device temperature, we can compensate for the temperature dependence by adjusting the bias magnetic field. Experiments showed that the enhancer improved the received carrier-to-noise ratio by 2 to 3 dB, providing good noise reduction in DBS reception.

TCP Redirection (TCP-R) is an extension of TCP, which maintains active TCP connections when the disconnection occurs due to IP address changes. In mobile computing environments, IP addresses may be changed frequently as the host moves across subnets or changes network devices. However, it is difficult for most stateful network applications to work continuously in that situation. There is much research to support such dynamics in the network layer, but these attempts in the IP layer tend to incur some complexity. This paper intends to investigate the end-to-end mobility support in the transport layer. We developed a simple redirection mechanism for TCP, which enables us to keep our working activities continuous without any intermediate agents for IP packet forwarding. We also show that TCP-R enables the intentional replacement of IP addresses, which is useful for certain network services. We implemented and evaluated a prototype of TCP-R. The measured performance indicates that TCP-R can realize continuous operation with minimal overhead and complexity.