This paper describes a 0.35µm SOI-CMOS gate array using partially-depleted transistors. The gate array adopts the field-shield isolation technique with body-tied structures to suppress floating-body problems such as: (1) kink characteristics in drain currents, (2) low break-down voltage, and (3) frequency-dependent delay time. By optimizing the basic-cell layout and power-line wiring, the SOI-CMOS gate array also allows the use of the cell libraries and the design methodologies compatible with bulk-CMOS gate arrays. An ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) physical-layer processing LSI was fabricated using a 0.35µm SOI-CMOS gate array with 560k raw gates. The LSI operated at 156 Mbps at 2.0 V, while consuming 71% less power than using a typical 0.35µm 3.3 V bulk-CMOS gate array.

In phased array antennas, the number of radiator rows is one of the important factors to minimizing both cost and weight. Therefore, the antenna tilt angles having relation with the element spacing are among the important design parameters. In this paper, the optimum tilt angles for several types of dipole planar arrays are investigated theoretically. To obtain optimum tilt angles, the directivity equation including phase shift factors for planar arrays are calculated.

This paper presents a new distributed scheduling architecture for wireless ATM networks. Usually, in WATM scheduling architectures, a fixed order is defined among the different connections through their ATM service category (CBR VBR ABR UBR). We argue that although this static priority is easier to implement, this type of precedence is not necessarily a good choice for the MAC layer. The MAC layer scheduling should define an order such that it uses efficiently the resources while providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees. In this spirit, our architecture delays (without violating their QoS) the real time connections in order to improve the performance of non real time connections.

A novel algorithm for an adaptive array that is suitable for a multi-carrier transmission will be proposed in this paper. In an adaptive array, signals received by antenna elements are weighted and combined together. In the proposed algorithm, distortion of a spectrum of the combined signal is detected and weight coefficients for each antenna element are controlled so that the spectrum of the combined signal becomes flat. Concept of the proposed algorithm can be interpreted as the CMA which is applied to signals sampled in the frequency domain. Furthermore, a configuration of the adaptive array will be shown. Signals separated in a receiver of the multi-carrier transmission are utilized to detect the distortion of the signal spectrum. By adopting the proposed configuration, the spectrum of the multi-carrier signal can be easily detected. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed adaptive array, computer simulation has been carried out. Numerical results show that; 1) A desired wave is captured well even if an interference wave is narrow band signal and is stronger than the desired wave. 2) Suppression performance for a co-channel interference wave depends on both a symbol timing and SIR of arrival waves. If the symbol timing of the interference wave greatly differs from the timing of FFT window of the receiver, the desired wave can be captured even if the co-channel interference wave is stronger more than 10 dB compared with the desired wave. The conventional CMA adaptive array has a serious problem that the narrow band interference wave is captured when it is stronger than the desired wave. On the other hand, it is extremely rare that the proposed adaptive array captures the narrow band interference wave. Therefore, it can be said that the proposed adaptive array is a robust system compared with the conventional system.

Speech can be modeled as short bursts of vocal energy separated by silence gaps. During typical conversation, talkspurts comprise only 40% of each party's speech and remaining 60% is silence. Communication systems can achieve spectral gain by disconnecting the users from the spectral resource during silence periods. This letter develops a simple and efficient Voice Activity Detection (VAD) algorithm to work in a mobile environment exhibiting dynamically varying background noise. The VAD uses a classification method involving the full-band energy, ratio of low-band energy to full-band energy, zero-crossing rate, and peakiness measure.

This paper analyzes the effective radiation efficiency of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) consisting of two resistor-loaded bow-tie antennas covered with a ferrite-coated conducting cavity by using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The GPR is located above a lossless or lossy ground surface. The relation between the radiation powers into the ground and air, dissipated powers at the loaded resistors and ferrite absorber, and the reflected power due to impedance mismatching, is clarified numerically.

Low voltage (LV) analog circuit design techniques are addressed in this tutorial. In particular, (i) technology considerations; (ii) transistor model capable to provide performance and power tradeoffs; (iii) low voltage implementation techniques capable to reduce the power supply requirements, such as bulk-driven, floating-gate, and self-cascode MOSFETs; (iv) basic LV building blocks; (v) multi-stage frequency compensation topologies; and (vi) fully-differential and fully-balanced systems.

This paper presents a new data hiding scheme via steganographic image transformation, which is different from conventional data hiding techniques. The transformation is achieved in the frequency domain and the concept of Fourier filtering method is used. An input image is transformed into a fractal image, which can be used in Computer Graphic (CG) applications. One of the main advantages of this scheme is the amount of data to be hidden (embedded) is equal to that of the host signal (generated fractal image) while it is in general limited in the conventional data hiding schemes. Also both the opened fractal image and the hidden original one can be properly used depending on the situation. Unauthorized users will not notice the "secret" original image behind the fractal image, but even if they know that there is a hidden image it will be difficult for them to estimate the original image from the transformed image. Only authorized users who know the proper keys can regenerate the original image. The proposed method is applicable not only as a security tool for multimedia contents on web pages but also as a steganographic secret communication method through fractal images.

Causal message logging has many benefits such as nonblocking message logging and no rollback propagation. In this paper, we consider the problem of the recovery in causally-logged distributed system and give a condition for consistent recovery. We then show that, based on the impossibility of the consensus, the consistent causal recovery cannot be solved in asynchronous systems.

A 10-bit 3-Msample/s multibit cyclic A/D converter for mixed-signal LSIs with a small chip-area of 1.5 mm2 and low power consumption of 10.8 mW with a 2.7-V power supply was realized using a 0.8-µm CMOS process. This ADC module is designed for high-speed servo-controller LSIs used in hard-disk-drive systems. We found that three-cycle cyclic conversion (four bit, three bit+(one redundant bit), and three bit+(one redundant bit)) was optimal for achieving 10-bit resolution with a small chip-area and low power consumption given a required conversion time of 0.33 µs. Our multipath architecture cut power consumption by 30% compared to conventional cyclic A/D converters. By adding one signal path between the residue amplifier and the four bit subADC, the settling timing requirement can be relaxed, and the amplifier's power consumption thus reduced.

It is proposed a novel method that optimizes nonlinear filters by unsupervised learning using a novel definition of morphological pattern spectrum, called "morphological opening/closing spectrum (MOCS)." The MOCS can separate smaller portions of image objects from approximate shapes even if the shapes are degraded by noisy pixels. Our optimization method analogizes the linear low-pass filtering and Fourier spectrum: filter parameters are adjusted to reduce the portions of smaller sizes in MOCS, since they are regarded as the contributions of noises like high-frequency components. This method has an advantage that it uses only target noisy images and requires no example of ideal outputs. Experimental results of applications of this method to optimization of morphological open-closing filter for binary images are presented.

This paper proposes a new approach to achieving high performance and low energy consumption for set-associative caches. The cache, called way-predicting set-associative cache, speculatively selects a single way, which is likely to contain the data desired by the processor, from the set designated by a memory address, before it starts a normal cache access. By accessing only the single way predicted, instead of accessing all the ways in a set, energy consumption can be reduced. In order for the way-predicting cache to perform well, accuracy of way prediction is important. This paper shows that the accuracy of an MRU (most recently used)-based way prediction is higher than 90% for most of the benchmark programs. The proposed way-predicting cache improves the ED (energy-delay) product by 60-70% compared to the conventional set-associative cache.

Low Power design has emerged as a both practically and theoretically attractive theme in modern LSI system design. This paper presents system level power optimization techniques. A brief survey of system level low power design approaches and several examples in detail are described. It reviews some techniques that have been proposed to overcome the power issue and gives guideline for prospective system level solutions.

Future high-speed switches and routers will be expected to support a large number of ports at high line rates carrying traffic with diverse statistical properties. Accordingly, scheduling mechanisms will be required to handle Tbit/sec aggregated capacity while providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper a novel high-capacity switching scheme for ATM/WDM networks is presented. The proposed architecture is contention-free, scalable, easy to implement and requires no internal "speedup. " Non-uniform destination distribution and bursty cell arrivals are examined when studying the switching performance. Simulation results show that at an aggregated throughput of 1 Tbit/sec, low latency is achieved, yielding a powerful solution for high-performance packet-switch networks.

The genetic algorithm is used to synthesize the directional circular arc array as a sectored antenna. Then, the performance of this sectored antenna in indoor wireless millimeter wave channel is investigated. Based on the desired pattern and the topography of the antennas, the synthesis problem can be reformulated into an optimization problem and solved by the genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm will always converge to global extreme instead of local extreme and achieves a good approximation to the desired pattern. Next, the impulse responses of the indoor channel for any transmitter-receiver location are computed by shooting and bouncing ray/image techniques. By using the impulse response of multipath channel, the performance of the sectored antenna on BPSK (binary phase shift keying) system with phase and timing recovery circuits is presented. Numerical results show that the synthesized sectored antenna is effective to combat the multipath fading and can increase the transmission rate of indoor millimeter wave system.

Building robots is generally considered difficult, because the designer not only has to predict the interactions between the robot and the environment, but also has to deal with the consequent problems. In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have been proposed to synthesize robot controllers. However, admittedly, it is not satisfactory enough just to evolve the control system, because the performance of the control system depends on other hardware parameters -- the robot body plan -- which might include body size, wheel radius, motor time constant, etc. Therefore, the robot body plan itself should, ideally, also adapt to the task that the evolved robot is expected to accomplish. In this paper, a hybrid GP/GA framework is presented to evolve complete robot systems, including controllers and bodies, to achieve fitness-specified tasks. In order to assess the performance of the developed system, we use it with a fixed robot body plan to evolve controllers for a variety of tasks at first, then to evolve complete robot systems. Experimental results show the promise of our system.

This paper describes embeddings of chordal rings and pyramids into mesh-connected computers with multiple buses which have a bus on each row and each column, called MCCMBs. MCCMBs have two types of communication. The one is local communication, provided by local links, and the other is global communication, provided by buses. By efficiently combining the two types of communication, optimal or efficient embeddings are achieved. For a large set of chordal rings, optimal embeddings, whose expansion, load, dilation and congestion are 1, are given. For pyramids, an efficient embedding based on a two phase strategy is presented. The embedding balances dilation and congestion.

In a Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (CC-NUMA) system, memory transactions can be classified into two types: inter-node transactions and intra-node transactions. Because the latency of inter-node transactions is usually hundreds times larger than that of intra-node transactions, it is important to reduce the latency of inter-node transactions. Even though the remote cache in the CC-NUMA systems improves the latency of inter-node transactions through caching the remote memory lines, the remote and processor caches of snoop-based CC-NUMA systems have to retain the multi-level cache inclusion property for the simplification of snooping. The inclusion property degrades the cache performance by following factors. First, all the remote memory lines in a processor cache should be preserved in the remote cache of the same node. Second, a line replacement at the remote cache replaces the same address line in the processor caches, which does not comply with the replacement policy of the processor caches. In this paper, we propose Access-list which renders the inclusion property unnecessary, and evaluate the performance of the proposed system by program-driven simulation. From the simulation results, it is shown that the miss rates of caches are reduced and the efficiency of the snoop filtering is similar to the system with the inclusion property. It turns out that the performance of the proposed system is improved up to 1.28 times.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the problem of recovering a signal from its noisy version. One example is to restore old images degraded by noise. The recovery solution is given within the framework of series expansion and we shall show that for the general case the recovery functions have to be elements of an extended pseudo biorthogonal basis (EPBOB) in order to suppress efficiently the corruption noise. After we discuss the different situations of noise, we provide some methods to construct the optimal EPBOB in order to deal with these situations.

This paper proposes an Iterated Function System (IFS) which can reduce effects of quantization errors of the IFS parameters. The proposed method skips conventional analog-parameter search and directly selects optimum IFS parameters from pools of discrete IFS parameters. In conventional IFS-based image coding the IFS parameters are quantized after their analog optimum values are determined. The image reconstructed from the quantized parameters is degraded with errors that are traced back to quantization errors amplified in the iterated mappings. The effectiveness of this new realistic approach is demonstrated by simulation results over the conventional method.