Photon upconversion (UC) is a technique to convert long wavelength light into short wavelength light. UC fluorescence by triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA) follows a mechanism involving two kinds of molecules as sensitizer and emitter. In this study, we constructed the photon UC dyes system that was applicable to weak excitation light and convert the red light into yellow light in high efficiency. The present result will be useful for the purpose of application to optical elements and light medical care.

Copper (Cu) electroless plating was conducted on planar and microstructured polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates. In this study, organic thin films terminated with nitrogen (N)-containing groups, e.g. poly (dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate) brush (PDMAEMA), aminopropyl trimethoxysilane monolayer (APTES), and polydopamine (PDA) were used to anchor palladium (Pd) catalyst. While electroless plating was successfully promoted on all sample surfaces, PDMAEMA was found to achieve the best adhesion strength to the PDMS surfaces, compared to APTES- and PDA-covered PDMS substrates, due to covalent bonding, anchoring effects of polymer chains as well as high affinity of N atoms to Pd species. Our process was also successfully applied to the electroless plating of microstructured PDMS substrates.

Improvement of output and lifetime is a problem for biofuel cells. A structure was adopted in which gelation mixed with agarose and fuel (fructose) was sandwiched by electrodes made of graphene-coated carbon fiber. The electrode surface not contacting the gel was exposed to air. In addition, grooves were added to the gel surface to further increase the oxygen supply. The power density of the fuel cell was examined in terms of the electrode area exposed to air. The output increased almost in proportion to the area of the electrode exposed to air. Optimization of the concentration of fuel, gel, and the amount of enzyme at the cathode were also examined. The maximum power density in the proposed system was approximately 121μW/cm2, an enhancement of approximately 2.5 times that in the case of using liquid fuel. For the power density after 24h, the fuel gel was superior to the fuel liquid.

Technological developments in direction control of axonal outgrowth are a must for advances in regenerative medicine of the nervous system. In order to solve the problem, we fabricate a new neural cell culture sheet by applying the soft lithography technique to micro-patterning of the extracellular matrix and using thin-film biodegradable polymer for the scaffold. Micro-trenches were coated with Dulbecco's phosphate-buffered saline (-) containing laminin, using micro-molding in capillaries (MIMIC), a soft lithography technique. Biodegradable thin films with micro-trenches were fabricated by UV-curing a polyanhydride solution covering the negative SU-8 mold through thiol-ene polymerization. Both approaches were performed conveniently, rapidly, and accurately. It is thought that these techniques are excellent in terms of convenience and high speed, and can contribute greatly to regenerative medicine.

Hydrophobic DNA (H-DNA) nano-film was formed on a thin glass plate of 50μm thick working as a slab optical waveguide. Bromothymol blue (BTB) molecules were immobilized from aqueous solution with direct contacting to the H-DNA nano-film for 20 minutes. From changes in absorption spectra observed with slab optical wave guide (SOWG) during automated solution exchange (SE) processes for 100 times, it was found that about 95% of bromothymol blue (BTB) molecules was immobilized in the H-DNA nano-film with keeping their functionality of color change responsible to pH change in the solution.

This paper presents a design for the perpendicular-corporate feed in a four-layer circularly-polarized parallel-plate slot array antenna. We place a dielectric layer with adequate permittivity in the region between the coupling-aperture and the radiating-slot layers to remove x-shaped cavity walls completely in the radiating part of a conventional planar corporate-feed waveguide slot array antenna. To address fabrication constraints, the dielectric layer consists of PTFE and air. It excites a strong standing wave in the region and so provides 2×2-element subarrays with uniform excitation. None of the slot layers are in electrical contact due to air gaps between the slot layers. The four-layer structure with apertures for circular polarization contributes to wideband design for axial ratios because of the eigenmodes in the desired band. We realize an 11.9% bandwidth for axial ratios of less than 3.0dB as confirmed by measurements in the 60GHz band. At the design frequency, the measured realized gain is 32.7dBi with an antenna efficiency of 75.5%.

The spaces between words and paragraphs are popular places for embedding data in data hiding techniques for text documents. Due to the low redundancy in text documents, the payload is limited to be small. As each bit of data is independently inserted into specific spaces in conventional methods, a malicious party may be able to modify the data without causing serious visible distortions. In this paper, we regard a collection of space lengths as a one-dimensional feature vector and embed watermark into its frequency components. To keep the secrecy of the embedded information, a random permutation and dither modulation are introduced in the operation. Furthermore, robustness against additive noise is enhanced by controlling the payload. In the proposed method, through experiments, we evaluated the trade-off among payload, distortion, and robustness.

The separating redundancy is an important property in the analysis of the error-and-erasure decoding of a linear block code. In this work, we investigate the separating redundancy of the duals of first-order generalized Reed-Muller (GRM) codes, a class of nonbinary linear block codes that have nice algebraic properties. The dual of a first-order GRM code can be specified by two positive integers m and q and denoted by R(m,q), where q is the power of a prime number and q≠2. We determine the first separating redundancy value of R(m,q) for any m and q. We also determine the second separating redundancy values of R(m,q) for any q and m=1 and 2. For m≥3, we set up a binary integer linear programming problem, the optimum of which gives a lower bound on the second separating redundancy of R(m,q).

In 2017, Shirase proposed a variant of Elliptic Curve Method combined with Complex Multiplication method for generating certain special kinds of elliptic curves. His algorithm can efficiently factorize a given composite integer when it has a prime factor p of the form 4p=1+Dv2 for some integer v, where -D is an auxiliary input integer called a discriminant. However, there is a disadvantage that the previous method works only for restricted cases where the class polynomial associated to -D has degree at most two. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the previous algorithm to the cases of class polynomials having arbitrary degrees, which enlarges the class of composite integers factorizable by our algorithm. We also extend the algorithm to more various cases where we have 4p=t2+Dv2 and p+1-t is a smooth integer.

Frequency-hopping sequence (FHS) sets with low-hit-zone (LHZ) have Hamming correlations maintained at a low level as long as the relative time delay between different sequences are limited in a zone around the origin, and thus can be well applied in quasi-synchronous (QS) frequency-hopping multiple-access (FHMA) systems to reduce the mutual interference between different users. Moreover, the periodic partial Hamming correlation (PPHC) properties of employed LHZ-FHS sets usually act as evaluation criterions for the performances of QS-FHMA systems in practice. In this letter, a new class of LHZ-FHS sets is constructed via interleaving techniques. Furthermore, these new LHZ-FHS sets also possess optimal PPHC properties and parameters not included in the related literature.

Road generalization is a method for thinning out road networks to allow easy viewing according to the size of the map. Most conventional road generalization methods mainly focus on the length of a stroke, which is a chain of links with good continuity based on the principle of perceptual grouping applied to network data such as roads and rivers. However, in the case of facility search in a web map service, for example, a “restaurant guide map,” a road generalization mechanism can be more effective if it depends not only on the stroke length but also on the facility search results. Accordingly, in this study, we implement an on-demand road generalization method that adapts to both the facility search results and the stroke length. Moreover, a sufficiently fast response speed is achieved for practical use in web map services. In particular, this study proposes a fat-stroke model that links facility information to individual strokes and implements a road generalization method that uses this model to improve the response time. In addition, we develop a prototype based on the proposed system. The system evaluation results are based on three indicators, namely, response time of the road generalization system, connectivity between strokes, and connectivity between stroke and facilities. Our experimental results suggest that the proposed method can yield improved response times by a factor of 100 or more while affording higher connectivity.

As a modulation scheme for optical wireless communication, there is MPolSK (multilevel polarization shift keying) that modulates a state of polarization of light. MPolSK has a problem that it is severely affected by mismatched polarization axes. Although MDPolSK (multilevel differential PolSK) can overcome the problem, it is susceptible to noise, and its SER (symbol error rate) degrades as compared to MPolSK. In this paper, we propose one kind of MDPolSK that estimates the mismatched polarization axes in the receiver. We analyzed SER of the proposed scheme by computer simulations. The result shows that the proposed scheme is not affected by the mismatched polarization axes, and it provides a good SER as compared to the conventional MDPolSK. In addition, we modified the constellation used in the proposed scheme to improve SER.

In order to improve an imaging performance of a sparse array radar system we propose an optimization method to find a new antenna array layout. The method searches for a minimum of the cost function based on a 3D point spread function of the array. We found a solution for the simulated problem in a form of the new layout for the antenna array with more sparse middle-point distribution comparing with initial one.

Pose estimation is a basic requirement for the autonomous behavior of robots. In this article we present a robust and fast visual odometry method to obtain camera poses by using RGB-D images. We first propose a motion estimation method based on sparse geometric constraint and derive the analytic Jacobian of the geometric cost function to improve the convergence performance, then we use our motion estimation method to replace the tracking thread in ORB-SLAM for improving its runtime performance. Experimental results show that our method is twice faster than ORB-SLAM while keeping the similar accuracy.

A 19.1-to-20.4 GHz sigma-delta fractional-N frequency synthesizer with two-point modulation (TPM) for frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar applications is presented. The FMCW synthesizer proposes a digital and voltage controlled oscillator (D/VCO) with large continuous frequency tuning range and small digital controlled oscillator (DCO) gain variation to support TPM. By using TPM technique, it avoids the correlation between loop bandwidth and chirp slope, which is beneficial to fast chirp, phase noise and linearity. The start frequency, bandwidth and slope of the FMCW signal are all reconfigurable independently. The FMCW synthesizer achieves a measured phase noise of -93.32 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from a 19.25 GHz carrier and less than 10 µs locking time. The root-mean-square (RMS) frequency error is only 112 kHz with 94 kHz/µs chirp slope, and 761 kHz with a fast slope of 9.725 MHz/µs respectively. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS process, the synthesizer consumes 74.3 mW with output buffer.

In cloud computing environments, data processing systems with strong and stochastic stream data processing capabilities are highly desired by multi-service oriented computing-intensive applications. The independeny of different business data streams makes these services very suitable for parallel processing with the aid of multicore processors. Furthermore, for the random crossing of data streams between different services, data synchronization is required. Aiming at the stochastic cross service stream, we propose a hardware synchronization mechanism based on index tables. By using a specifically designed hardware synchronization circuit, we can record the business index number (BIN) of the input and output data flow of the processing unit. By doing so, we can not only obtain the flow control of the job package accessing the processing units, but also guarantee that the work of the processing units is single and continuous. This approach overcomes the high complexity and low reliability of the programming in the software synchronization. As demonstrated by numerical experiment results, the proposed scheme can ensure the validity of the cross service stream, and its processing speed is better than that of the lock-based synchronization scheme. This scheme is applied to a cryptographic server and accelerates the processing speed of the cryptographic service.

An ASIC crypto processor optimized for the 254-bit prime-field optimal-ate pairing over Barreto-Naehrig (BN) curve is proposed. The data path of the proposed crypto processor is designed to compute five Fp2 operations, a multiplication, three addition/subtractions, and an inversion, simultaneously. We further propose a design methodology to automate the instruction scheduling by using a combinatorial optimization solver, with which the total cycle count is reduced to 1/2 compared with ever reported. The proposed crypto processor is designed and fabricated by using a 65nm silicon-on-thin-box (SOTB) CMOS process. The chip measurement result shows that the fabricated chip successfully computes a pairing in 0.185ms when a typical operating voltage of 1.20V is applied, which corresponds to 2.8× speed up compared to the current state-of-the-art pairing implementation on ASIC platform.

Maximal designed distances for nonbinary narrow-sense quantum Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes of length $n=rac{q^4-1}{r}$ and new constructions for them are given, where q is an odd prime power. These constructions are capable of designing quantum BCH codes with new parameters. Furthermore, some codes obtained here have better parameters than those constructed by other known constructions.

This paper studies synchronization phenomena in a ring-coupled system of digital spiking neurons. The neuron consists of two shift registers connected by a wiring circuit and can generate various spike-trains. Applying a spike based connection, the ring-coupled system is constructed. The ring-coupled system can generate multi-phase synchronization phenomena of various periodic spike-trains. Using a simple dynamic model, existence and stability of the synchronization phenomena are analyzed. Presenting a FPGA based test circuit, typical synchronization phenomena are confirmed experimentally.

To improve the robustness of the polarization modulation (PM) technique applied in dual-polarized satellite systems, a zero-forcing aided demodulation (ZFAD) method is proposed to eliminate the impairment to the PM from the depolarization effect (DE). The DE elimination is traditionally dependent on the pre-compensation method, which is based on the channel state information (CSI). While the distance between communication partners in satellite systems is so long that the CSI can not be always updated in time at the transmitter side. Therefore, the pre-compensation methods may not perform well. In the ZFAD method, the CSI is estimated at the receiver side and the zero forcing matrix is constructed to process the received signal before demodulating the PM signal. In this way, the DE is eliminated. In addition, we derive the received signal-to-noise ratio expression of the PC and ZFAD methods with the statistical channel model for a better comparison. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the ZFAD method can eliminate the DE effect effectively and achieve a better symbol error rate performance than the pre-compensation method.