This paper proposes a new circuit-fed 2-D amplifying array architecture using the multi-ported aperture-coupled patch antennas. The power distribution achieved by this array is formed by stacking three kinds of basic cells repeatedly. Each cell, which serves as a radiator and also a power relay, has a multi-ported patch antenna and one or two amplifiers. The signal transmission coefficient of the cell from the input port to the output port is designed with a power level of 0 dB and a phase of 360. An X-band 4 3 element array with uniform amplitude distribution is demonstrated. The measured results, such as the antenna gain and the radiation patterns, agree very well with the predicted ones, due to the precision design of the basic cells. The measured gain of the antenna array is 27.7 dBiA at the frequency of 10.4 GHz on the H-plane, with a half-power beamwidth of 14 in the H-plane and 16 in the E-plane.

Two-dimensional (2D) matrix symbols have higher storage capacity than conventional bar-codes, and hence have been used in various applications, including parts management in factories and Internet site addressing in camera-equipped mobile phones. These symbols generally utilize strong error control codes to protect data from errors caused by blots and scratches, and therefore require a large number of check bits. Because 2D matrix symbols are expressed in black and white dot patterns, blots and scratches often induce clusters of unidirectional errors (i.e., errors that affect black but not white dots, or vice versa). This paper proposes a new class of unidirectional lm ln-clustered error correcting codes capable of correcting unidirectional errors confined to a rectangle with lm rows and ln columns. The proposed code employs 2D interleaved parity-checks, as well as vertical and horizontal arithmetic residue checks. Clustered error pattern is derived using the 2D interleaved parity-checks, while vertical and horizontal positions of the error are calculated using the vertical and horizontal arithmetic residue checks. This paper also derives an upper bound on the number of codewords based on Hamming bound. Evaluation shows that the proposed code provides high code rate close to the bound. For example, for correcting a cluster of unidirectional 40 40 errors in 150 150 codeword, the code rate of the proposed code is 0.9272, while the upper bound is 0.9284.

Ball Grid Array packages in which I/O pins are arranged in a grid array pattern realize a number of connections between chips and a printed circuit board, but it takes much time in manual routing. We propose a fast routing method for 2-layer Ball Grid Array packages that iteratively modifies via assignment. In experiments, in most cases, via assignment and global routing on both of layers in which all nets are realized and the violation of wire congestion on layer 1 is small are speedily obtained.

Recently, various types of 3-D nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices have been researched to improve the integration density [1]-[3]. The NVM device of pillar structure can be considered as one of the candidates [4],[5]. When this is applied to a NAND flash memory array, bottom end of the device channel is connected to the bulk silicon. In this case, the current in vertical direction varies depending on the thickness of silicon channel. When the channel is thick, the difference of saturation current levels between on/off states of individual device is more obvious. On the other hand, when the channel is thin, the on/off current increases simultaneously whereas the saturation currents do not differ very much. The reason is that the channel potential barrier seen by drain electrons is lowered by read voltage on the opposite sidewall control gate. This phenomenon that can occur in 3-D structure devices due to proximity can be called gate-induced barrier lowering (GIBL). In this work, the dependence of GIBL on silicon channel thickness is investigated, which will be the criteria in the implementation of reliable ultra-small NVM devices.

Microarray technology has been applied to various biological and medical research fields. A preliminary step to extract any information from a microarray data set is to identify differentially expressed genes between microarray data. The identification of the differentially expressed genes and their commonly associated GO terms allows us to find stimulation-dependent or disease-related genes and biological events, etc. However, the identification of these deregulated GO terms by general approaches including gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) does not necessarily provide us with overrepresented GO terms in specific data among a microarray data set (i.e., data-specific GO terms). In this paper, we propose a statistical method to correctly identify the data-specific GO terms, and estimate its availability by simulation using an actual microarray data set.

This paper introduces our proposed pre-FFT type MMSE-AAA for an OFDM packet transmission system to suppress sporadic interference. The AAA scheme controls an antenna weight to minimize the mean square error between its output signals of two periods with identical transmitted waveform and iterates the weight updating process in an OFDM symbol to rapidly converge the weight. The average PER performance of the proposed AAA with the presence of a sporadic inter-system/intra-system interference signal is evaluated through computer simulations that assume an exponentially decaying 12-path LOS fading channel and IEEE 802.11a data frame transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed AAA can effectively suppress sporadic inter-system interference that is irrelevant to its arrival timing. Sporadic intra-system interference can also be suppressed by the proposed AAA more efficiently than inter-system interference as long as the interference arrives between 13% and 90% of the OFDM symbol duration after the beginning of an OFDM symbol of the desired signal.

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme of cooperative relaying network based on data exchange between relays before forwarding their received data to destination. This inter-relay data exchange step is done during an additional middle-slot in order to enhance the transmit signals from relays to the destination under low transmit power condition. To reduce the propagation errors between relays as well as the required transmit power during this data exchange, only the relay possessing the highest SNR is engaged into exchanging data by forwarding its received signal to the other relays. As for the remaining non-selected relays, i.e. with low SNR, the transmitted signal is estimated by using both signals received separately at different time slots (i.e., 1st and 2nd slot) from source and the 'best' selected relay, respectively, emulating virtual antenna array where appropriate weights for the antenna array are developed. In addition, we investigate distributed transmit beamforming and maximum ratio combining at the relays and the destination, respectively, to combine coherently the received signals. At the relay optimal location and for low SNR condition, the proposed method has significant better outage behavior and average throughput than conventional methods using one or two time slots for transmission.

We fabricated a high-speed wavelength tunable arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) and an AWG integrated with optical switches using (Pb,La)(Zr,Ti)O3-(PLZT). PLZT has a high electro-optic (EO) coefficient, which means these devices have considerable potential for use in reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexers (ROADMs). The PLZT waveguides in this work have a rib waveguide structure with an effective relative index difference (Δ) of 0.65%. Both AWGs have 8 channels with a frequency spacing of 500 GHz. The fabricated wavelength tunable AWGs allows us to freely shift the output at a particular wavelength to an arbitrary port by applying voltages to 3 mm long electrodes formed on each of the waveguides. We confirmed that the maximum tuning range with driving voltage of 22 V was approximately 32 nm at 1.55 µm. With the integrated 8-ch PLZT waveguide switch array, we could also select the output port by setting the drive voltage applied to the switch array. 2 2 directional coupler switches were used for the switch array. The two devices exhibited insertion losses of 17 dB and 19 dB, adjacent crosstalk of -18.5 dB and -19.7 dB, and a maximum extinction ratio of 19.6 dB and 12.6 dB, respectively. The tuning speed of both devices was 15 ns and their physical sizes were 9.0 23.0 mm and 8.0 29.5 mm, respectively.

In this paper we describe a new framework of feature combination in the cepstral domain for multi-input robust speech recognition. The general framework of working in the cepstral domain has various advantages over working in the time or hypothesis domain. It is stable, easy to maintain, and less expensive because it does not require precise calibration. It is also easy to configure in a complex speech recognition system. However, it is not straightforward to improve the recognition performance by increasing the number of inputs, and we introduce the concept of variance re-scaling to compensate the negative effect of averaging several input features. Finally, we propose to take another advantage of working in the cepstral domain. The speech can be modeled using hidden Markov models, and the model can be used as prior knowledge. This approach is formulated as a new algorithm, referred to as Hypothesis-Based Feature Combination. The effectiveness of various algorithms are evaluated using two sets of speech databases. We also refer to automatic optimization of some parameters in the proposed algorithms.

A novel closed-form algorithm is presented for estimating the 3-D location (azimuth angle, elevation angle, and range) of a single source in a uniform circular array (UCA) with a center sensor. Based on the centrosymmetry of the UCA and noncircularity of the source, the proposed algorithm decouples and estimates the 2-D direction of arrival (DOA), i.e. azimuth and elevation angles, and then estimates the range of the source. Notwithstanding a low computational complexity, the proposed algorithm provides an estimation performance close to that of the benchmark estimator 3-D MUSIC.

This paper reviews our recent progress on arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) using super-high-Δ silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technology and their application to integrated optical devices. Factors affecting the chip size of AWGs and the impact of increasing relative index difference Δ on the chip size are investigated, and the fabrication result of a compact athermal AWG using 2.5%-Δ silica-based waveguides is presented. As an application of super-high-Δ AWGs to integrated devices, a flat-passband multi/demultiplexer consisting of an AWG and cascaded MZIs is presented.

This paper proposes a Inter-symbol Interference (ISI) suppressing method For Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. In the environments where the delay spread exceeds the guard interval, the occurrence of ISI results in a degradation of system performance. A receiving method based on the Equivalent Transmission Path (ETP) model is proposed for Single-Input Multiple-Output (SIMO) OFDM system. Compared to the receiving scheme using Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) method, the proposed one shows better performance in suppressing errors due to ISI. The paper also points out that the ETP-based model can be used for detecting the desired signal in the multi-user OFDM system. Simulation results of the system performance show the effectiveness of the proposed method over the conventional OFDM system in suppressing ISI.

This paper presents the formulation for the evaluation of external coupling in the alternating-phase feed single-layer slotted waveguide array antenna with baffles by using the Spectrum of Two-Dimensional Solutions (S2DS) method. A one-dimensional slot array is extracted from the array by assuming the periodicity in transversal direction and introducing the perfect electric conductors in the external region. The uniform excitation over the finite array is synthesized iteratively to demonstrate the fast and accurate results by S2DS. A unit design model with the baffles is introduced to determine the initial parameters of the slot pair which accelerate the iteration. Experiment at 25.3 GHz demonstrates good uniformity of the aperture field distribution as well as the effects of the baffles. The directivity is 32.7 dB which corresponds to the aperture efficiency 90.5% and the reflection is below -15.0 dB over 1.3 GHz.

A system that has an array of dielectric rods at the center of a waveguide was previously suggested for single mode propagation with a wide frequency range. However, it is difficult to introduce the wave source from a coaxial cable, due to use of the TE10-like and TE20-like modes. In this investigation, an asymmetric setup of the dielectric rods is proposed for better coupling efficiency of the TE10 mode.

An essential condition for diversity reception is that the fading distributions between individual received signals of an antenna array are uncorrelated. In this paper, a new technique to improve the performance of transmission with the correlated Rayleigh-fading signals is proposed. In conventional array systems, individual receivers start sampling the received signals at the same time with the same sampling rate. On the other hand, in the proposed scheme, the received signals are again sampled with the same rate, however the sampling points are shifted in each receiver. Numerical results through computer simulation show that with correlated received signals, by applying the proposed technique the correlation can be reduced to a sufficient level for diversity reception.

We propose a new methodology of DOA (direction of arrival) estimation named SPIRE (Stepwise Phase dIfference REstoration) that is able to estimate sound source directions even if there is more than one source in a reverberant environment. DOA estimation in reverberant environments is difficult because the variance of the direction of an estimated sound source increases in reverberant environments. Therefore, we want the distance between microphones to be long. However, because of the spatial aliasing problem, the distance cannot be longer than half the wavelength of the maximum frequency of a source. DOA estimation performance of SPIRE is not limited by the spatial aliasing problem. The major feature of SPIRE is restoration of the phase difference of a microphone pair (M1) by using the phase difference of another microphone pair (M2) under the condition that the distance between the M1 microphones is longer than the distance between the M2 microphones. This restoration process enables the reduction of the variance of an estimated sound source direction and can alleviates the spatial aliasing problem that occurs with the M1 phase difference using direction estimation of the M2 microphones. The experimental results in a reverberant environment (reverberation time = about 300 ms) indicate that even when there are multiple sources, the proposed method can estimate the source direction more accurately than conventional methods. In addition, DOA estimation performance of SPIRE with the array length 0.2 m is shown to be almost equivalent to that of GCC-PHAT with the array length 0.5 m. SPIRE can executes DOA estimation with a smaller microphone array than GCC-PHAT. From the viewpoint of the hardware size and coherence problem, the array length is required to be as small as possible. This feature of SPIRE is preferable.

A uniform circular array (UCA) is a well-known array configuration which can accomplish estimation of 360 field of view with identical accuracy. However, a UCA cannot estimate coherent signals because we cannot apply the SSP owing to the structure of UCA. Although a variety of studies on UCA in coherent multipath environments have been done, it is impossible to estimate the DOA of coherent signals with different incident polar angles. Then, we have proposed Root-MUSIC algorithm with a cylindrical array. However, the estimation performance is degraded when incident signals arrive with close polar angles. To solve this problem, in the letter, we propose to use SAGE algorithm with a cylindrical array. Here, we adopt a CLA Root-MUSIC for the initial estimation and decompose two-dimensional search to double one-dimensional search to reduce the calculation load. The results show that the proposal achieves high resolution with low complexity.

Source-drain follower has been designed and implemented for monolithically integrated biosensor array. The circuit acts as a voltage follower, in which a sensing transistor is operated at fixed gate-source and gate-drain voltages. It operates at 10 nW power dissipation. The wide-swing cascode configurations are investigated in constant and non-constant biasing methods. The constant biased cascode source-drain follower has the merit of small cell size. The chip was fabricated using 1.2 µm standard CMOS technology, and a wide range of operation between 1 nW and 100 µW was demonstrated. The accuracy of the voltage follower was 30 mV using minimum sized transistors, due to the variation of threshold voltage. The error in the output except for the threshold voltage mismatch was less than 10 mV. The temperature dependence of the output was 0.11 mV/. To improve the input voltage range and accuracy, non-constant biased cascode source-drain follower is examined. The sensor cell is designed for 10 mV accuracy and the cell size is 105.3µm 81.4 µm in 1.2 µm CMOS design rules. The sensor cell was fabricated and showed that the error in the output except for the threshold voltage mismatch was less than 2 mV in a range of total current between 3 nA and 10 µA and in a temperature range between 30 and 100.

Wireless ad hoc communications such as ad hoc networks have been attracting researchers' attention. They are expected to become a key technology for "ubiquitous" networking because of the ability to configure wireless links by nodes autonomously, without any centralized control facilities. Adaptive array antennas (AAA) have been expected to improve the network efficiency by taking advantage of its adaptive beamforming capability. However, it should be noted that AAA is not almighty. Its interference cancellation capability is limited by the degree-of-freedom (DOF) and the angular resolution as a function of the number of element antennas. Application of AAA without attending to these problems can degrade the efficiency of the network. Let us consider wireless ad hoc communication as a target application for AAA, taking advantage of AAA's interference cancellation capability. The low DOF and insufficient resolution will be crucial problems compared to other wireless systems, since there is no centralized facility to control the nodes to avoid interferences in such systems. A number of interferences might impinge on a node from any direction of arrival (DOA) without any timing control. In this paper, focusing on such limitations of AAA applied in ad hoc communications, we propose a new scheme, Forward Interference Avoidance (FIA), using AAA for ad hoc communications in order to avoid problems caused by the limitation of the AAA capability. It enables nodes to avoid interfering with other nodes so that it increases the number of co-existent wireless links. The performance improvement of ad hoc communications in terms of the number of co-existent links is investigated through computer simulations.

Simulation and fabrication results on back-illuminated 4-channel photodiode (PD) array with a self-aligned micro ball lens are described. The channel pitch and diameter of each photosensitive area are 250 µm and 40 µm, respectively. Measured photocurrent is 1.92 times larger than that without a lens. Alignment tolerance between the single mode fiber (SMF) optical axis and the photodiode is improved from 21.2 µm to 42.7 µm. Moreover, the separation tolerance between the fiber and the lens is 210.5 µm. These large tolerances agree with simulation results, demonstrating that the device configuration is suitable for receivers for multi-channel inter-connection. Frequency response and inter-channel cross talk are also discussed.