In order to control a sound field using multiple sources and microphones, we must choose the optimum values of parameters such as the numbers of sources and microphones, the location of the sources and the microphones and the filter tap length. Because there is a huge number of possible combinations of these conditions, the boundary surface control principle can be useful as a basis of a design method of such a system. In this paper, a design method of sound field reproduction and active noise control based on the BSC principle are described and several example of its application are presented.

The finite difference time domain (FDTD) method has been developed in tandem with the progress of computer technology since K. S. Yee applied it to the analysis of an electromagnetic problem in 1966. The FDTD method is widely recognized as a powerful computational tool for analyzing electromagnetic problems involving complex geometries, such as antennas, microwave and optical waveguides and interaction between antennas and the human body. The commercial electromagnetic simulators based on the FDTD are also being developed very actively because users are able to trace temporal electromagnetic behaviors and to easily obtain a practical level of accuracy. However, the user must understand the principle of the method in order to use the simulator efficiently. In this paper, the basic concept and the principle of the FDTD method are reviewed for beginners, including graduate course students, rather than specialists in this discipline. Several recent topics concerning electromagnetic and antenna problems are also introduced.

Efficient extraction of interconnect parasitic parameters has become very important for present deep submicron designs. In this paper, the improved boundary element method (BEM) is presented for 3-D interconnect resistance extraction. The BEM is accelerated by the recently proposed quasi-multiple medium (QMM) technology, which quasi-cuts the calculated region to enlarge the sparsity of the overall coefficient matrix to solve. An un-average quasi-cutting scheme for QMM, advanced nonuniform element partition and technique of employing the linear element for some special surfaces are proposed. These improvements considerably condense the computational resource of the QMM-based BEM without loss of accuracy. Experiments on actual layout cases show that the presented method is several hundred to several thousand times faster than the well-known commercial software Raphael, while preserving the high accuracy.

Imaging techniques for robots are important and meaningful in the near future. Pulse radar systems have a great potential for shape estimation and locationing of targets. They have an advantage that they can be used even in critical situations where optical techniques cannot be used. It is thus required to develop high-resolution imaging algorithms for pulse radar systems. High-resolution imaging algorithms utilize the carrier phase of received signals. However, their estimation accuracy suffers degradation due to phase rotation of the received signal because the phase depends on the shape of the target. In this paper, we propose a phase compensation algorithm for high-resolution pulse radar systems. The proposed algorithm works well with SEABED algorithm, which is a non-parametric algorithm of estimating target shapes based on a reversible transform. The theory is presented first and numerical simulation results follow. We show the estimation accuracy is remarkably improved without sacrificing the resolution using the proposed algorithm.

This paper discusses stability boundaries in an electric power system with dc transmission based on a differential-algebraic equation (DAE) system. The DAE system is derived to analyze transient stability of the ac/dc power system: the differential equation represents the dynamics of the generator and the dc transmission, and the algebraic equation the active and reactive power relationship between the ac system and the dc transmission. In this paper complete characterization of stability boundaries of stable equilibrium points in the DAE system is derived based on an energy function for the associated singularly perturbed (SP) system. The obtained result completely describes global structures of the stability boundaries in solution space of the DAE system. In addition the characterization is confirmed via several numerical results with a stability boundary.

Novel high-frequency asymptotic solutions for the scattered fields by a dielectric circular cylinder with a radius of curvature sufficiently larger than the wavelength are presented in this paper. We shall derive the modified UTD (uniform Geometrical Theory of Diffraction) solution, which is applicable in the transition regions near the geometrical boundaries produced by the incident ray on the dielectric cylinder from the tangential direction. Also derived are the uniform geometrical ray solutions applicable near the geometrical boundaries and near the caustics produced by the ray family reflected on the internal concave boundary of the dielectric cylinder. The validity and the utility of the uniform solutions are confirmed by comparing with the exact solution obtained from the eigenfuction expansion.

Common-mode excitation caused by an imperfect ground plane on a printed circuit board (PCB) has been conventionally explained with the 'current driven' scheme, in which the common-mode current is driven by the ground voltage across the unintentional inductance of the ground plane. We have developed an alternative method for estimating common-mode excitation that is driven by the difference of the common-mode voltages for two connected transmission lines. A parameter called current division factor (CDF) that represents the degree of imbalance of a transmission line explains the common-mode voltage. In this paper, we calculate the CDF with two-dimensional (2-D) static electric field analysis by using the boundary element method (BEM) for asymmetric transmission lines with an arbitrary cross-section. The proposed 2-D method requires less time than three-dimensional simulations. The EMI increase due to a signal line being close to the edge of the ground pattern was evaluated through CDF calculation. The estimated increase agreed well--within 2 dB--with the measured one.

Environment measurement is an important issue for various applications including household robots. Pulse radars are promising candidates in a near future. Estimating target shapes using waveform data, which we obtain by scanning an omni-directional antenna, is known as one of ill-posed inverse problems. Parametric methods such as Model-fitting method have problems concerning calculation time and stability. We propose a non-parametric algorithm for high-resolution estimation of target shapes in order to solve the problems of parametric algorithms.

The electromagnetic scattering of a plane wave by an inhomogeneous plane whose surface impedance changes locally on the plane is treated. A boundary-value problem is formulated to describe the scattering phenomenon, in which the boundary condition depends on the surface impedance of the plane. Application of the Fourier transform derives an integral equation, which is approximately solved by the method of least-squares. From the solution of the equation, the scattered field is obtained by the inverse Fourier transform. By the use of the incomplete Lipschitz-Hankel integral for the computation of the field, numerical examples are given and the scattering phenomenon is discussed.

We show examples of accurate computer-aided design of power coupling between two dielectric slab waveguides of finite length by using the boundary-element method (BEM) based on guided-mode extracted integral equations (GMEIE's). The integral equations derived in this paper can be solved by the conventional BEM. Various properties in numerical calculations of GMEIE's are examined. The reflection and coupling coefficients of the guided wave as well as the scattering power are calculated numerically for the case of incidence TM guided-mode. The presented results are checked by the energy conservation law and reciprocity theorem. The results show that it is possible to design an optimum coupling between two dielectric slab waveguides by using the BEM based on GMEIE's.

The boundary element method (BEM), a representative method of numerical calculation of electromagnetic wave scattering, has been used for solving boundary integral equations. Using BEM, however, we finally have to solve a linear system of L equations expressed by dense coefficient matrix. The floating-point operation is O(L2) due to a matrix-vector product in iterative process. Greengard-Rokhlin's fast multipole algorithm (GRFMA) can reduce the operation to O(L). In this paper, we describe GRFMA and its floating-point operation theoretically. Moreover, we apply the fast Fourier transform to the calculation processes of GRFMA. In numerical examples, we show the experimental results for the computation time, the amount of used memory and the relative error of matrix-vector product expedited by GRFMA. We also discuss the convergence and the relative error of solution obtained by the BEM with GRFMA.

Several 2 nm seed layers were sputtered to increase coercivity (Hc) and anisotropy (Ku) of CoCrPt/Ti perpendicular recording media. Among them 2 nm Ag seed layer was very effective to increase Hc of (Co78Cr22)100-xPtx/Ti (x = 14, 20). However, the effect was more pronounced when (Co78Cr22)100-xPtx/Ti became thinner. In addition α[=4π(dM/dH)Hc] decreased when the Ag layer was used. The film thickness below which the seed Ag layer was effective was reduced with decreasing Pt content. However, the Ag seed layer did not promote (0002) texture of Ti and CoCrPt layers. Domain size was reduced when the Ag seed layer was used. The effects of Ag seed layer are thought to be due to change of exchange constant of the grains, for which the grain boundary plays an important role. Effects of film thickness and Pt content can also be explained successfully by the variation of exchange constant due to grain boundary. Some experimental evidence as well as crude mode for exchange constant variation are given.

Accurately segmenting and quantifying pulmonary nodule structure is a key issue in three-dimensional (3-D) computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes. This paper presents a nodule segmentation method from 3-D thoracic CT images based on a deformable surface model. In this method, first, a statistical analysis of the observed intensity is performed to measure differences between the nodule and other regions. Based on this analysis, the boundary and region information are represented by boundary and region likelihood, respectively. Second, an initial surface in the nodule is manually set. Finally, the deformable surface model moves the initial surface so that the surface provides high boundary likelihood and high posterior segmentation probability with respect to the nodule. For the purpose, the deformable surface model integrates the boundary and region information. This integration makes it possible to cope with inappropriate position or size of an initial surface in the nodule. Using the practical 3-D thoracic CT images, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A new formula on the Hermite expansion is presented in an explicit form. An application of the formula is given to a random boundary value problem: a plane wave reflection from a flat plane, of which position is randomly distributed in the normal direction, is presented. Several numerical results are given for a verification of the formula and for a discussion of the exact behavior of the fluctuation part of the reflection power.

The wavelet transform approach is applied to the boundary element method (BEM) for solving electromagnetic scattering from multiple scatterers. A matrix equation is first obtained by the BEM where the elements of the impedance matrix are arranged as smooth as possible along its columns and rows. Consequently, the matrix is divided into several minor matrices with continuous and periodic structures along their columns and rows. Next, the matrix equation is transformed by a wavelet matrix to sparsify the impedance matrix. The wavelet matrix is constructed to consist of minor wavelet matrices and makes the minor matrices of the impedance matrix be transformed independently. This approach reduces both the computation costs of performing the wavelet transform and solving sparse linear equations if it is compared with the conventional one.

This paper presents a study on modeling inter-word pauses to improve the robustness of acoustic models for recognizing noisy conversational speech. When precise contextual modeling is used for pauses, the frequent appearances and varying acoustics of pauses in noisy conversational speech make it a problem to automatically generate an accurate phonetic transcription of the training data for developing robust acoustic models. This paper presents a proposal to exploit the reliable phonetic heuristics of pauses in speech to aid the detection of varying pauses. Based on it, a stepwise approach to optimize pause HMMs was applied to the data of the DARPA SPINE2 project, and more correct phonetic transcription was achieved. The cross-word triphone HMMs developed using this method got an absolute 9.2% word error reduction when compared to the conventional method with only context free modeling of pauses. For the same pause modeling method, the use of the optimized phonetic segmentation brought about an absolute 5.2% improvements.

This paper investigates the behavior of one-dimensional discrete-time binary cellular neural networks with both the A- and B-templates and gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for the above network to be stable for unspecified fixed boundaries.

The radar cross section (RCS) of a dielectric-coated cylindrical cavity was measured and the measurements were compared with those calculated according to the iterative physical optics (IPO). The IPO analysis used the equivalent-impedance boundary condition (EIBC) based on transmission-line theory which takes into account the thickness of the coating. It was consequently found that this condition is much more effective than the ordinary-impedance boundary condition based on the intrinsic impedance of the material.

We propose a new and fast full search (FS) motion estimation algorithm for video coding. The computational reduction comes from sequential rejection of impossible candidates with derived formula and subblock norms. Our algorithm reduces more the computations than the recent fast full search (FS) motion estimation algorithms.

Boundary Constraints of VLSI floorplanning require a set of blocks to be placed along the boundaries of the chip. Thus, this set of blocks can be adjacent to I/O pads for external communication. Furthermore, these blocks are kept away from the central area so that they do not form blockage for internal routing. In the paper, we devise an algorithm of VLSI floorplanning with boundary constraints using a Corner Block List (CBL) representation. We identify the necessary and sufficient conditions of the CBL representation for the boundary constraints. We design a linear time approach to scan the conditions and formulate a penalty function to punish the constraint violation. A simulated annealing process is adopted to optimize the floorplan. Experiments on MCNC benchmarks show promising results.