Research on low-power scan testing has been focused on the shift mode, with little consideration given to the capture mode power. However, high switching activity when capturing a test response can cause excessive IR-drop, resulting in significant yield loss due to faulty test results. This paper addresses this problem with a novel low-capture-power X-filling method by assigning 0's and 1's to unspecified bits (X-bits) in a test cube to reduce the switching activity in capture mode. This method can be easily incorporated into any test generation flow, where test cubes can be obtained during ATPG or by X-bit identification. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this method in reducing capture power dissipation without any impact on area, timing, and fault coverage.

In this paper, based on Equivalent Active Flow, we propose a novel technique called Approximate Fairness Dropping, which is able to approximate fairness by containing misbehaving flows' access queue opportunity with low time/space complexity. Unlike most of the existing Active Queue Management schemes (e.g., RED, BLUE, CHOKE), Approximate Fairness Dropping does not drop the packets whose arriving rate is within the maximum admitted rate, so it protects the well-behaving flows against misbehaving ones, moreover, improves the throughput and decreases the queuing delay. Our simulations and analyses demonstrate that this new technique outperforms the existing schemes and closely approximates the "ideal" case, where full state information is needed.

Admission control is becoming an essential technique for IP networks to provide full-fledged multimedia streaming services. Although signaling-based schemes are utilized to achieve this, these are difficult to deploy and can hardly achieve strict admission control taking the properties of packet arrival into consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel admission control strategy called the Tentative Accommodating and Congestion Confirming Strategy (TACCS). The main idea is to accommodate incoming flows tentatively and confirm congestion after a certain period. Since tentative accommodating enables us to generate the same situation as where incoming flows have been accommodated, TACCS makes it possible to control admission considering the properties of packet arrival after they have been accommodated, without collecting resource information in advance. From the results of mathematical analysis, we confirmed that TACCS enabled a domain to control admission without a centralized management agent and we provided guidelines for configuring parameters of TACCS.

An efficient pad assignment methodology to minimize voltage drop on a power distribution network is proposed. A combination of successive pad assignment (SPA) with incremental matrix inversion (IMI) determines both location and number of power supply pads to satisfy drop voltage constraint. The SPA creates an equivalent resistance matrix which preserves both pad candidates and power consumption points as external ports so that topological modification due to connection or disconnection between voltage sources and candidate pads is consistently represented. By reusing sub-matrices of the equivalent matrix, the SPA greedily searches the next pad location that minimizes the worst drop voltage. Each time a candidate pad is added, the IMI reduces computational complexity significantly. Experimental results including a 400 pad problem show that the proposed procedures efficiently enumerate pad order in a practical time.

Continuous and explosive growth of the Internet has shown that current TCP mechanisms can obstruct efficient use of high-speed, long-delay networks. To address this problem we propose an enhanced transport-layer protocol called gHSTCP, based on HighSpeed TCP proposed by Sally Floyd. It uses two modes in the congestion avoidance phase based on the changing trend of RTT. Simulation results show gHSTCP can significantly improve performance in mixed environments, in terms of throughput and fairness against the traditional TCP Reno flows. However, the performance improvement is limited due to the nature of TailDrop router, and the RED/ARED routers can not alleviate the problem completely. Therefore, we present a modified version of Adaptive RED, called gARED, directed at the problem of simultaneous packet drops by multiple flows in high speed networks. gARED can eliminate weaknesses found in Adaptive RED by monitoring the trend in variation of the average queue length of the router buffer. Our approach, combining gARED and gHSTCP, is quite effective and fair to competing traffic than Adaptive RED with HighSpeed TCP.

Optical signal processing is one of essential technologies for improving the flexibility of all-optical network. Above all, recently there have been a lot of studies regarding all-optical 2R/3R regeneration technology. However, there are few studies about all-optical 2R/3R technologies that are carried out in field environment. In this paper, we report the successful results of field trials of an all-optical 2R regeneration system based on an electro-absorption modulator for 40-Gbit/s WDM transmission systems with optical add/drop multiplexing. It was made sure that by applying the all-optical 2R regeneration system to the optical add/drop multiplexer in the 320-km-long transmission systems the transmission characteristics of the express signal after 320-km transmission and those of the dropped signal at 160-km can be made nearly the same. It is quite important that the transmission characteristics are equal for both the dropped and express channel from a point of view of the system design, and the results in this paper suggests one possible solution for this matter.

The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been popular in communication societies for providing very large communication bands by multiple lightpaths with different wavelengths on a single optical fiber. Particularly, a double-ring optical network architecture based on the packet-over-WDM technology such as the HORNET architecture, has been extensively studied as a next generation platform for metropolitan area networks (MANs). Each node in this architecture is equipped with a wavelength-fixed optical-drop and a fast tunable transmitter so that a lightpath can be established between any pair of nodes without wavelength conversions. In this paper, we formulate the optical-drop wavelength assignment problem (ODWAP) for efficient wavelength reuse under heterogeneous traffic in this network, and prove the NP-completeness of its decision problem. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm for the basic case of ODWAP. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing waiting times for packet transmissions when a small number of wavelengths are available to retain the network cost for MANs.

This paper reports on the bending loss insensitive single mode fiber suitable for access networks, which is applicable for wide wavelength use. Excellent attenuation stability of the fiber in the full spectrum range has been confirmed even in severe conditions such as fiber handling in mid-span access at aerial closure, cable installation/handling in indoor wirings and so on. Also, applications suitable for FTTH subscribers' use have been introduced.

Dynamic power supply noise measurements with resolutions of 100 ps and 100 µV for 100 ns and 1 V ranges are performed at various operating frequencies up to 400 MHz on multiple points in a low power register file and SRAM for product chips by using on-chip noise detectors. The measurements show that the noises are clearly emphasized in frequency domains by the interaction of circuit operations and bias network's AC transfers. A proposed design methodology that covers a fast SPICE simulator and parasitic extractors can predict dynamic noises from power supplies, ground, well, and substrate interactions to provide robustness to the design of low power body bias control circuitry.

We report tunable optical devices based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs), whose filtering characteristics are controlled by strain distributions. These devices include a widely wavelength tunable filter, a tunable group-velocity dispersion (GVD) compensator, a tunable dispersion slope (DS) compensator, and a variable-bandwidth optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM), which will play important roles for next-generation reconfigurable optical networks.

The add/drop wavelength filter is an essential component in the new-generation photonic network. Microring resonator filters using high index contrast (HIC) optical waveguides are recently attracting attention as add/drop filters owing to their compactness, functionality such as dispersion compensation, and ease of filter synthesis. In particular, the vertically coupled microring resonator (VCMRR) filter is highly suited for the dense, large-scale integration of filter circuits. In this review, the fundamental characteristics advantageous to the add/drop filter nodes are introduced, and the recent progress in the development of vertically coupled microring resonator filters achieved mainly by the author's group is described.

This paper compares a stub and a decoupling capacitor for power supply noise reduction. A quarter-length stub attached to the power supply line of an LSI chip works as a band-eliminate filter, and suppresses the power supply bounce of the designed frequency. The conditions where the stub is more effective than the same-area decoupling capacitor are clarified. The stub will work more efficiently and on-chip integration will be possible on high frequency operation LSIs.

In this study, we propose an object-based multimedia model for specifying the QoS (quality of service) requirements, such as the maximum data-dropping rate or the maximum data-delay rate. We also present a resource allocation model, called the net-profit model, in which the satisfaction of user's QoS requirements is measured by the benefit earned by the system. Based on the net-profit model, the system is rewarded if it can allocate enough resources to a multimedia delivery request and fulfill the QoS requirements specified by the user. At the same time, the system is penalized if it cannot allocate enough resources to a multimedia delivery request. We first investigate the problem of how to allocate resources efficiently, so that the QoS satisfaction is maximized. However, the net-profit may be distributed unevenly among the multimedia delivery requests. Thus, the second problem discusses how to allocate the resource efficiently so that the net-profit difference is minimized between any two multimedia requests. A dynamic programming based algorithm is proposed to find such an optimal solution with the minimum net-profit differences.

In order to exploit the benefits of soft handoff, finding good values of handoff control parameters is important. In cellular system specifications such as IS-95C and WCDMA, handoff decision algorithm includes signal strength averaging and drop timer in addition to hysteresis. This paper analyzes the effects of signal strength averaging and drop timer and their performance tradeoffs. Because averaging and drop timer are both based on time delay, one may expect that they have similar impact on soft handoff performance. The results show that the effects of averaging and drop timer are rather similar and closely connected in terms of reducing the signaling overhead. However, they have different impacts on resource usage and diversity gain of the system.

In IP-based mobile networks, a few of mobility agents (e.g., home agent, foreign agent, etc.) are used for mobility management. Recently, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) was proposed to reduce signaling overhead and handoff latency occurred in Mobile IPv6. In HMIPv6, a new mobility agent, called mobility anchor point (MAP), is deployed in order to handle binding update procedures locally. However, the MAP can be a single point of performance bottleneck when there are a lot of mobile node (MNs) performing frequent local movements. This is because the MAP takes binding update procedures as well as data packet tunneling. Therefore, it is required to control the number of MNs serviced by a single MAP. In this paper, we propose a load control scheme at the MAP utilizing an admission control algorithm. We name the proposed load control scheme proactive load control scheme to distinct from the existing load control schemes in cellular networks. In terms of admission control, we use the cutoff priority scheme. We develop Markov chain models for the proactive load control scheme and evaluate the ongoing MN dropping and the new MN blocking probabilities. As a result, the proactive load control scheme can reduce the ongoing MN dropping probability while keeping the new MN blocking probability to a reasonable level.

As semiconductor manufacturing technology advances, power dissipation and noise in scan testing have become critical problems. Our studies on practical LSI manufacturing show that power supply voltage drop causes testing problems during shift operations in scan testing. In this paper, we present a new testing method named MD-SCAN (Multi-Duty SCAN) which solves power supply voltage drop problems, as well as its experimental results applied to practical LSI chips.

We analytically investigate combinatorial effects of timer control and backoff algorithms on performance of bulk data transfer over two-state Markovian packet error channels. Numerical results for throughput, energy efficiency, and the probabilities of packet loss and loss of bulk data indicate that linear backoff algorithms outperform binary exponential ones as a whole when they are employed at the logical link sublayer with timer control.

A technique for the design of circular- and racetrack-shaped NRD guide ring resonators was developed based on the mode coupling theory. Besides the operating mode, a parasitic mode is generated at curved sections of the resonator as a result of the mode conversion. Resonance of the NRD guide ring resonator is derived by characteristic equations of the coupled modes and then employed in making the design diagrams, which are useful for determining the dimensions of the ring resonators. It is shown that the discrepancy between the experimental results and previous theory can be resolved by using the present theory. Low loss, small-sized ring resonators with curvature radii of less than 5.3 mm were fabricated at 60 GHz and a band rejection performance of more than 30 dB was observed. Moreover, a procedure for the design of the channel dropping filter was developed and a 2-pole filter, which has great advantages such as a low insertion loss of 1.2 dB and a compact size smaller than that of a golf ball, was successfully developed by using two racetrack-shaped ring resonators.

Sliding contact behavior is important in the mechanism of collecting current. In this study, the effect of ambient gas including an inert gas on surface film formation and on the contact voltage drop was examined, changing the atmosphere from low pressure to atmospheric pressure. Furthermore, the sliding surface state was observed using SEM, EDX and XPS analyzers after the test operation. As a result, at the sliding contact in an inert gaseous environment (nitrogen and argon), it was confirmed that the contact voltage drop tends to increase. However, it was clarified that any chemically generated surface film is difficult to detect in the inert gas environment by qualitative analysis. On the basis of these results, we suggest the existence of physically adsorbed surface film. The relationship between inert gases and sliding contact phenomena is discussed.

A high-speed 32-bit RISC microcontroller has been developed. In order to realize high-speed operation with minimum hardware resource, we have developed new design and analysis methods such as a clock distribution, a bus-line layout, and an IR drop analysis. As a result, high-speed operation of 400 MHz has been achieved with power dissipation of 0.96 W at 1.8 V.