Electrical properties of contacts between head-tail coupled poly(3-hexylthiophene), PHT and Al (and Au) in planer type and sandwich type diodes of Al/PHT/Au have been studied. The contact resistances are directly evaluated by probing the potential profile of PHT between the metal electrodes using micromanipulators installed in scanning electron microscope. In the potential profile of planer type diode, a large potential cliff is observed at Al/PHT interface and some appreciable potential step is also found at PHT/Au interface. The contact resistance at the Al/PHT interface deduced from the potential profile shows the bias and its polarity dependence, indicating the existing of the Schottky like junction. At forward bias, it is found that the residual resistance at Al/PHT interface limits the diode performance. The residual resistance is supposed to be insulating layer of Al oxide. At larger reversed bias, the contact resistance at Al/PHT decreased abruptly due to the Zener breakdown. The potential profile of sandwich type diode is similar to that of planer type diode. It is found that even the PHT/Au contact shows the ohmic behavior, the contact resistance is significant as to limit the maximum current of the cells.

A two-dimensional laser beam profiler has been developed that can measure the intensity distribution on a sample surface of a single-shot of an excimer-laser light beam from not only the macroscopic viewpoint, but also the microscopic viewpoint, which is important to excimer-laser triggered lateral large-grain growth of Si. A resolution as fine as 0.4 µm was obtained with a field of view of as large as 30 µm 30 µm. The effects of homogenizers, phase-shifters, and their combination on beam profiles were quantitatively investigated by using this apparatus. The relationship between the microscopic beam profile and the surface morphology of laterally grown grains was also examined.

It is expected that per-user customized services are widely used in next generation Personal Communication Network. To provide personalized services for each call, per-user service profiles are frequently referenced, so efficient service profile management is essentially required. To provide service profile based services, typically two schemes can be employed: One is Intelligent Network based Central scheme and the other is IMT-2000 based full replication scheme, we refer to as Follow-Me Replication Unconditional (FMRU). Since the Central scheme only depends on the service call rate and the FMRU is merely dependent on the movement rate, it is apparent that the FMRU scheme outperforms the Central scheme if the call-to-mobility ratio (CMR) is large, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a new service profile replication schemes, Adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (AFMRC) that determine replication automatically according to the user's varying CMR in real-time. We compared the performance of the AFMRC with the previous non-adaptive Follow-Me Replication Conditional (FMRC) scheme. Performance results indicate that as the CMR of a user changes, AFMRC adapts well compared to the existing schemes.

As so many software titles are now being distributed via the Internet, the number of accesses to file servers, such as FTP servers, is rapidly increasing. To prevent the concentration of accesses to the original file server, mirror servers are being introduced that contain the same directories and files as held by the original server. However, inconsistency among the mirror servers and the original server is often observed because of delivery latency, traffic congestion on the network, and management policies of the mirror servers. This inconsistency degrades the value of the mirror servers. Accordingly, we have developed an intermediate FTP proxy server system that guarantees the freshness of the files as well as preventing access concentration on the original FTP server. The system adopts per-file selection of the replicated files; most existing methods are based on per-host or per-directory selection. Therefore it can assure users of a quick, stable, and up-to-date FTP mirroring service even in the face of frequent content updates, which tend to degrade the homogeneity of services. Moreover, it can forward the retrieved files with little overhead. Tests confirmed that our system is comparable to existing systems from the viewpoint of actual retrieval time, required traffic, and load endurance. This technology can assure clients that they will receive the latest version of the file(s) desired. It well supports heterogeneous network environments such as the Internet.

Steganography is a technique that conceals the very existence of communication by means of hiding secret messages in innocuous cover objects. We previously developed a steganographic method that uses standard MIDI files (SMFs) as cover objects. Our method could conceal the secret messages in SMFs without changing their sound. We also investigated the effectiveness of our method against steganalysis. This steganalytic research revealed that files embedded using our method are vulnerable to detection, because stego SMFs lose the imprints borne by sequencers. In this study, we describe two improved methods of steganography that enable even stego SMFs to keep the sequencer's imprint. As a result, we improved the resistance of SMFs against steganalysis but there was a slight reduction in the embedding rate.

This letter presents the implementation results of an application-level cache file system, MCFS, which is specifically designed to provide efficient caching and transmission mechanisms for streaming media. The file system is built on a virtual file disk which is constructed as a single large file on a general-purpose file system. MCFS suits the access requirement of continuous media caching and provides an efficient I/O mechanism for cache servers. The experimental results show that MCFS outperforms the comparison model and provides a consistent I/O bandwidth.

A low power MPEG-4 video codec LSI with the capability for core profile decoding is presented. A 16-b DSP with a vector pipeline architecture and a 32-b arithmetic unit, eight dedicated hardware engines to accelerate MPEG-4 SP@L1 codec, CP@L1 decoding and post video processing, 20-Mb embedded DRAM, and three peripheral blocks are integrated together on a single chip. MPEG-4 SP@L1 codec, CP@L1 decoding and post video processing are realized with a hybrid architecture consisting of a programmable DSP and dedicated hardware engines at low operating frequency. In order to reduce the power consumption, clock gating technique is fully adopted in each hardware block and embedded DRAM is employed. The chip is implemented using 0.18-µm quad-metal CMOS technology, and its die area is 8.8 mm 8.6 mm. The power consumption is 90 mW at a SP@L1 codec and 110 mW at a CP@L1 decoding.

In this paper, we first investigate the characteristics of movie contents over the Internet. As in the previous studies, we found the lognormal-distribution well fits the distribution of file size for the whole set of general movie contents. When we specifically focus on the subset that consists of movie trailers, however, it shows different distribution from the lognormal-distribution. Our analysis shows it is similar to an exponential-distribution. We here assume that movie trailers are one of the relevant contents for Contents Delivery Networks (CDN) or Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file exchange communities. We further studies the relationship between playing duration and file size for the movie trailers and we did not find any linear correlation among them. We next consider bandwidth requirements to retrieve movie trailer contents. Our objective is to make it possible for user to view the contents in real-time. Many previous studies investigate bandwidth requirement based only on the file size distribution. In this paper, we analyze the traffic design criteria for CDN or P2P by taking into account both of the results for the file size distribution and the relationship between playing duration and file size for movie trailers. Simulation studies reveal the impact for the bandwidth requirement.

In traditional file systems, data clustering and grouping have improved small file performance. These schemes make it possible for file systems to use large data transfers in accessing small files, reducing disk I/Os. However, as file systems age, disks become too fragmented to support the grouping and clustering. To offer a solution to this problem, we describe a De-Fragmented File System (DFFS), which gradually alleviates fragmentation of small files. By using data cached in memory, DFFS dynamically relocates blocks of small fragmented files, clustering them on the disks contiguously. In addition, DFFS relocates small related files in the same directory, grouping them at contiguous disk locations.

Mirroring of network servers has been considered to be effective for load balancing. However, the cost of setting up new mirror servers is enormously high. In this paper, we propose a dynamic file allocation model with a simple mirroring function for handling significant changes of network traffic in the Internet. According to the load fluctuation, we can dynamically reallocate files using this model. We show that our model accomplishes satisfactory performance and reduces cost by adding a simple mirroring function to all existent servers instead of setting up mirror servers afresh.

In a conventional file system, the directory tree is traversed to find the inode number of a file. The inode lookup performance degrades as the size of the directory tree increases. In this letter, a new directory scheme, called direct hashing directory, is proposed. The inode number of a file is the cyclic redundancy code of the file's absolute path name such that the inode number can be computed directly. The average number of disk accesses for inode lookup is 1.08, which is order of magnitude faster than the conventional directory schemes such as hashing, B tree, and sequential directory.

A problem of obtaining an optimal file transfer of a file transmission net N is to consider how to transmit, with the minimum total cost, copies of a certain file of information from some vertices, called sources, to other vertices of N by the respective vertices' copy demand numbers. This problem is NP-hard for a general file transmission net N. Some classes of N, on each of which a polynomial time algorithm for obtaining an optimal file transfer can be designed, are known. In the characterization, we assumed that file given originally to the source remains at the source without being transmitted. In this paper, we relax the assumption to the one that a sufficient number of copies of the file are given to the source and those copies can be transmitted from the source to other vertices on N. Under this new assumption, we characterize a class of file transmission nets, on each of which a polynomial time algorithm for obtaining an optimal file transfer can be designed. A minimum spanning tree with degree constraints plays a key role in the algorithm.

This paper presents efficient file management of a hard disk drive embedded digital satellite receiver. The digital broadcasting technology enables multimedia access via broadcasting systems. The amount of digital data to be processed is increased remarkably as compared to the previous analog broadcasting environments. The efficient digital data storage and management technology are discussed in this paper to cope with these changes. The DSR uses a new file system that is designed by considering disk cluster sizes and limited memories in the system, which is more appropriate than that of general Personal Computers. The proposed system enables us to watch broadcasting and to manage multimedia data efficiently.

This paper proposes a multi-host RAID-5 architecture in which multiple hosts can access disk array via storage area network. In this configuration, parity inconsistency occurs when different hosts try to write to the same stripe simultaneously. Parity consistency can be ensured by the serialization of the writes to the same stripe with locking method. While conventional locking methods can be used, the performance is degraded in the case of large number of hosts. When multiple-reader single-writer file consistency semantic is used, most of the stripes are written exclusively by a single host, so parity inconsistency problem does not occur. By removing locking of those stripes which amounts to 95% in practical workloads, the performance becomes more scalable and 50% faster than using the conventional stripe locking methods.

A parallel file system is normally used to support excessive file requests from parallel applications in a cluster system, whereas prefetching is useful for improving the file system performance. This paper proposes dynamic file prefetching scheme based on file access patterns, named table-comparison prefetching policy, that is particularly suitable for parallel scientific applications and multimedia web services in a VIA-based parallel file system. VIA relieves the communication overhead of traditional communication protocols, such as TCP/IP. The proposed policy introduces a table-comparison method to predict data for prefetching. In addition, it includes an algorithm to determine whether and when prefetching is performed using the current available I/O bandwidth. Experimental results confirmed that the use of the proposed prefetching policy in a VIA-based parallel file system produced a higher file system performance for various file access patterns.

Femtosecond optical pulses were irradiated into a YBa2Cu3O7-δ strip-line of 400 µm in width in order to investigate the relationship between the laser beam power profile and the distribution of the optically generated magnetic fluxes. To homogenize the current distribution in the strip-line, a half of the strip-line was patterned into the ordered array structure of holes of 2 µm in diameter at an interval of 4 µm, and several experimental conditions were examined by changing the focal size of the pulsed laser beam at the sample surface. As a result, it was found out that the generated optical magnetic fluxes strongly depend on the power profile of the femtosecond optical pulses, and showed a possibility for the application to a laser beam profiler and the other optical devices.

A fast, low-power 16-bit adder, 32-word register file and 512-bit cache SRAM have been developed using 0.25-µm GaAs HEMT technology for future multi-GHz processors. The 16-bit adder, which uses a negative logic binary look-ahead carry structure based on NOR gates, operates at the maximum clock frequency of 1.67 GHz and consumes 134.4 mW at a supply voltage of 0.6 V. The active area is 1.6 mm2 and there are about 1,230 FETs. A new DC/DC level converter has been developed for use in high-speed, low-power storage circuits such as SRAMs and register files. The level converter can increase the DC voltage, which is supplied to an active-load circuit on request, or supply a minimal DC voltage to a load circuit in the stand-by mode. The power dissipation (P) of the 32-word register file with on-chip DC/DC level converters is 459 mW, a reduction to 25.2% of that of an equivalent conventional register file, while the operating frequency (fc) was 5.17 GHz that is 74.8% of fc for the conventional register file. P for the 512-bit cache SRAM with the new DC/DC level converters is 34.3 mW, 89.7% of the value for an equivalent conventional cache SRAM, with the read-access time of 455 psec, only 1.1% longer than that of the conventional cache SRAM.

This letter proposes a hardware/software partitioning algorithm for digital signal processor cores with two register files. Given a compiled assembly code and a timing constraint of execution time, the proposed algorithm generates a processor core configuration with a new assembly code running on the generated processor core. The proposed algorithm considers two register files and determines the number of registers in each of register files. Moreover the algorithm considers two or more types of functional units for each arithmetic or logical operation and assigns functional units with small area to a processor core without causing performance penalty. A generated processor core will have small area compared with processor cores which have a single register file or those which consider only one type of functional units for each operation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

To generalize characteristics of a received signal level distribution from narrow- to wide-bands in a mobile radio channel, a new propagation parameter called equivalent received bandwidth (2ΔfΔLmax) has been proposed. The distributions are discussed mainly with computer simulation results. The simulation results shows the level distribution depends on 2ΔfΔLmax and power ratio a of direct to indirect waves, and the value of 2ΔfΔLmax classifies the radio channel as narrow- or wide-bands transmission. To confirm these simulated results, a field test was performed with a 3.35 GHz radio wave. This paper describes that the field test demonstrated the simulation results. It is concluded that the equation representing received signal level in the computer simulation is valid. And the fading depth depends directly on 2ΔfΔLmax, and the 2ΔfΔLmax is effective for generalizing the received signal level distribution. Furthermore, a method for calculating the power ratio was found to be better for a peak level model.

This paper proposes a novel file transfer scheme named "Jam-packing file transfer" that consists of a call admission control and a packet scheduling mechanism. This combination can efficiently multiplex the traffic of file transfer and provides a guaranteed delivery time. Simulation results show the highness of extreme the multiplexing efficiency as the improvement in call blocking probabilities compared with the conventional rate-based reservation schemes. Furthermore, simulations of the packet scheduling indicate that file deliveries are done at the predicted delivery time.