We have fabricated and characterized two types of high-Tc planar SQUID gradiometers having different line width of pickup loops. The device worked in flux-locked loop (FLL) operation even in laboratory environment without any shielding. A magnetic field gradient resolution of a parallel-type device in a lightly shielded room was about 0.5 pT/cmHz1/2 at 1 kHz and 2 pT/cmHz1/2 at 1 Hz. The device was possible to record magnetocardiograms in a shielded room. QRS-complex peaks of about 10 pT PP/4mm are clearly observed. For a mesh-type device, the increase of low frequency noise in the open laboratory environment was less than that for a parallel-type.

This letter presents a novel application of the Verilog-A, which is a hardware description language for analog circuits, to the modeling and simulation of high-speed interconnects in time/frequency transform-domain for signal integrity problems. This modeling method with the Verilog-A language would handle the transfer function approximation and admittance matrices, which are expressed by the dominant poles and residues as used in AWE technique. Finally, it is shown that modeling and simulation of the high-speed interconnects with nonlinear terminations can be done easily.

A cascode crystal oscillator is widely used for the stable frequency source of mobile communication equipments. Recently, IC production of the cascode crystal oscillator has become necessary. The cascode crystal oscillator is composed of a colpitts crystal oscillator and a cascode connected base-common buffer amplifier. The base bypass condenser prevents the area size reduction. In this paper, we have proposed the new structures of the cascode crystal oscillator suitable for integrated circuits. The proposed circuits have the advantages on reduction of the area size and start-up time without deteriorating the frequency stability against the load impedance variation and other performances. The simulation and experiment have shown the effectiveness of the proposed circuits.

A highly stable oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO) with low phase-noise characteristics has been developed using a dual-mode SC-cut quartz crystal oscillator. The OCXO uses a conventional oven-control system for coarse compensation and a digital-correction system, which uses B-mode signal in an SC-cut resonator as a temperature sensor, for fine compensation. Combining these two forms of compensation greatly improves the stability of the C-mode frequency without requiring a double-oven system. The experimental results indicated that the frequency stability of the proposed OCXO, including the frequency-temperature hysteresis, is ten times better than that of a conventional, free-running OCXO. The results also indicated that the proposed OCXO has good frequency retraceability and low phase-noise characteristics.

In this paper, we propose a method of unicast and broadcast packet sharing for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multi-base station (BS) indoor wireless communication system using an adaptive array antenna on mobile terminals. The adaptive array antenna placed on the mobile terminal allows quality improvement due to the diversity effect when the data transmitted from all BSs are the same, and provides capacity improvement by channel sharing when the data from each BS are different. In the proposed sharing method, unicast packets are transmitted independently from multiple BSs in order to increase the communication capacity, and broadcast packets are transmitted simultaneously with other BSs in order to enhance the communication quality without retransmission. Furthermore, by modifying the packet assignment procedure, we confirm that quality can be improved for unicast packets in a low traffic environment.

A high isolation hybrid circuit composed of a pair of transformers, a voltage control resistance (VCR) circuit and an automatic impedance control device is designed for a two-wire full duplex cable modem to adapt variable line impedance. A binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) cable modem using the new hybrid circuit with an isolation of 52 dB to 58 dB in the line impedance variation range of 400 to 950 ohm is demonstrated. The isolation of the new hybrid circuit is increased by more than 30 dB over the traditional hybrid circuit for a two-wire full duplex modem in the preset line impedance range.

A highly sensitive optical sampling system has been produced by using sum-frequency generation in a periodically poled lithium niobate crystal. When the relations between crystal length and wavelength bandwidth and SFG conversion efficiency were investigated theoretically and experimentally, a system with a 1.4-mm-long periodically poled lithium niobate crystal was found to have a 22.5-nm wavelength bandwidth and a SFG conversion efficiency ten times that of a similar system with a 3-mm-long KTP crystal. The SNR of the system with the 1.4-mm-long PPLN crystal was about 7 dB higher than that of the system with a 3-mm-long KTP crystal, and a temporal resolution better than 1 ps was obtained by using compressed optical sampling pulses. The eye diagram of a 10-Gbit/s RZ optical signal with a 1-mW peak power could be observed, and the eye diagram of a 160-Gbit/s RZ optical signal could be observed clearly.

We applied control theory to nerve-muscle in order to model and systematize the muscle system. The association between nerve stimulation frequencies and electromyogram (EMG) amplitude was studied in rat nerve-muscle under normal and hypokalemic conditions. From these results, we modeled the nerve-muscle and simulated frequency response from the nerve-muscle system which can be expressed as a closed loop transfer function.

We propose a frequency stabilization system for laser diodes (LD's), in which the major parameters in the stabilization process can be controlled in respond to the monitored frequency noise characteristics in real-time basis. The performance of this system was also tested through stabilizing a 35 mW visible LD. The center frequency of the LD has been stabilized by negative electrical feedback based on Pound-Drever-Hall technique. The linewidth of the LD has been reduced by adapting optical feedback from resonant confocal Fabry-Perot (CFP) cavity. The controlling parameters, especially gain levels and frequency responses of the negative electrical feedback loop can be manipulated to remove the instantaneous frequency noise by monitoring power spectral density (PSD) of the frequency error signals in the real-time basis. The achieved PSD of frequency noise of a sample LD stabilized by the present system was less than 1105 Hz2/Hz for the Fourier frequency < 10 MHz. The reduced linewidth was estimated to be narrower than 400 kHz. The achieved minimum square root of the Allan variance was 3.910-11 at τ = 0.1 msec.

In this paper, we propose a frequency domain active noise control (ANC) system without a secondary path model. The proposed system is based on the frequency domain simultaneous perturbation (FDSP) method we have proposed. In this system, the coefficients of the adaptive filter are updated only by error signals. The conventional ANC system using the filtered-x algorithm becomes unstable due to the error between the secondary path, from secondary source to error sensor, and its model. In contrast, the proposed ANC system has the advantage not to use the model. In this paper, we show the principle of the proposed ANC system, and examine its efficiency through computer simulations.

A digital noncoherent demodulation scheme is presented for reception of Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) signals with small modulation index. The proposed differential demodulator utilizes oversampled signals to estimate the symbol timing and to compensate the frequency offset. The performance of the proposed receiver is evaluated in terms of the bit-error rate (BER). Numerical results show that the proposed demodulator provides performance comparable to that of conventional baseband differential demodulator, while significantly reducing the implementation complexity suitable for single chip integration with direct conversion radio frequency module. Finally the performance of the proposed receiver is improved by adding a simple decision feedback module.

Phase-based methods for estimating the frequency of a sinusoid have typically suffered from a threshold effect, where for signal to noise ratio (SNR) below the threshold, the mean squared error of the estimate rapidly increases. Furthermore, it is a significant problem that the threshold is considerably high and strongly depends on frequency. To overcome the difficulties, a Kalman-based sinusoidal estimator bank (KSEB) is proposed. In the derivation of the KSEB, a four-channel filter bank and decimation technique are effectively used. The computer simulation also demonstrates the superiority of the KSEB to the other frequency estimators.

This paper described a new method to generate a spread spectrum clock for the purpose of EMI reduction. This method uses two phase-locked loops (PLL). The output of the first PLL is locked to its input of 14.318 MHz. The VCO in this PLL is used to produce 32 outputs with the same frequency and each with 11.25 degrees phase variation. A digital spread spectrum generator uses these 32 signals to generate the desired spread spectrum signal by phase hopping technique. These two circuits form a spread spectrum digital PLL (SSDPLL). The second PLL is configured as a conventional frequency synthesizer. It can be programmed to generate the desired frequencies. The second PLL also serves as a low pass filter of the output of the SSDPLL to smooth out frequency variation. This circuit was implemented with a 0.6 µm single poly CMOS process. The active areas of the SSDPLL and the synthesizer are 826396 µm2 and 790298 µm2, respectively. The total power consumption is 99 mW at 3.3 V supply. The peak power of the spread spectrum clock is reduced by 10 dBm at 14.318 MHz output with a 2.34% frequency spreading. The reduction of peak power increases with output frequency.

This paper investigates the optimum transmit-antenna-weight generation method for adaptive antenna array transmit diversity (AAA-TD) in the W-CDMA forward link: AAA-TD with beam and null steering (BNST), AAA-TD with beam steering (BST), or switched beam transmit diversity with fixed weights (SBTD-FW). The achievable BER performance after carrier frequency calibration in the transmit beam pattern is compared among the three methods assuming a different carrier frequency in a 2-GHz band with the carrier separation of 184.5 MHz based on computer simulations. The simulation results show that the achievable BER performance in the forward link using AAA-TD with BNST is almost identical to that using AAA-TD with BST when there are many more interfering users than there are array antennas, except for the special case when a small number of higher rate users exists in the reverse link. This is because by performing carrier frequency calibration, the directions of the beam nulls are shifted from the real directions of arrival (DOAs) of the interfering users. However, we also show that the required transmit Eb/N0 at the average BER of 10-3 using AAA-TD with BST is decreased by approximately 1.0 to 1.2 dB compared to that using SBTD-FW with 12 beams.

This paper investigates a device model of the power current used for an LSI/IC. The model is proposed to analyze the power bus noise in digital circuit boards. This model is defined in the frequency domain and constructed with an equivalent internal impedance and an equivalent internal current source. Accordingly, the output current of the model is affected by power bus impedance, such as the capacitance of bypass capacitors and the parasitic inductance of power bus wiring. Therefore, the model is useful for analyzing the effectiveness of bypass capacitors and power bus wiring. The structure of equivalent internal impedance for a simple logic IC, such as 74HCXX, can be represented as an RLC series circuit. These parameters are identified by applying the least square method. To demonstrate the validity of the model, an experimental study was conducted. As a result, it was shown that the output current of the model corresponds to the measured current under a variety of power bus impedance levels within 6 dB.

In this paper, we present a new signal frequency estimation method based on the sinusoidal additive synthesis model. In the proposed method, frequencies in both the signal and noise are estimated with several delay times by using an expanded linear prediction (LP) method, and assuming that the signal is stationary and noise is unstationary in short record length. Frequencies in the signal are extracted according to their dependence on different delays. The frequency estimation can be accomplished with short record length even in the case where the number of frequency components in the signal is unknown. And it is capable of estimating the frequencies of a signal in the presence of noise. Furthermore, the proposed method estimates the parameters with less computation and high estimation accuracy. Simulation results are provided to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. The comparison of estimation accuracy between the proposed method and the analysis by synthesis (ABS) method is shown with the corresponding Cramer-Rao lower bound. And the frequency resolution of this method is also shown.

Power supply rejection ratio (PSRR) characteristics of a switched capacitor filter (SCF) is improved when using an equal level diagram design of a leapfrog type filter. By using this design method, it is shown that PSRR of a SCF measured is improved about 20 dB.

The low-frequency noise of InGaAs pseudomorphic HEMTs fabricated on GaAs substrate was studied. The dependence of the noise spectral density on the gate voltage indicates that the channel of the device dominates the low-frequency noise. Generation-recombination (G-R) noise was observed in the form of bulges superimposed on a background of 1/f. The activation energyof the G-R noise was 0.32-0.39 eV which is close to that of the DX center, suggesting that the origin of the G-R noise is the DX center in the AlGaAs barrier layer. Little bulge was observed in the gate current noise of the HEMTs with large InAs mole fractions of 0.4 and 0.5. Generation of the traps with different time constant can explain this behavior.

In this report we demonstrate the characteristics of the opt-electrical transducer that is newly designed for a fiber-optic wireless access system. This transducer consists of a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) oscillator whose oscillation frequency is over 30 GHz. The active element of the oscillator is an InAlAs/InGaAs high electron mobility transistor (HEMT). The shift of frequency is observed when we illuminate 1.55 µm wavelength light onto the HEMT area. The size of the frequency shift is -150 MHz/mW, and it does not change as a function of gate bias conditions. We also confirm that the oscillator is able to respond with an optical signal of 500 MHz, which is sufficiently fast to achieve 156 Mbit/s communication. If this transducer is introduced into the base station (BS) of a fiber-optic wireless access system, a high-speed optical modulator no longer has to be incorporated into the control station. As a result, the configuration of the system becomes simpler than that of Radio on Fiber. We constructed a system that adopts the frequency shift keying technique with application of the transducer into the BS and then performed a transmission experiment at 5 Mbit/s. The demodulated data is sufficiently clear to distinguish high from low. Therefore, we can put forth that the fabricated transducer is a promising candidate as a device for the BS of a fiber-optic millimeter-wave wireless access system.

We fabricated 50-nm-gate InAlAs/InGaAs high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) lattice-matched to InP substrates by using a conventional process under low temperatures, below 300C, to prevent fluorine contamination and suppress possible diffusion of the Si-δ-doped sheet in the electron-supply layer, and measured the DC and RF performance of the transistors. The DC measurement showed that the maximum transconductance gm of a 50-nm-gate HEMT is about 0.91 S/mm. The cutoff frequency fT of our 50-nm-gate HEMT is 362 GHz, which is much higher than the values reported for previous 50-nm-gate lattice-matched HEMTs. The excellent RF performance of our HEMTs results from a shortening of the lateral extended range of charge control by the drain field, and this may have been achieved because the low-temperature fabrication process suppressed degradation of epitaxial structure.