This paper describes the application of an unsupervised parallel approach called the Annealed Hopfield Neural Network (AHNN) using a modified cost function with moment and entropy preservation for magnetic resonance image (MRI) classification. In the AHNN, the neural network architecture is same as the original 2-D Hopfield net. And a new cooling schedule is embedded in order to make the modified energy function to converge to an equilibrium state. The idea is to formulate a clustering problem where the criterion for the optimum classification is chosen as the minimization of the Euclidean distance between training vectors and cluster-center vectors. In this article, the intensity of a pixel in an original image, the first moment combined with its neighbors, and their gray-level entropy are used to construct a 3-component training vector to map a neuron into a two-dimensional annealed Hopfield net. Although the simulated annealing method can yield the global minimum, it is very time-consuming with asymptotic iterations. In addition, to resolve the optimal problem using Hopfield or simulated annealing neural networks, the weighting factors to combine the penalty terms must be determined. The quality of final result is very sensitive to these weighting factors, and feasible values for them are difficult to find. Using the AHNN for magnetic resonance image classification, the need of finding weighting factors in the energy function can be eliminated and the rate of convergence is much faster than that of simulated annealing. The experimental results show that better and more valid solutions can be obtained using the AHNN than the previous approach in classification of the computer generated images. Promising solutions of MRI segmentation can be obtained using the proposed method. In addition, the convergence rates with different cooling schedules in the test phantom will be discussed.

The abilities of fuzzy inference methods in modeling of complicated systems are implemented to electromagnetics for the first time. The very popular and well known monopole antenna is chosen as a general example and a fast, simple and accurate fuzzy model for its input impedance is made by introducing a new point of view to impedance basic parameters. It is established that a surprisingly little number of input data points is sufficient to make a full model and also the system behavior (dominant rules) are saved as simple membership functions. The validity of the derived rules is confirmed through applying them to the case of thin-angled monopole antenna and comparing the results with the measured. Finally using the spatial membership function context, input impedance of thick-angled monopole antenna is predicted and a novel view point to conventional electromagnetic parameters is discussed to generalize the modeling method.

An integrated slider-suspension system was designed and prototyped. The structure of this system has a full flying air-bearing surface in the leading part with a contamination-resistant feature, and it accommodates a slider with a 5-15 nm head-disk spacing at the trailing part. Performance analysis and simulation were conducted to validate the high performances of the design. Two key issues, the rigid motions (vibrations) and the elastic motions of the slider, were investigated systematically. For the rigid motions, it was found that the natural frequencies of the slider system are dependent on the disk contact stiffness and that the slider vibrations under excitation exhibit various nonlinear resonance. For the elastic motions, the average elastic response of the slider body under the random interaction of the interface was derived and characterized.

An accurate and efficient numerical solution is presented for a two-dimensional electromagnetic wave scattering from a multilayered resistive strip grating embedded in a dielectric slab. Both E- and H-waves are treated. The problem is formulated into a set of integral equations, which is solved by the moment method accompanied by a regularization procedure. The resultant set of linear algebraic equations has the form of the Fredholm second kind, and therefore yields stable and accurate numerical solutions. The power distribution is computed for several grating parameters. Attention is paid to seek a set of parameters that maximizes absorption in the strips. The low frequency approximate formulas are also derived. This analysis would be useful in designing electromagnetic wave absorbers.

Thermal stability of anisotropic and isotropic Co alloy thin-film media is investigated. The orientation ratio of CoCrTa(Pt)/Cr media was controlled by the mechanical texture of the NiP/Al substrates. Bulk magnetic properties, delta M curves and time decay of magnetization in the circumferential and radial directions were measured. The maximum magnetic viscosity coefficient calculated from the time decay of magnetization in the circumferential direction was higher than that in the radial direction for a mechanically textured sample, while it was similar in both directions for a non-textured sample. The magnetic viscosity coefficient in the circumferential direction is smaller than that in the radial direction when the reverse field is in the range of the demagnetization field for thin-film recording media. This implies that an anisotropic sample (namely, a sample with a high orientation ratio) will be more thermally stable when it is not exposed to a large external magnetic field.

In various digital wireless communication systems, it is known that turbo coding provides an error rate performance within a few tenths of a dB of the theoretical Shannon limit. The error correcting capability of turbo coding is attractive for a recording code in a digital magnetic recording system. The performance of a partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) system with any recording code is degraded by many undesirable factors such as linear and nonlinear distortions. For improving the performance of the PRML system, it is useful to adopt a high-order PRML system or high rate code in general. In this paper, the two-track recording system using turbo coding which can increase the coding rate over 1 and improve the performance is proposed. Turbo-coding provides a near-ML performance by the suboptimum symbol-by-symbol maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoding algorithm. Our proposed turbo-coded class 4 partial response (PR4) systems use the rate 4/6, 8/10 and 16/18 turbo codes for high-density two-track digital magnetic recording. The error rate performance is obtained by computer simulation, taking account of the partial erasure which is a prominent nonlinear distortion in high-density recording. As a result, the proposed systems are hardly affected by partial erasure and maintains good performance compared with the conventional NRZ coded PR4ML system.

A head-disk spacing tester that includes the effect of lubricant will be necessary if the slider-disk interaction is to be considered. The interaction and interaction induced spacing variation can be quantitatively characterized by optical method and by replacing the functional disk media with a glass disk covered with a carbon layer and a lubricant layer of the same materials and the same layer thickness as the functional disk media. This paper reports a tester configuration based on that concept. Experimental investigations into the nanometer spaced head-disk interface with such a setup are presented also. Results indicate that the lubricant plays an important role in slider-disk interaction and the vibration of the slider-disk interface. Two types of interface vibration were noticed: contact vibration and bouncing vibration. For the bouncing case, the natural frequency of air-bearing and its fold frequencies will be excited and air-bearing plays more important role in the determination of the slider vibration, comparing with the contact-vibration case.

In this paper, we will present a study of the time-dependence effect in alumite perpendicular media at different thicknesses. Important parameters of the time-dependence effect such as magnetic viscosity and activation volume are investigated. Viscosity as a function of applied field (viscosity curve) exhibits a short plateau at a low field and then decreases monotonously with increasing field. After correcting for the demagnetizing field, the shape of the intrinsic viscosity curves changes to the well-known shape of the viscosity curve of in-plane media, i. e. , they have a peak near Hc. The intrinsic viscosity curves obtained from the experiments were fitted to an analytical model by Chantrell et al., from which, we found that the effective switching volumes obtained by fitting are much smaller than the column volumes, indicating that the reversal mechanism is incoherent.

A novel method to obtain a compact plastic package with higher isolation by providing subsidiary inner ground leads between outer leads is proposed and demonstrated. The effect of the subsidiary ground leads is investigated by using a 3-dimensional electromagnetic field simulation and measuring the fabricated packages. Newly designed package with subsidiary ground leads achieves higher isolation by more than 10 dB at 3 GHz as compared to a conventional package. This package is applied to GaAs SPDT switch IC's. Isolation of the switch IC's is improved by 5 dB at 3 GHz by the subsidiary inner ground leads. The isolation characteristics are discussed based on the equivalent circuit extracted from the simulation results.

This paper describes a novel layout optimization technique using electromagnetic (EM) simulation. Simple equivalent circuits fitted to EM simulation results are employed in this method, to present a modification guide for a layout pattern. Fitting errors are also investigated with some layout patterns in order to clarify the applicable range of the method, because the errors restrict the range. The method has been successfully adopted to an X-band low noise MMIC amplifier (LNA). The layout pattern of the amplifier was optimized in only two days and the amplifier has achieved target performances--a 35 dB gain and a 1.7 dB noise figure--in one development cycle. The effective chip area has been miniaturized to 4.8 mm2. The area could be smaller than 70% in comparison with a conventional layout MMIC.

The flip-chip structure for millimeter-wave MMICs has been investigated to obtain high performance and high reliability. In our approach, an air gap between the MMIC and the alumina substrate was determined so as not to change electrical characteristics from those of the unflipped MMIC. We calculated the proximity effect between the MMIC and the substrate by using 3D-electromagnetic simulator, and found that the air gap should be controlled to be greater than 20 µm. Since the discontinuity of transmission lines at bump interconnects is not negligible above 60 GHz, we constructed the LCR-equivalent circuit for the bump interconnect and confirmed its validity by comparing measurement with calculation. Based on these investigations, the 60- and 76-GHz-band CPW three-stage low noise amplifiers were successfully mounted on the alumina substrate using a thermal compression bonding process. The gain of the flipped 60- and 76-GHz-band MMICs are greater than 18 dB at around 60 GHz and 17 dB at around 76 GHz, respectively. The noise figures are 3.6 dB and 3.9 dB, respectively. The gain and noise performances showed little degradation compared to those of the unflipped MMICs when appropriate bonding conditions are given. We confirmed that the flip-chip structure has high reliability under a thermal cycle test. From these results, flip-chip technology is promising for millimeter-wave applications.

Analytical solutions have been obtained for the electromagnetic scattering by a modified Luneberg lens with the permittivity of arbitrary parabolic function. They are expressed by four spherical vector wave functions for radially stratified medium which were introduced for the Luneberg lens by C. T. Tai. They consist of the confluent hypergeometric function and a "generalized" confluent hypergeometric function, in which the parameters for the permittivity of arbitrary parabolic function are involved. The characteristics of the modified Luneberg lens are numerically investigated using exact solutions in comparison with that of the conventional Luneberg lens. The bistatic cross section, the forward cross section and the radar cross section are studied in detail. The near-field distribution is also investigated in order to study the focal properties of the Luneberg lens. The focal shifts defined by the distance between the geometrical focal point and the electromagnetic focal point are obtained for various ka (k is the wave number and a is the radius of the lens). The focal shift normalized to the radius of the sphere becomes larger as ka is smaller. However it drops down rapidly for ka5 when the peak of the electric field amplitude appears on the surface of sphere.

Effective wavelets to solve electromagnetic integral equations are proposed. It is based on the same construction procedure as Daubechies wavelets but with mix-phase to obtain maximum sparsity of moment matrix. These new wavelets are proved to have excellent performance in non-zero elements reduction in comparison with minimum-phase wavelet transform (WT). If further sparsity is concerned, wavelet packet (WP) transform can be applied but increases the computational complexity. In some cases, the capability of non-zero elements reduction by this new wavelets even better than WP with minimum-phase wavelets and with less computational efforts. Numerical experiments demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the new wavelets.

Recently, it is widely known that the partial response maximum-likelihood (PRML) system has attracted much attention as one of indispensable signal processing technique for achieving high density digital magnetic recording. But, the performance of PRML system is degraded by many undesirable causes in recording channel. For improving the performance, it is desirable to use any high order PRML system or high rate code. Our proposed two-track recording method increases the coding rate over 1, and contributes to decrease these degradation effects. The recording code in our system adopts a turbo code which provides a substantial near-ML performance by the suboptimum iterative decoding algorithm. In this paper, the turbo coded class four partial response (PR4) systems using the rate 4/6, 8/10 and 16/18 codes for high density two track digital magnetic recording are proposed. The error rate performance of the proposed system is obtained by computer simulation taking account of the partial erasure, which is one of nonlinear distortions at high densities. The performance of our system is compared with that of the conventional NRZ coded PR4ML system. The result shows that the proposed system is hardly affected by partial erasure and keeps good performance in high density recording. In especial, the proposed system using the rate 16/18 turbo code can achieve a bit error rate of 10-4 with SNR of approximately 12.2 dB less than the conventional NRZ coded PR4ML systems at a normalized linear density of 3.

The problem of transient scattering caused by abrupt extinction of a terminative conducting screen in a waveguide is considered. First, a boundary-value problem is formulated to describe the transient phenomena, the problem in which the boundary condition depends on time. Then, application of the Fourier transformation with respect to time derives a Wiener-Hopf-type equation, which is solved by a commonly known decomposition procedure. The transient fields are obtained through the deformation of the integration path for the inverse transformation and the results are represented in terms of the incomplete Lipschitz-Hankel integrals. Numerical examples showing typical transient phenomena are attached.

The magnetic shielding performance of the high-Tc superconducting (HTS) plate in a mixed state has been investigated numerically. By taking account of the crystallographic anisotropy of the HTS plate, the axisymmetric shielding plate is assumed to have a multiple thin-layer structure. Under the assumptions, the governing equations of the shielding current density can be expressed in terms of a scalar function. The numerical code to integrate the equation has been developed and, by use of the code, the shielding current density and the damping coefficient are calculated for the axisymmetric HTS plate in a mixed state. The results of computations show that the shielding current density localizes around the edge under the high-frequency magnetic field. With an increasing frequency of the applied magnetic field, the localization becomes remarkable and the shielding current density becomes larger until the flux flow occurs. In addition, the magnetic shielding performance of the HTS plate drastically changes with time under the low-frequency magnetic field below 100 Hz, whereas it is almost time-independent under the high-frequency magnetic field. Moreover, it turns out that the HTS plate can shield ac magnetic fields with a high frequency even if it remains in a mixed state.

This paper presents a contact-less connector using proximity coupling through a parasitic element. For example, proximity coupling is used for interconnect of microstrip lines for DC-break structure. We also present a cross wiring structure using this interconnect.

A novel method for the radiated immunity test is proposed. The method is to generate controlled electromagnetic fields applying in arbitrary directions to an under test. The fields rotate at a low speed controlled electrically so that the immunity characteristics may be known in more detail. The primal characteristics of the fields generated by a trial benchtop setup are investigated.

This paper is consisting of the two novel EMC technologies that we have been developed in our laboratory. The first is the technology for measuring the RF (Radio Frequency) nearby magnetic field and estimation of the RF current in the printed circuit board (PCB) by using the small loop antenna with multi-layer PCB structure developed by our laboratory. I introduce the application of our small loop antenna with its physical structure and the analysis of the nearby magnetic field distribution of the printed circuit board applying the discrete Wavelet analysis. We can understand the behavior of the digital circuit in detail, and we can also take measures to meet the specification about the electromagnetic radiation from the digital circuit from the higher order of priority by using these technologies. The second is our proposing novel technology for reducing the electromagnetic radiation from the digital equipment by taking notice of the improvement of the de-coupling in the PCB. We confirmed the remarkable effect of this technology by redesigning the motherboard of the small-sized computer.

The authors observed the correlation between electromagnetic noise and trace of discharge on surface for various surface areas of Cu in opening copper (Cu)-carbon (C) electrodes. In the case of Cu (anode)-C (cathode), the duration of sporadic burst noise generated by discharge becomes longer when Cu surface area is increased, and trace of discharge (melting area) distribute widely on electrodes. Also the forms of the burst noise in the start of arc are classified, and the traces of discharge correspond to each forms. The forms of the burst noise depend on the pattern which the trace of discharge are formed. As these results, the authors showed the correlation between form of burst noise and trace of discharge on electrode surface.