A MIPS-architecture-based embedded out-of-order superscalar microprocessor targeting broadband applications has been developed. Aggressive microarchitectures, such as superpipelining and out-of-order execution, have been applied to realize better performance scalability in order to fit with next-generation broadband applications. The chip includes a 32 K-Byte instruction cache, a 32 K-Byte data cache, 6 independent execution units, and has been designed using an ASIC-style design methodology on a 0.13-µm CMOS 5-layer aluminum technology. It can operate up to 500 MHz and achieves 1005 MIPS (Dhrystone 2.1) at 500-MHz operation.

We review recent progresses in our studies on the fiber-optic soliton compression and related subjects with special emphasis on dispersion-flattened fibers (DFFs). As for the ultimately short pulse generation, it has been demonstrated to compress 5 ps laser diode pulses down to 20 fs with a 15.1 m-long single-stage step-like dispersion profiled fiber employed. The compression was brought about through a series of the higher order soliton processes in conjunction with a single and ordinary erbium-doped fiber preamplifier, and DFFs contained at its end played a major role. We have performed intensive investigations on the DFF compression mechanisms in the 100-20 fs range. A fairly reliable model was developed for the higher order soliton propagation along a DFF in the temporal range from 100 down to 30 fs by taking into consideration the higher order nonlinear and dispersion effects as well as incident pulse shape dependence. Through the simulation, parametric spectrum generation originating from the modulation instability gain was pointed out at frequencies apart from the pump wave frequency, which agrees with the experimental observation. Its possible application is also discussed.

A tunable external-cavity InGaAs/AlGaAs quantum-well laser using a grating coupler monolithically integrated in a selectively disordered waveguide is demonstrated. The laser consists of an amplifier with a narrow channel for lateral single-mode guiding and a tapered section, a grating coupler for output beam collimation and wavelength dispersion, and an external half mirror. Selective quantum-well disordering technique using SiO2 caps of different thicknesses and rapid thermal annealing was employed to reduce the passive waveguide loss in the grating coupler region. Loss reduction from 40 cm-1 to 3 cm-1 was accomplished. Resultant increase of the grating coupler efficiency and expansion of the effective aperture length led to significant improvement of the laser performances. The maximum output power of 105 mW and wide tuning range of 21.1 nm centered at 997 nm were obtained. The well collimated output beam of full diffraction angles at half maximum of 0.16 0.18 was obtained.

Deterministic execution testing has been considered a promising way for concurrent program testing because of its ability to replay a program's execution. Since, however, deterministic execution requires that a synchronization event sequence to be replayed be feasible and valid, it is not directly applicable to a situation in which synchronization sequences, being valid but infeasible, are taken into account. Resolving this problem is very important because a program may still meet its specification although the feasibility of all valid sequences is not satisfied. In this paper, we present a new approach to deterministic execution for testing concurrent systems. The proposed approach makes use of the notion of event independence and constructs an automation which accepts all the sequences semantically equivalent to a given event sequence to be replayed. Consequently, we can allow a program to be executed according to event sequences other than the given (possible infeasible) sequence if they can be accepted by the automation.

The legal firing sequence problem of Petri nets (LFS) is one of fundamental problems in the analysis of Petri nets, because it appears as a subproblem of various basic problems. Since LFS is shown to be NP-hard, various heuristics has been proposed to solve the problem of practical size in a reasonable time. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for this problem. It is based on the partial order verification technique, and reduces redundant branches in the search tree. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can be combined with various types of heuristics.

Layout design for analog circuits has historically been a time consuming, error-prone, manual task. Its complexity results not so much from the number of devices, as from the complex interactions among devices or with the operating environment, and also from continuous-valued performance specifications. This paper addresses the problem of device-level placement for analog layout in a non-traditional way. Different from the classic approaches--exploring a huge search space with a combinatorial optimization technique, where the cells are represented by means of absolute coordinates, being allowed to illegally overlap during their moves in the chip plane--this paper advocates the use of non-slicing topological representations, like (symmetric-feasible) sequence-pairs, ordered- and binary- trees. Extensive tests, processing industrial analog designs, have shown that using skillfully the symmetry constraints (very typical to analog circuits) to remodel the solution space of the encoding systems, the topological representation techniques can achieve a better computation speed than the traditional approaches, while obtaining a similar high quality of the designs.

This paper presents a new adaptive blind separation of sources (BSS) method for linear and non-linear mixtures. The sources are assumed to be statistically independent with non-uniform and symmetrical PDF. The algorithm is based on both simulated annealing and density estimation methods using a neural network. Considering the properties of the vectorial spaces of sources and mixtures, and using some linearization in the mixture space, the new method is derived. Finally, the main characteristics of the method are simplicity and the fast convergence experimentally validated by the separation of many kinds of signals, such as speech or biomedical data.

Reliability-based decoding algorithm in multistage decoding of multilevel codes is discussed. Through theoretical analyses, effects of soft reliability information are examined for different types of partitionings.

In this paper we consider a tensor-based approach to the analytical computation of higher-order expectations of quantized trajectories generated by Piecewise Affine Markov (PWAM) maps. We formally derive closed-form expressions for expectations of trajectories generated by three families of maps, referred to as (n,t)-tailed shifts, (n,t)-broken identities and (n,t,π)-mixing permutations. These families produce expectations with asymptotic exponential decay whose detailed profile is controlled by map design. In the (n,t)-tailed shift case expectations are alternating in sign, in the (n,t)-broken identity case they are constant in sign, and the (n,t,π)-mixing permutation case they follow a dumped periodic trend.

This paper explores how to extend the dependency pair technique for proving termination of higher-order rewrite systems. We show that the termination property of higher-order rewrite systems can be checked by the non-existence of an infinite R-chain, which is an extension of Arts' and Giesl's result for the first-order case. It is clarified that the subterm property of the quasi-ordering, used for proving termination automatically, is indispensable.

In this paper, we propose an efficient linear ordering algorithm for netlist partitioning. The proposed algorithm incrementally merges two segments which are selected based on the proposed cost function until only one segment remains. The final resultant segment then corresponds to the linear order. Compared to the earlier work, the proposed algorithm yields an average of 11.4% improvement for the ten-way scaled cost partitioning.

This paper proposes a nonlinear distortion suppression scheme for optical direct FM Radio-on-Fiber system. This scheme uses the interaction between the nonlinearities of DFM-LD and OFD to suppress a 3rd order intermodulation distortion. We theoretically analyze the carrier to noise-plus-distortion ratio (CNDR) and show a controlling method in the MZI type OFD to realize the proposed suppression scheme.

This paper proposes a nonlinear distortion suppression scheme for optical direct FM Radio-on-Fiber system. This scheme uses the interaction between the nonlinearities of DFM-LD and OFD to suppress a 3rd order intermodulation distortion. We theoretically analyze the carrier to noise-plus-distortion ratio (CNDR) and show a controlling method in the MZI type OFD to realize the proposed suppression scheme.

Using decision trees to fill the missing values in data has been shown experimentally to be useful in some domains. However, this is not the general case. In other domains, using decision trees for imputing missing attribute values does not outperform other methods. Trying to identify the reasons behind the success or failure of the various methods for filling missing values on different domains can be useful for deciding the technique to be used when learning concepts from a new domain with missing values. This paper presents a technique by which to approach to previous goal and presents the results of applying the technique on predicting the success or failure of a method that uses decision trees to fill the missing values in an ordered manner. Results are encouraging because the obtained decision tree is simple and it can even provide hints for further improvement on the use of decision trees to impute missing attribute values.

In this paper, a novel cumulant-based adaptive notch filtering technique for the enhancement and tracking of a single sinusoid in additive noise is presented. In this technique, the enhanced signal is obtained as the output of a narrow bandpass filter implemented using a second-order pole-zero constraint IIR adaptive notch filter, which needs only one coefficient to be updated. The filter coefficient, which leads to identifying and tracking the sinusoidal frequency, is updated using a suggested adaptive algorithm employing a recursive estimate of the kurtosis and only one-sample-lag point of a selected one-dimensional fourth-order cumulant slice of the input signal. Therefore, the proposed technique provides automatically resistance to additive Gaussian noise. It is also shown that the presented technique outperforms the correlation-based counterpart in handling additive non-Gaussian noise. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the correlation-based lattice algorithm.

In this paper, we propose a lower bound for the minimum distance of [n,k] linear codes which are specified by generator matrices whose rows are k vectors of a given sequence of n linearly independent vectors over a finite field. The Feng-Rao bound and the order bound give the lower bounds for the minimum distance of the dual codes of the codes considered in this paper. We show that the proposed bound gives the true minimum distance for Reed-Solomon and Reed-Muller codes and exceeds the Goppa bound for some L-type algebraic geometry codes.

In this paper, we consider the complexity of recognizing ordered tree-shellable Boolean functions when Boolean functions are given as OBDDs. An ordered tree-shellable function is a positive Boolean function such that the number of prime implicants equals the number of paths from the root node to a 1-node in its ordered binary decision tree representation. We show that given an OBDD, it is possible to check within polynomial time if the function is ordered tree-shellable with respect to the variable ordering of the OBDD.

Causal message ordering in the context of group communication ensures that all the message receivers observe consistent ordering of events affecting a group as a whole. This paper presents a scalable causal multicast protocol for mobile distributed computing systems. In our protocol, only a part of the mobility agents in the system is involved in group computations and the resulting size of control information in messages can be kept small. Our protocol can outperform qualitatively the counterparts in terms of communication overhead and handoff complexity. An analytical model is also developed to evaluate our proposal. The performance results show that the proposed protocol is promising.

Superscalar processors can achieve increased performance by issuing instructions Out-of-Order (OoO) from the original instruction stream. Implementing an OoO instruction scheme requires a hardware mechanism to prevent incorrectly executed instructions from updating registers values. In addition, performance decreases if data dependencies, a branch or a trap among instructions appears. To this end we propose a new mechanism named Dynamic Fast Issue (DFI) mechanism to issue instructions in an OoO fashion to multiple parallel functional units without considerable hardware complexity. The above system, which will be implemented in our Superscalar Functional Assignments Register Microprocessor(FARM), solves data dependencies, supports precise interrupt and branch prediction, which are the main problems associated with the dynamic scheduling of instructions in superscalar machines. Results are written only once,Write-once, directly into the register file (RF). To ensure that results are written in order in their appropriate output registers, a record of instruction order and state is maintained by a status buffer (STB). A 64 entries integrated register file is implemented to hold both renamed and logical registers. To recover the processor state from an interrupt or a branch miss-prediction, a status buffer (STB) and a recovery list table (RLT) are implemented. Novel aspects of the above system architecture as well as the principle underlying this process and the constraints that must be met is presented. Performance evaluation results are performed through full-pipelined-level architectural simulator and SPECint95 benchmark programs.

First order line seach optimization techniques gained essential practical importance over second order optimization techniques due to their computational simplicity and low memory requirements. The computational excess of second order methods becomes unbearable for large optimization tasks. The only applicable optimization techniques in such cases are variations of first order approaches. This article presents one such variation of first order line search optimization technique. The presented algorithm has substantially simplified a line search subproblem into a single step calculation of the appropriate value of step length. This remarkably simplifies the implementation and computational complexity of the line search subproblem and yet does not harm the stability of the method. The algorithm is theoretically proven convergent, with superlinear convergence rates, and exactly classified within the formerly proposed classification framework for first order optimization. Performance of the proposed algorithm is practically evaluated on five data sets and compared to the relevant standard first order optimization technique. The results indicate superior performance of the presented algorithm over the standard first order method.