Various kinds of structured ASICs have been proposed that can customize logic functions using a few photomasks, which decreases the initial cost, especially that of expensive photo-masks. In the past, we have developed a via programmable structured ASIC “VPEX2” (Via Programmable logic device using EXclusive-or array) that is capable of changing logics on 2 via (the 1st and 3rd via) layers. The logic element (LE) of VPEX2 is composed of EXOR gate and 2 NOT gates. However, “VPEX2” architecture has the two important penalty, the area penalty is 5-6 times that of the ASIC and wiring congestion by detouring wires to avoid I/O terminals. In this paper, we propose a new architecture “VPEX3” in order to achieve the practical structures. In VPEX3, we applied three techniques for decrease area penalty and higher wiring efficiency: (1) LE area is reduced approximately 60% by omitting 1 NOT gate on a LE and the gate width reduction, (2) the kinds of configurable logic function on a single LE is increased from 13 to 22 by introducing “flexible AOI gate technique” and (3) flexible I/O terminal by introducing 2nd via as a programmable layers. Furthermore, the delay model for via programmable wiring is necessary in order to evaluate via programmable wiring architecture compared to standard cell ASIC. We extracted wiring delay characteristics from the ring oscillator test circuit using both of normal wiring and via-programmable wiring. These three new architectures and via programmable wiring-delay-model revealed that an area-delay product of “VPEX3” is as small as twice that of ASIC. Chip-cost estimation among FPGA, “VPEX2”, “VPEX3” and ASIC revealed that the “VPEX3” is the most cost-effective architecture for Systems-on-chips (SoCs) whose production volume is from one thousand to several tens of thousands units.

Entangled states play crucial roles in quantum information theory and its applied technologies. In various protocols such as quantum teleportation and quantum key distribution, a good entangled state shared by a pair of distant players is indispensable. In this paper, we numerically examine entanglement sharing protocols using quantum LDPC CSS codes. The sum-product decoding method enables us to detect uncorrectable errors, and thus, two protocols, Detection and Resending (DR) protocol and Non-Detection (ND) protocol are considered. In DR protocol, the players abort the protocol and repeat it if they detect the uncorrectable errors, whereas in ND protocol they do not abort the protocol. We show that DR protocol yields smaller error rate than ND protocol. In addition, it is shown that rather high reliability can be achieved by DR protocol with quantum LDPC CSS codes.

A non-audible murmur (NAM), a very weak whisper sound produced without vocal fold vibration, has been researched in the development of a silent-speech communication tool for functional speech disorders as well as human-to-human/machine interfaces with inaudible voice input. The NAM can be detected using a specially designed microphone, called a NAM microphone, attached to the neck. However, the detected NAM signal has a low signal-to-noise ratio and severely suppressed high-frequency component. To improve NAM clarity, the mechanism of a NAM production must be clarified. In this work, an air flow through a glottis in the vocal tract was numerically simulated using computational fluid dynamics and vocal tract shape models that are obtained by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan for whispered voice production with various strengths, i.e. strong, weak, and very weak. For a very weak whispering during the MRI scan, subjects were trained, just before the scanning, to produce the very weak whispered voice, or the NAM. The numerical results show that a weak vorticity flow occurs in the supraglottal region even during a very weak whisper production; such vorticity flow provide aeroacoustic sources for a very weak whispering, i.e. NAM, as in an ordinary whispering.

In this letter, we propose a multi-stage decoding scheme with post-processing for low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which remedies the rapid performance degradation in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range known as error floor. In the proposed scheme, the unsuccessfully decoded words of the previous decoding stage are re-decoded by manipulating the received log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of the properly selected variable nodes. Two effective criteria for selecting the probably erroneous variable nodes are also presented. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can correct most of the unsuccessfully decoded words of the first stage having oscillatory behavior, which are regarded as a main cause of the error floor.

Nearest neighbor search (NNS) among large-scale and high-dimensional vectors plays an important role in recent large-scale multimedia search applications. This paper proposes an optimized multiple codebook construction method for an approximate NNS scheme based on product quantization, where sets of residual sub-vectors are clustered according to their distribution and the codebooks for product quantization are constructed from these clusters. Our approach enables us to adaptively select the number of codebooks to be used by trading between the search accuracy and the amount of memory available.

Navigation systems providing route-guidance and traffic information are one of the most widely used driver-support systems these days. Most navigation systems are based on the map paradigm which plots the driving route in an abstracted version of a two-dimensional electronic map. Recently, a new navigation paradigm was introduced that is based on the augmented reality (AR) paradigm which displays the driving route by superimposing virtual objects on the real scene. These two paradigms have their own innate characteristics from the point of human cognition, and so complement each other rather than compete with each other. Regardless of the paradigm, the role of any navigation system is to support the driver in achieving his driving goals. The objective of this work is to investigate how these map and AR navigation paradigms impact the achievement of the driving goals: productivity and safety. We performed comparative experiments using a driving simulator and computers with 38 subjects. For the effects on productivity, driver's performance on three levels (control level, tactical level, and strategic level) of driving tasks was measured for each map and AR navigation condition. For the effects on safety, driver's situation awareness of safety-related events on the road was measured. To find how these navigation paradigms impose visual cognitive workload on driver, we tracked driver's eye movements. As a special factor of driving performance, route decision making at the complex decision points such as junction, overpass, and underpass was investigated additionally. Participant's subjective workload was assessed using the Driving Activity Load Index (DALI). Results indicated that there was little difference between the two navigation paradigms on driving performance. AR navigation attracted driver's visual attention more frequently than map navigation and then reduces awareness of and proper action for the safety-related events. AR navigation was faster and better to support route decision making at the complex decision points. According to the subjective workload assessment, AR navigation was visually and temporally more demanding.

In this letter, we derive a probability density function (PDF) for a modulus of product of two complex-valued Gaussian random variables. The PDF is expressed using Modified Bessel Functions, and the probability distribution is named Gaussian Product Modulus Distribution. Some examples of expectation calculation are provided.

This paper presents a framework of supporting system for a drug formulation. We designed ontology to represent the related knowledge for reusable and sharing purposes. The designed ontology is applied with operation rules to suggest an appropriate generic drug production based on information of original drug. The system also provides a validation module to preliminarily approve a pharmaceutical equivalence of the suggested result. Preliminary testing with four random samples shows potential to reformulate a generic product by returning a satisfactory and acceptable of the system suggestions for all samples.

Hypercube Qn is a well-known graph structure having three different kinds of equivalent definitions that are: 1. binary n bit sequences with the adjacency condition, 2. Q1=K2, Qn=Qn-1 K2, where means the Cartesian product, 3. the Cayley graph on Z2n with the generator set {100, 0100, , 001}. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a set of binary sequences to be a generator set for the hypercube. Then, we give relations between some generator sets and relational products. These results show the wide variety of representability of hypercubes which would be used for many applications.

In this paper, the performance of the soft-decision-and-forward (SDF) protocol in the cooperative communication network with one source, one relay, and one destination, where each node has two transmit and receive antennas, is analyzed in terms of the bit error rate (BER) obtained from the pairwise error probability (PEP). Using the moment generating function and Q-function approximation, the PEP of SDF protocol is calculated and we confirm that the SDF with two antennas achieves the full diversity order. For the slow-varying Rayleigh fading channel, the optimal power allocation ratio can be determined so as to minimize the average PEP (or BER). Due to the difficulty of deriving the optimal value analytically, an alternative strategy of maximizing the product signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of direct and relay links, which we call the suboptimal power allocation, is considered. Through a numerical analysis, we show that the performance gap between the suboptimal and optimal power allocation strategies is negligible in the high SNR region.

This paper proposes a feature-based service identification method to improve productivity using a feature relationship; where a feature can express service properties. We define the distance measured between features by considering their selective (node) and relational (edge) attributes and present the service boundary concept. The result of an evaluation of the proposed method shows that it has higher productivity than existing methods.

Recently, Mooij et al. proposed new sufficient conditions for convergence of the sum-product algorithm, and it was also shown that if the factor graph is a tree, Mooij's sufficient condition for convergence is always activated. In this letter, we show that the converse of the above statement is also true under some assumption, and that the assumption holds for the sum-product decoding. These newly obtained fact implies that Mooij's sufficient condition for convergence of the sum-product decoding is activated if and only if the factor graph of the a posteriori probability of the transmitted codeword is a tree.

This letter proposes extended single parity check product codes and presents their empirical performances on a Gaussian channel by belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm. The simulation results show that the codes can achieve close-to-capacity performance in high coding rate. The code of length 9603 and of rate 0.96 is only 0.77 dB away from the Shannon limit for a BER of 10-5.

The visual attributes, brightness, colorfulness, and hue, are affected by chromaticity coordinates, excitation purity, and luminance of background, and these attributes are changed according as intensity of illumination changes. Therefore there is a need to correct display's conditions by controlling image factors such as luminance offset, contrast, color gain, and gamma to maintain the perceived display quality. The focus of our study is on the formulation of a simpler and more effective model for color and tone reproduction for digital imaging systems to utilize color appearance models. It can be applicable to optimum color display conditions to give comfort and consistency visually in various ambient conditions.

We develop a novel construction method for n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves. The construction method includes four steps: block allocation, Gray permutation, coordinate transformation and recursive construction. We use the tensor product theory to formulate the method. An n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curve of 2r elements on each dimension is specified as a permutation which rearranges 2rn data elements stored in the row major order as in C language or the column major order as in FORTRAN language to the order of traversing an n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curve. The tensor product formulation of n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves uses stride permutation, reverse permutation, and Gray permutation. We present both recursive and iterative tensor product formulas of n-dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves. The tensor product formulas are directly translated into computer programs which can be used in various applications. The process of program generation is explained in the paper.

In this paper, a design methodology for the minimization of various performance metrics of MOS Current-Mode Logic (MCML) circuits is described. In particular, it allows to minimize the delay under a given power consumption, the power consumption under a given delay and the power-delay product. Design solutions can be evaluated graphically or by simple and effective automatic procedures implemented within the MATLAB environment. The methodology exploits the novel concepts of crossing-point current and crossing-point capacitance. A useful feature of it is that it provides the designer with useful insights into the dependence of the performance metrics on design variables and fan-out capacitance. The methodology was validated by designing several MCML circuits in an IBM 130 nm CMOS process.

An efficient multiplier design method for predetermined coefficient groups is presented based on the variation of canonic signed digit (CSD) encoding and partial product sharing. By applications to radix-24 FFT structure and the pulse-shaping filter design used in CDMA, it is shown that the proposed method significantly reduces the area, propagation delay and power consumption compared with previous methods.

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity, high-efficiency two-dimensional look-up table (2D LUT) for carrying out the sum-product algorithm in the decoding of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Instead of employing adders for the core operation when updating check node messages, in the proposed scheme, the main term and correction factor of the core operation are successfully merged into a compact 2D LUT. Simulation results indicate that the proposed 2D LUT not only attains close-to-optimal bit error rate performance but also enjoys a low complexity advantage that is suitable for hardware implementation.

This paper considers the problem of target location estimation in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks and proposes a novel algorithm using a factor graph to fuse the heterogeneous measured data. In the proposed algorithm, we map the problem of target location estimation to a factor graph framework and then use the sum-product algorithm to fuse the heterogeneous measured data so that heterogeneous sensors can collaborate to improve the accuracy of target location estimation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm provides high location estimation accuracy.

When we design a robust vector quantizer (VQ) for noisy channels, an appropriate index assignment function should be contrived to minimize the channel-error effect. For relatively high rates, the complexity for finding an optimal index assignment function is too high to be implemented. To overcome such a problem, we use a structurally constrained VQ, which is called the sample-adaptive product quantizer (SAPQ) [12], for low complexities of quantization and index assignment. The product quantizer (PQ) and its variation SAPQ [13], which are based on the scalar quantizer (SQ) and thus belong to a class of the binary lattice VQ [16], have inherent error resilience even though the conventional affine index assignment functions, such as the natural binary code, are employed. The error resilience of SAPQ is observed in a weak sense through worst-case bounds. Using SAPQ for noisy channels is useful especially for high rates, e.g., > 1 bit/sample, and it is numerically shown that the channel-limit performance of SAPQ is comparable to that of the best codebook permutation of binary switching algorithm (BSA) [23]. Further, the PQ or SAPQ codebook with an affine index assignment function is used for the initial guess of the conventional clustering algorithm, and it is shown that the performance of the best BSA can be easily achieved.