A two stage non-scan design for testability method is proposed. The first stage selects test points based on an earlier testability measure conflict. A new design for testability algorithm is proposed to select test points by a fault-oriented testability measure conflict+ in the second stage. Test points are selected in the second stage based on the hard faults after the initial ATPG run of the design for testability circuit in the preliminary stage. The new testability measure conflict+ based on conflict analysis of hard-faults in the process of test generation is introduced, which emulates most general features of sequential ATPG. The new testability measure reduces testability of a fault to the minimum D or controllability of the primary outputs, and therefore, does not need observability measure any more. Effective approximate schemes are adopted to get reasonable estimation of the testability measure. A couple of effective techniques are also adopted to accelerate the process of the proposed design for testability algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method gets even better results than two of the recent non-scan design for testability methods nscan and lcdft.

In this paper, we consider the problem of bearing estimation for spatially distributed sources in unknown spatially-correlated noise. Assumed that the noise covariance matrix is centro-Hermitian, a differential denoising scheme is developed. Combined it with the classic DSPE algorithm, a differential denoising estimator is formulated. Its modified version is also derived. Exactly, the differential processing is first imposed on the covariance matrix of array outputs. The resulting differential signal subspace (DSS) is then utilized to weight array outputs. The noise components orthogonal to DSS are eliminated. Based on eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix of weighted array outputs, the DSPE null spectrum is constructed. The asymptotic performance of the proposed bearing estimator is evaluated in a closed form. Moreover, in order to improve the performance of bearing estimation in case of low signal-to-noise ratio, a modified differential denoising estimator is proposed. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed estimators under the low SNR case. The impacts of angular spread and number of sensors are also investigated.

A mathematical expression for the received signal power in a severe frequency-selective fading channel is derived. Using the derived expression, the signal power distributions are obtained by Monte-Carlo simulation and compared with the Nakagami m-power distribution. It is found that the power distribution matches well with the Nakagami m-power distribution when the multipath channel has a uniform power delay profile.

This letter presents a lower bound and approximation for the coverage probability of the pilot channel that can be used for a CDMA downlink design. The approximation of a compound truncated Poisson distribution is used to obtain a closed form equation for the coverage probability of the pilot channel. Computer simulations show that our lower bound curve is truly less than the empirical curve, and our proposed approximation agrees well with the empirical result.

A special group of voice application services (VASs) are promising contents for wireless as well as wireline networks. Without a designated call admission policy, VAS calls are expected to suffer from relatively high probability of blocking since they normally require better signal quality than ordinary voice calls. In this letter, we consider a prioritized call admission design in order to reduce the blocking probability of VAS calls, which makes the users feel the newly-provided VAS in belief. The VAS calls are given a priority by reserving a number of channel-processing hardwares. With the reservation, the blocking probability of prioritized VAS calls can be evidently reduced. That of ordinary calls, however, is increasing instead. This letter provides a system model that counts the blocking probabilities of VAS and ordinary calls simultaneously, and numerically examines an adequate level of the prioritization for VAS calls.

At EuroCrypt '95, Stadler, Piveteau and Camenish introduced the concept of fair blind signatures to prevent the misuse of blind signature schemes by criminals. Recently, Hwang, Lee and Lai claimed that Stadler et al.'s first fair blind signature scheme cannot meet the untraceability property of the blind signature schemes. However, this letter will demonstrate that Hwang et al.'s claim is incorrect and Stadler et al.'s first scheme still holds the untraceability property.

In this paper, we construct a new signature scheme which is provably secure against adaptive chosen message attack in the standard model under the strong RSA assumption. The proposed scheme is different from Cramer-Shoup scheme and Camenisch-Lysyanskaya scheme and is more efficient than them. The tradeoff of the proposed scheme is a slight increase of the secret key.

The software rejuvenation is a proactive fault management technique for operational software systems which age due to the error conditions that accrue with time and/or load, and is important for high assurance systems design. In this paper, fine-grained shock models are developed to determine the optimal rejuvenation policies which maximize the system availability. We introduce three kinds of rejuvenation schemes and calculate the optimal software rejuvenation schedules maximizing the system availability for respective schemes. The stochastic models with three rejuvenation policies are extentions of Bobbio et al. (1998, 2001) and represent the failure phenomenon due to the exhaustion of the software resources caused by the memory leak, the fragmentation, etc. Numerical examples are devoted to compare three control schemes quantitatively.

In this paper, the time-frequency separation algorithm (TFS) proposed by Belouchrani and Amin is applied to ground penetrating radar (GPR) data to reduce ground clutter, that hides reflected waves from a near-surface planar interface. We formulated the problem with several assumptions so that narrow band signals, whose center frequency and baseband signal depend on propagation paths, are received at the receiver, when a wideband signal is radiated from a transmitter. These phenomena can be clearly seen in time-frequency distribution (TFD) of the received signal. In this paper, we adopted the TFS utilizing the TFD signature as a blind separation technique to separate the ground clutter from the target signals. We show numerical and experimental results in order to verify the validity of the problem formulation and the TFS. We carried out GPR measurements to measure permafrost in Yakutsk, Russia. We found the difference in TFD signatures between the ground clutter and the target signal in the experimental data. We could detect the upper boundary of the permafrost with the TFS in spite of the unstable ground clutter.

In this letter, a new output feedback tracking control using a fuzzy disturbance observer (FDO) is proposed and its application to control of a nonlinear system in the presence of the internal parameter perturbation and external disturbance is presented. An FDO using a filtered signal is developed and the high gain observer (HGO) is employed to implement the output feedback tracking control. It is shown in a rigorous manner that all the errors involved can be kept arbitrarily small. Finally, the effectiveness and the feasibility of the suggested method is demonstrated by computer simulation.

In this paper, we investigate Tanner's lower bound for the minimum distance of regular LDPC codes based on combinatorial designs. We first determine Tanner's lower bound for LDPC codes which are defined by modifying bipartite graphs obtained from combinatorial designs known as Steiner systems. Then we show that Tanner's lower bound agrees with or exceeds conventional lower bounds including the BCH bound, and gives the true minimum distance for some EG-LDPC codes.

A distributor of digital contents desires to collect users' attributes. On the other hand, the users do not desire to offer the attributes owing to the privacy protection. Previously, an anonymous survey system for attributes statistics is proposed. In this system, asking trusted third parties' helps, a distributor can obtain the correct statistics of users' attributes, such as gender and age, while no information beyond the statistics is revealed. However, the system suffers from the inefficiency of a protocol to generate the statistics, since the cost depends on the number of all the users registering this survey system. This paper proposes an anonymous survey system, where this cost is independent from the number of all the registering users. In this accomplishment, a group signature scheme with attribute tracing is also proposed. A conventional group signature scheme allows a group member to anonymously sign a message on behalf of the group, while only a designated party can identify the signer. The proposed scheme further enables the party to trace signer's attribute.

In this paper an algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization techniques called Ants on a Tree (AOT) is introduced. This algorithm can integrate many algorithms together to solve a single problem. The strength of AOT is demonstrated by solving a High-Level Synthesis problem. A High-Level Synthesis problem consists of many design steps and many algorithms to solve each of them. AOT can easily integrate these algorithms to limit the search space and use them as heuristic weights to guide the search. During the search, AOT generates a dynamic decision tree. A boosting technique similar to branch and bound algorithms is applied to guide the search in the decision tree. The storage explosion problem is eliminated by the evaporation of pheromone trail generated by ants, the inherent property of our search algorithm.

In this paper, a high-performance pipelining architecture for 2-D inverse discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) is proposed. We use a tree-block pipeline-scheduling scheme to increase computation performance and reduce temporary buffers. The scheme divides the input subbands into several wavelet blocks and processes these blocks one by one, so the size of buffers for storing temporal subbands is greatly reduced. After scheduling the data flow, we fold the computations of all wavelet blocks into the same low-pass and high-pass filters to achieve higher hardware utilization and minimize hardware cost, and pipeline these two filters efficiently to reach higher throughput rate. For the computations of N N-sample 2-D IDWT with filter length of size K, our architecture takes at most (2/3)N2 cycles and requires 2N(K-2) registers. In addition, each filter is designed regularly and modularly, so it is easily scalable for different filter lengths and different levels. Because of its small storage, regularity, and high performance, the architecture can be applied to time-critical image decompression.

Software rejuvenation is a proactive fault management technique that has been extensively studied in the recent literature. In this paper, we focus on an example for a telecommunication billing application considered in Huang et al. (1995) and develop the discrete-time stochastic models to estimate the optimal software rejuvenation schedule. More precisely, two software availability models with rejuvenation are formulated via the discrete semi-Markov processes, and the optimal software rejuvenation schedules which maximize the steady-state availabilities are derived analytically. Further, we develop statistically non-parametric algorithms to estimate the optimal software rejuvenation schedules, provided that the complete sample data of failure times are given. Then, a new statistical device, called the discrete total time on test statistics, is introduced. Finally, we examine asymptotic properties for the statistical estimation algorithms proposed in this paper through a simulation experiment.

We present the channel capacity, specifically the mutual information, of an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel in the presence of phase noise, and investigate the effect of phase noise impairment on powerful error-correcting codes (ECCs) that normally operate in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. This channel-induced impairment is common in digital coherent transmission systems and is caused by imperfect carrier tracking of the phase error detector for coherent demodulation. It is shown through semi-analytical derivation that decreasing the information rate from its ideal capacity to an information rate lower than its inherent capacity significantly mitigates the impairment caused by phase noise, and that operating systems in the low SNR region also lessen the phase noise impairment by transforming typical phase noise behavior into Gaussian-like behavior. We also demonstrate by computer simulation using turbo-trellis coded modulation (TTCM) with high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals that the use of capacity-approaching codes (CACs) makes transmission systems invulnerable to phase noise. To verify the effect of CACs on phase noise, simulation results of TTCM are also compared to that of trellis-coded modulation (TCM), which is used as an example of a conventional ECC operating at a relatively high SNR.

In this paper, we propose new physical design techniques to reduce crosstalk noise and crosstalk-induced delay variations caused in a nanometer-scale system-on-a-chip (SoC). We have almost eliminated the coupling effect between signal wires by simply optimizing parameters for the automatic place and route methodology. Our approach consists of two techniques, (1) A 3-D optimization technique for tuning the routing grid configuration both in the horizontal and vertical directions. (2) A co-optimization technique for tuning the cell utilization ratio and the routing grid simultaneously. Experiments on the design of an image processing circuit fabricated in a 0.13 µm CMOS process with six layers of copper interconnect show that crosstalk noise is almost eliminated. From the results of a static timing analysis considering the worst-case crosstalk condition, the longest path delay is decreased by about 15% maximum if technique (1) is used, and by about 7% maximum if technique (2) is used. The 7-15% delay reduction has been achieved without process improvement, and this reduction corresponds to between 1/4 and 1/2 generation of process progress.

General packet radio service (GPRS) uses a two-stage mechanism to allocate uplink radio resource to mobile stations (MSs). In stage-1, the base station (BS) assigns several packet data channels (PDCHs) to an MS. Furthermore, a PDCH may be assigned to multiple MSs. In stage-2, therefore, the BS selects one of the multiplexed MSs in a PDCH to use the radio resource. In this paper, maintaining a load balance between PDCHs in stage-1 is examined and several selection schemes to lower the mis-selection rate in stage-2 are proposed. From our simulation results, the cost deduced from the poor load balancing and selection schemes render a lower system throughput and a non-negligible increase in packet queuing delay. Among the various stage-2 selection policies, round robin with linearly-accumulated adjustment (RRLAA) has the lowest mis-selection rate and outperforms the one without any heuristic by up to 50%.

We investigate the statistical features of both random- and chaos-based FM timing signals to ascertain their applicability to digital circuits and systems. To achieve such a goal, we consider both the case of single- and two-phase logic and characterize the random variable representing, respectively, the time lag between two subsequent rising edges or between two consecutive zero-crossing points of the modulated timing signal. In particular, we determine its probability density and compute its mean value and variance for cases which are relevant for reducing Electromagnetic emissions. Finally, we address the possible problems of performance degradation in a digital system driven by a modulated timing signal and to cope with this we give some guidelines for the proper choice of the statistical properties of the modulating signals.

A series of micromagnetic models including simulations of the 3D thin film write head field, the GMR read head, the thin film media and channel codes are utilized to study the recording performance in longitudinal hard disk drives (HDD) at extremely high densities. The (0, 4/4) encoder is utilized to translate the user data into (0, 4/4) constrained codes, before the write process is performed. The write current is achieved from the constrained code in the NRZ format. The read back voltage is reshaped to the PR-IV signal and the Viterbi detector is utilized to recover the data. In a medium of 10 nm grains, the recording linear density limits with the PRML method are about 1000 kfci, which is 1.5 times of those with the PD channel.