A novel operation of a flash memory cell, named DINOR (DIvided bit line NOR) operation, is proposed. This operation is based on gate-biased FN programming/FN erasing, and we found that it satisfies all basic cell characteristics such as program/erase, disturb immunity and a cycling endurance. Making a good use of this cell operation, we also proposed a new array structure applied to DINOR type cell whose bit line is divided into the main and sub bit line, having 1.82 µm2 cell size, suitable for 32 Mbit flash memory based on 0.5 µm CMOS process. In the last part of this paper, the useful and practical application of the DINOR operation to a virtual ground array architecture, realizing 1.0 µm2 cell size for a 0.5 µm 64 Mbit flash memory, is described.

Today, defect sources of LSI device mainly lie in the process equipments. The particles generating in these equipments are introduced onto the wafer, and form the defects resulting in functional failures of LSI device. Thus, reducing these particles is acquired for increasing production yield and higher productivity, and it is important to identify the particle source in the equipment. In this study, we discussed new two methods to identify this source in the equipment used in the production line. The important point of identifing is to estimate the particle generation with short time and high accuracy, and to minimize long time stop of the equipment requiring disassembly. First, we illustrated "particle distribution analysis method." In this method, we showed the procedure to express the particle distribution mathematically. We applied this method to our etching equipment, and could identify the particle source without stopping this etching equipment. Secondly, we illustrated the method of "in-situ particle monitoring method," and applied this method to our AP-CVD equipment. As a result, it was clear the main particle source of this equipment and the procedure for decreasing these particles. By using this method, we could estimate the particle generation at real time in process without stopping this equipment. Thus, both methods shown in this study could estimate the particle generation and identify the particle source with short time and high accuracy. Furthermore, they do not require long time stop of the process equipment and interrupting the production line. Therefore, these methods are concluded to be very useful and effective in LSI manufacturing process.

In a probabilistic graph (network), source-to-all-terminal (SAT) reliability may be defined as the probability that there exists at least one path consisting only of successful arcs from source vertex s to every other vertex. In this paper, we define an optimal SAT reliability formula to be the one with minimal number of literals or operators. At first, this paper describes an arc-reductions (open- or short-circuiting) method for obtaining a factored formula of directed graph. Next, we discuss a simple strategy to get an optimal formula being a product of the reliability formulas of vertex-section graphs, each of which contains a distinct strongly connected component of the given graph. This method reduces the computing cost and data processing effort required tu generate the optimal factored formula, which contains no identical product terms.

The inverse problem we consider in this paper seeks, based on the equivalent source method, to determine the shape of perfectly conducting cylinders from the scattered farfield data obtained by using several incident waves. When incident waves of different frequencies are used, the shape of the scatterer can be reconstructed by employing only a few number of observation points. In the reconstruction problem, to determine the shape of the scatterer, the conjugate gradients method is applied. The general approach is applicable to cylindrical scatterers of arbitrary shape. Results of numerical simulations are presented to support the suggested approach.

We propose a high-level synthesis method that uses data path information given by a designer. The main purpose of this method is to generate a control unit, one of the most difficult aspects of hardware design. In general, designers can specify data paths easily. Therefore, we believe that basing a method on specified data path information is the best way to synthesize hardware that more closely satisfies the designer's requirements. Moreover, a datapath-constrained scheduling algorithm can perform both "scheduling" and "resource allocation" at the same time. In particular, the resource allocation explicitly decides used paths as well as functional modules in each execution state. This cannot be done with previously reported algorithms.

We have developed a new HIGFET structure achieving an extremely high K-value of 13.3 S/Vcm with a gate length of 0.15 µm. Self-aligned ion implantation is excluded to suppress a short-channel effect. An i-GaAs cap layer and an n+-GaAs contact layer are employed to reduce source resistance. The threshold voltage shift is as small as 50 mV when the gate length is reduced from 1.5 µm to 0.15 µm. Source resistance is estimated to be 53 mΩcm. We have also developed a new fabrication process that can achieve a shorter gate length than the minimum size of lithography. This process utilizes an SiO2 sidewall formed on the n+-GaAs contact layer to reduce the gate length. A gate length of 0.15 µm can be achieved using 0.35 µm lithography.

This paper characterizes a class of optimal fixed-to-fixed length data compression codes for memoryless Gaussian sources that achieve asymptotically the rate-distortion bound under squared-error criterion. Any source output of blocklength n is encoded by two steps, i.e., 1) to quantize in gain by scholar quantizers and 2) to quantize in shape by pointsets on n-dimensional hyperspheres. To show the asymptotic optimality of the proposed codes, rate-distortion properties of the codes are analyzed in detail by using a random coding argument on the n-dimensional unit hypersphere. It is shown that asymptotic behaviors of the proposed codes are mainly determined by the choice of scalar quantizer of the gain. As a results, deep insights into not only the class of asymptotically optimal codes but also the rate-distortion bound itself are obtained.

This paper presents a new idea of photometric stereo method which uses 3 point light sources as illumination source. Its intention is to extract the 3-D information of gastric surface. The merit of this method is that it is applicable to the textured and/or specular surfaces, moreover whose environment is too narrow, like gastric surface. The verification of the proposed method was achieved by the theoretical proof and experiment.

Based on distributed artificial intelligence technology, the paper proposes a distributed expert system for distribution system planning. The developed expert system is made up of a set of problem-solving agents that autonomously process local tasks and cooperatively interoperate with each other by a shared database in order to reach a proper distribution plan. In addition, a two-level control mechanism composed of local-control and meta-control is also proposed to achieve a high degree of goodness in distribution system planning. To demonstrate its effect, the distributed expert system is implemented on basis of NASA's CLIPS and SUN's RPC and applied to the planning of distribution system in Taiwan. Test results indicate that the distributed expert system assists system planners in making an appropriate plan.

This paper's main objective is to clearly describe the construction of a universal code for minimizing Davisson's minimax redundancy in a range where the true model and stochastic parameters are unknown. Minimax redundancy is defined as the maximum difference between the expected persymbol code length and the per-symbol source entropy in the source range. A universal coding scheme is here formulated in terms of the weight function, i.e., a method is presented for determining a weight function which minimizes the minimax redundancy even when the true model is unknown. It is subsequently shown that the minimax redundancy achieved through the presented coding method is upper-bounded by the minimax redundancy of Rissanen's semi-predictive coding method.

This paper's main objective is to analyze several procedures which select the model g among a set G of stochastic models to minimize the value of an information criterion in the form of L(g)H[g](zn)+(k(g)/2)c(n), where zn is the n observed data emitted by an information source θ which consists of the model gθ∈G and k(gθ) mutually independent stochastic parameters in the model gθ∈G, H[g](zn) is (-1) (the maximum log likelihood value of the data zn with respect to a model g∈G), and c(n) is a predetermined function (penalty function) of n which controls the amount of penalty for increasing the model size. The result is focused on specific performances when the information criteria are applied to the framework of so-called state decomposition. Especially, upper bounds are derived of the following two performance measures for each penalty function c(n): the error probability of the model selection, and the average Kullback-Leibler information between the true information source and the estimated information source.

The method of estimating multiple sound source locations based on a neural network algorithm and its performance are described in this paper. An evaluation function is first defined to reflect both properties of sound propagation of spherical wave front and the uniqueness of solution. A neural network is then composed to satisfy the conditions for the above evaluation function. Locations of multiple sources are given as exciting neurons. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with the deterministic method based on the Hyperbolic Method for the case of 8 sources on a square plane of 200m200m. It is found that the solutions are obtained correctly without any pseudo or dropped-out solutions. The proposed method is also applied to another case in which 54 sound sources are composed of 9 sound groups, each of which contains 6 sound sources. The proposed method is found to be effective and sufficient for practical application.

Subjective quality tests have proven that embedded adaptive differential PCM (ADPCM), known to tolerate information loss through bit dropping, does not maintain sufficient speech quality when directly applied to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) due to the fixed-length cell transmission scheme unique to ATM. We propose a coding and transmission scheme which enhances the performance by adjusting the embedded ADPCM coding rate according to input speech characteristics, thereby taking advantage of the ATM environment, where the transmission of variable rate sources is feasible. By varying the number of code bits of an embedded ADPCM coder from 6bits per sample, or 48kbps, for blocks of speech with a high prediction gain, to 2bits, or 16kbps, for silent blocks, a good compromise between coding bit rate and speech quality with gradual degradation due to information loss is achieved. The results of subjective evaluation tests showed the speech quality of the proposed scheme to be over 3.5 mean opinion score (MOS) on a scale of 1 to 5 at a cell loss rate of 10%. A prototype of the codec and the ATM cell assembly/disassembly functions were also fabricated using 3 conventional digital signal processors (DSPs) for real-time conversation tests.

The transmission of HDTV signals on digital networks requires adoption of sophisticated compression techniques to limit the bit-rate requirements and to provide a high-quality and reliable services to customers. This paper describes system design and transmission characteristics of an adaptive subband DCT codec that can encode original 1.2Gb/s HDTV signals at 156Mb/s. The performance of the codec was evaluated using motion picture signals. The characteristics obtained with the codec was found to maintain good picture quality.

The paper deals with the evaluation of channel allotment criteria in a mixed cellular environment composed by a regular grid of macrocells, plus a number of microcells deployed in the most congested areas. The optimum allotment of the resources between microcells and macrocells, which is a key issue for future personal communication systems, has to be tailored on the basis of their different functionalities. The approach is quite innovative since the analysis is carried out considering real traffic statistics, which are characterised by peaks and fluctuations resulting in uneven traffic loads on different cells. Different propagation models for macrocells and microcells have been adopted. Finally, the impact of the allotment of frequency resources to microcells and macrocells is analysed.

This letter proposes an improvement of the equivalent source method in order to give an accurate solution for the scattering of an electromagnetic plane wave by a conducting cylinder with edges.

Synchrotron radiation (SR) irradiation of amorphous SiO2 (a-SiO2) induces continuous removal of the SiO2 film without the use of etching gas. The dependence of the photostimulated evaporation rate on substrate temperature and SR intensity was measured and the reaction mechanism is discussed in detail separately for surface and bulk. Using the high material selectivity of the Sr-stimulated evaporation, a sefl-aligned process to fabricate a 0.6 µm line-and-space pattern is presented. Si surface cleaning is demonstrated as an example of application of this reaction to thin native oxide film grown by wet pretreatment. Si(100)-21 and Si(111)-77 structures were observed by reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) at temperatures as low as 650. The difference between a-SiO2 and native oxide on the evaporation rate is higlighted. Epitaxial Si growth using disilane (Si2H6) gas occurs selectively in the SR-irradiated region on a Si(100) surface. Using SR irradiation in an ultrahigh vacuum, followed by residual oxide reduction by disilane, is proposed as an effective cleaning method.

Efficient probabilistic decision trees are required in various application areas such as character recognition. This paper presents a polynomial-time approximate algorithm for designing a probabilistic decision tree. The obtained tree is near-optimal for the cost, defined as the weighted sum of the expected test execution time and expected loss. The algorithm is advantageous over other reported heuristics from the viewpoint that the goodness of the solution is theoretically guaranteed. That is, the relative deviation of the obtained tree cost from the exact optimum is not more than a positive constant ε, which can be set arbitrarily small. When the given loss function is Hamming metric, the time efficiency is further improved by using the information theoretical lower bound on the tree cost. The time efficiency of the algorithm and the accuracy of the solutions were evaluated through computational experiments. The results show that the computing time increases very slowly with an increase in problem size and the relative error of the obtained solution is much less than the upper bound ε for most problems.

A current source with current switches (switched current source) is widely used in various analog ICs. One of its typical application is data converters. This paper describes an analysis of the transient behavior of a switched current source. The analysis has clarified conditions and causes of overshooting in the output waveform. The analysis also clarifies dependence of the settling time on parameters. The waveform heavily depends on time constant and initial charge at the internal node where current source and current switch are connected. They can cause the overshooting and limit the settling time. A phenomenon of acceleration of the settling time and an influence of the charge coupling through current switches are also discussed. A chart mentioned in this paper is useful for the initial design and the improvement of switched current sources.