We present analytical and numerical results on the flux-quantum transitions in a three-junction superconducting quantum interference device (3J-SQUID) controlled by two RF signals. The 3J-SQUID has two superconducting loops, and the RF signals are magnetically coupled to the loops. Flux-quantum transitions in the 3J-SQUID loops can be controlled by utilizing the phase difference of the two RF signals. Under proper conditions, we can obtain a situation where one flux quantum passes through the 3J-SQUID per one cycle of the RF signals without DC current biasing, which results in a zero-crossing step on the current-voltage characteristics. In this paper, we first explain the operation principle by using a quantum state diagram of a 3J-SQUID. Next, we numerically simulate RF-induced transitions of the quantum states. A zero-crossing step on the current-voltage characteristics is demonstrated. We also investigate dependence of zero-crossing steps upon parameters of the 3J-SQUID and RF signals.

We report the measurements on the ramp-edge type Josephson and quasiparticle tunnel junctions with the different interface angle geometry using high-Tc YBa2Cu3O7-y (YBCO) electrodes. The YBCO/I/Ag tunnel junctions with different crystal-interface boundary angles are fabricated for the investigation of zero bias conductance peak. The angle dependent zero bias conductance peak typical to a dx2-y2-wave superconductor is observable. For Josephson junctions, YBCO ramp-edge junctions with different ab-plane electrodes relatively rotated by 45are fabricated using a CeO2 seed-layer technique. The temperature dependence of the maximum Josephson current for YBCO/PBCO/YBCO junctions (PBCO: PrBa2Cu3O7-y) exhibits angle-dependent behavior, qualitatively different from the Ambegaokar-Baratoff prediction. Under microwave irradiation of 9 GHz, the Shapiro steps appear at integer and/or half integer multiples of the voltage satisfying Josephson voltage-frequency relation, whose behavior depends on the sample angle geometry. The results are reasonably interpreted by the dx2-y2-wave theory by taking the zero energy state into account.

In this paper, we review recent developments in the field of optical regeneration for both ultra long-haul transmission and terrestrial networking applications. Different techniques (2R/3R) using nonlinear properties of materials and/or devices are proposed such as saturable absorber or InP based interferometer structures showing regenerative capabilities. Principles of operation as well as system experiments are described.

Wavelet based image compression is getting popular due to its promising compaction properties at low bitrate. Zerotree wavelet image coding scheme efficiently exploits multi-level redundancy present in transformed data to minimize coding bits. In this paper, a new technique is proposed to achieve high compression by adding new zerotree and significant symbols to original EZW coder. Contrary to four symbols present in basic EZW scheme, the modified algorithm uses eight symbols to generate fewer bits for a given data. Subordinate pass of EZW is eliminated and replaced with fixed residual value transmission for easy implementation. This modification simplifies the coding technique as well and speeds up the process, retaining the property of embeddedness.

Network bandwidth has rapidly increased, and high-speed networks have come into wide use, but overheads in legacy network protocols prevent the bandwidth of networks from being fully utilized. Even UDP, which is far lighter than TCP, has been a bottleneck on high-speed networks due to its overhead. This overhead mainly occurs from per-byte overhead such as data copy and checksum. Previous works have tried to minimize the per-byte overhead but are not easily applicable because of their constraints. The goal of this paper is to investigate how to fully utilize the bandwidth of high-speed networks. We focus on eliminating data copy because other major per-byte overhead, such as checksum, can be minimized through hardware. This paper introduces a new concept called Asynchronous UDP and shows that it eliminates data copy completely. We implement Asynchronous UDP on Linux with ATM and present the experiment results. The experiments show that Asynchronous UDP is much faster than the existing highly optimized UDP by 133% over ATM. In addition to the performance improvement, additional advantages of Asynchronous UDP include: (1) It does not have constraints that previous attempts had, such as copy-on-write and page-alignment; (2) It uses much less CPU cycles (up to 1/3) so that the resources are available for more connections and/or other useful computations; (3) It gives more flexibility and parallelism to applications because applications do not have to wait for the completion of network I/O but can decide when to check the completion.

This paper presents the performance of the Directionally Constrained Minimization of Power (DCMP) and the Zero-Forcing (ZF) in the Angular Spread (AS) environment. To obtain the optimal weights for both methods, the Extended Array Mode Vector (EAMV) is employed. It is known that the EAMV represents the instantaneous AS as well as the instantaneous DOA in the slow fading channel. As a result, it is shown that the DCMP and the ZF using the EAMV estimates can improve the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) considerably, as compared with those using the Direction of Arrival (DOA) information only. At the same time, the intrinsic problems causing the performance loss in the DCMP and the ZF are revisited. From this, the reasons for the performance deterioration are analyzed, in relation with the AS, the number of samples, the number of antenna elements, and the spatial correlation coefficient of the signals. It follows that the optimal signal combining techniques using the EAMV estimates can diminish such effects.

In this paper, we propose a new clock tree synthesis method for semi-synchronous circuits. A clock tree obtained by the proposed method is a multi-level multi-way clock tree such that a clock-input timing of each register is a multiple of a predefined unit delay and the wire length from a clock buffer to an element driven by it is bounded. The clock trees are constructed for several practical circuits. The size of constructed clock tree is comparable to a zero skew clock tree. In order to assure the practical quality of the clock trees, they are examined under the five delay conditions, which cover various environmental and manufacturing conditions. As a result, they are proved stable under each condition and improve the clock speed up to 17.3% against the zero skew clock trees.

Today software piracy is a major concern to electronic commerce since a digitized product such as software is vulnerable to redistribution and unauthorized use. This paper presents an enhanced electronic software distribution and software protection model. Authentication scheme of the proposed model is based on zero-knowledge (ZK) proof which requires limited computation. The proposed model considers post installation security using authentication agent. It prevents software piracy and illegal copy. It also provides secure and efficient software live-update mechanism based on traitor tracing scheme. Even if software or personal key is copied illegally, a merchant can trace back to its original owner from the electronic license and personal key. The proposed model provides security and reasonable performance and safety.

We proposed a simple technique for measuring the effective zero-dispersion wavelength. In this study, we measured the effective zero-dispersion wavelength of a 25-km-long dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) using the four-wave mixing (FWM) of a spectrum-sliced fiber amplifier light source, and then compared our results with other conventional techniques to confirm the validity of our method.

We formalize a model of "demonstration of program result-correctness," and investigate how to prove this fact against possible adversaries, which naturally extends Blum's theory of program checking by adding zero-knowledge requirements. The zero-knowledge requirements are universal for yes and no instances alike.

Dr. Kenji Koyama, one of the most respected and prominent Japanese researchers in modern cryptography, passed away on March 27, 2000. He left behind him many outstanding academic achievements in cryptography as well as other areas such as emotion transmission theory, learning and mathematical games. In this manuscript, with our deepest sympathy and greatest appreciation for his contribution to our society, we introduce his major works mainly in cryptography, although his papers in other areas are included in the bibliography list.

The aim of this study is to examine the effectiveness of various open-ended resonators. According to the required filter responses, the application to microwave filters based on presented open-ended resonators is systematically examined as well. First, the resonance property of the basic open-ended resonator is discussed based on even-and odd-mode analysis. The intrinsic property of a tapped open-ended resonator is also discussed here. Second, the basic properties of a stepped impedance resonator (SIR) and a loaded-element resonator are examined theoretically for improvement of spurious responses and the dual-passband response. The basic operations of these resonators are also explained based on even- and odd-mode analysis. Examples for filter applications based on presented resonators are also provided. We found that the intrinsic properties of the open-ended resonators are very useful for practical filter responses.

This paper investigates noise enhancement factors of a zero-forcing detector and a decision feedback detector for synchronous Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channels. It is first shown that the zero-forcing and decision feedback detectors can be implemented in a vector digital filter form, and the noise enhancement factors with the detectors can easily be calculated by using the vector digital filter form. This paper then applies the zero-forcing and decision feedback detectors to the signal detection of a frequency-overlapped multicarrier signaling (FOMS) system. The normalized noise enhancement factor, which is given as a product of the noise enhancement and bandwidth reduction factors, is shown to be smaller with the decision feedback detector than the zero-forcing detector. Results of computer simulations conducted to evaluate bit error rate (BER) performances with the two detectors are also shown together with the BER performance with a conventional channel-by-channel detector.

This paper describes a highly performance scalable video coder. Wavelet transform is employed to decompose the video frame into different resolutions. Novel features of this coder are 1) a highly efficient multi-resolution motion estimation that requires minimum compuation and overhead motion information is embedded in this scheme; 2) the wavelet coefficients are organized in an extended zero tree (EZT) which is much more efficient than the simple zerotree. We show with experimental results that this video coder achieves good performances both in processing time and compression ratio when applied to typical test video sequences.

We introduce a new wavelet image coding framework using context-based zerotree quantization, where an unique and efficient method for optimization of zerotree quantization is proposed. Because of the localization properties of wavelets, when a wavelet coefficient is to be quantized, the best quantizer is expected to be designed to match the statistics of the wavelet coefficients in its neighborhood, that is, the quantizer should be adaptive both in space and frequency domain. Previous image coders tended to design quantizers in a band or a class level, which limited their performances as it is difficult for the localization properties of wavelets to be exploited. Contrasting with previous coders, we propose to trace the localization properties with the combination of the tree-structured wavelet representations and adaptive models which are spatial-varying according to the local statistics. In the paper, we describe the proposed coding algorithm, where the spatial-varying models are estimated from the quantized causal neighborhoods and the zerotree pruning is based on the Lagrangian cost that can be evaluated from the statistics nearby the tree. In this way, optimization of zerotree quantization is no longer a joint optimization problem as in SFQ. Simulation results demonstrate that the coding performance is competitive, and sometimes is superior to the best results of zerotree-based coding reported in SFQ.

We introduce an extended EZW coder that uses flexible zerotree coding of wavelet coefficients. A flexible parent-child relationship is defined so as to exploit spatial dependencies within a subband as well as hierarchical dependencies among multi-scale subbands. The new relationship is based on a particular statistics that a large coefficient is more likely to have large coefficients in its neighborhood in terms of space and scale. In the flexible relationship, a parent coefficient in a subband relates to four child coefficients in the next finer subband in the same orientation. If each of the children is larger than a given threshold, the parent extends its parentship to the neighbors close to its conventional children. A probing bit is introduced to indicate whether a significant parent has significant children to be scanned. This enables us to avoid excessive scan of insignificant coefficients. Also, produced symbols are re-symbolized into simple variable-length binary codes to remove some redundancy according to a pre-defined rule. As a result, the wavelet coefficients can be described with a small number of binary symbols. This binary symbol stream gives a competitive performance without an additional entropy coding and thus a fast encoding/decoding is possible. Moreover, the binary symbols can be more compressed by an adaptive arithmetic coding. Our experimental results are given in both binary-coded mode and arithmetic-coded mode. Also, these results are compared with those of the EZW coder.

In order to reduce state explosion problem, techniques such as symbolic state space traversal and partial order reduction have been proposed. Combining these two techniques, however, seems difficult, and only a few research projects related to this topic have been reported. In this paper, we propose handling single place zero reachability problem of Petri nets by using both partial order reduction and symbolic state space traversal based on ZBDDs. We also show experimental results of several examples.

This paper proposes the first provably secure multi-signature schemes under the random oracle model. The security of our schemes can be proven in the sense of concrete security in Ref. [13]. The proposed schemes are efficient if the random oracle is replaced by practical hash functions. The essential techniques in our proof of security are the optimal reduction from breaking the corresponding identification to breaking signatures (ID Reduction Technique), and the hierarchical heavy row lemmas used in the concrete reduction from solving the primitive problem to breaking the identification scheme.

In 1992 Burmester studied how to adapt the Guillou-Quisquater identification scheme to a proven zero-knowledge proof without significantly increasing the communication complexity and computational overhead. He proposed an almost constant round version of Guillou-Quisquater. Di Crescenzo and Persiano presented a 4-move constant round zero-knowledge interactive proof of membership for the corresponding language. A straightforward adaptation of the ideas of Bellare-Micali-Ostrovsky will also give a constant round protocol. However, these protocols significantly increase the communication and computational complexity of the scheme. In this paper we present constant round variants of the protocols of Guillou-Quisquater and Schnorr with the same (order-wise) communication and computational complexity as the original schemes. Note that in our schemes the probability that a dishonest prover will fool a honest verifier may be exponentially small, while it can only be one over a superpolynomial in Burmester's scheme. Our protocols are perfect zero-knowledge under no cryptographic assumptions.

This paper proposes a bit-commitment scheme, BC(), and an efficient statistical zero-knowledge (in short, SZK) protocol in which, for any given multi-variable polynomial, f(X1,,Xt), and any given modulus, n, a prover, P, gives (I1,,It) to a verifier,ν, and can convince ν that P knows (x1,,xt) which satisfies f(x1,,xt) 0 (mod n) and Ii = BC(xi), (i = 1,,t). The proposed protocol is O(|n|) times more efficient than the corresponding previous ones. The (knowledge) soundness of our protocol holds under a computational assumption, the intractability of a modified RSA problem (see Def. 3.2), while the (statistical) zero-knowledgeness of the protocol needs no computational assumption. The protocol can be employed to construct various practical cryptographic protocols, such as fair exchange, untraceable electronic cash and verifiable secret sharing protocols.