Circularly polarized dielectric-loaded planar antenna excited bythe parallel feeding waveguide network

A new receiving planar array antenna for DBS (direct broadcasting satellite) is proposed. The element antenna is a short waveguide aperture mounted in the ground plane, loaded with a dielectric and polarizers, and excited through its side wall by another feeding rectangular waveguide. The gain of the element antenna loaded with a dielectric is so high that the grating lobes can be reduced sufficiently even if the element spacing in the array is wider than the wavelength in free space. Therefore we can reduce the number of the array elements, and parallel feeding by the low loss waveguide network can be feasible to provide a planar array antenna. This paper describes the experimental results of several kinds of the circularly polarized dielectric-loaded element antennas and the planar antennas fed by the waveguide network. In the 12 GHz band the planar antenna with 64-element radiators has a maximum gain of 31.9 dBi with an aperture efficiency of 94.7%, the 1 dB-down frequency bandwidth of the gain is about 800 MHz (6.7% for a center frequency of 11.85 GHz), and the frequency bandwidth of the axial ratio is less than 1 dB of 850 MHz (7.2%)     

S-band erbium-doped silica fibre amplifier with flattened-gain ofover 21 dB

A gain-flattened erbium-doped silica fibre amplifier (EDSFA) has been developed for amplifying WDM signals in the S-band. The EDSFA exhibits a signal gain of over 21 dB, a gain excursion of less than 1.9 dB, and a noise figure of less than 6.7 dB in the 1491-1518 nm wavelength range     

Cloning and functional analysis of the Aspergillus oryzae conidiation regulator gene brlA by its disruption and misscheduled expression

We cloned the brlA gene from Aspergillus oryzae genomic DNA using the A. nidulans brlA gene as a probe. A 3.1-kb EcoRI-BalI genomic DNA fragment was cloned and sequenced. The deduced amino acid sequence revealed 70% identity with A. nidulans BRLA and contained two C2H2 zinc finger motifs in its carboxyl terminus, and the promoter sequence contained a 43-bp highly conserved region, indicating that the cloned gene was an A. oryzae homologue of A. nidulans brlA. Disruption of the brlA gene by homologous recombination resulted in the loss of ability to form conidiophores. These results suggest that the brlA gene of A. oryzae plays a fundamental role in controlling conidiophore development. When the brlA gene was expressed under the control of the amyB promoter in A. oryzae transformants, highly differentiated and compact colonies were observed on a solid medium. The misscheduled expression of the brlA gene in submerged culture, in which conidiation does not normally occur, caused the development of complex conidiophore structures with vesicles, phialides and conidia.     

Properties of the peptides liberated from rice protein in sokujo-moto

In the supernatant of sokujo-moto, a high level of acid carboxypeptidase (ACP) activity and a large amount of peptides were observed, however, the amount of free amino acids liberated was small. In order to determine why these peptides were not hydrolyzed to any significant degree by the ACP, the properties of the peptides in sokujo-moto were investigated in this study. Peptides were fractionated from sokujo-moto by ion exchange column chromatography. ACP purified from rice-koji (rice overgrown with Aspergillus oryzae) was allowed to react with the peptides, and it was found that they were not hydrolyzed to any significant degree by the enzyme. Gel filtration chromatography was performed to ascertain the molecular size distribution of the peptides in sokujo-moto, and it was revealed that they were of low molecular sizes; molecular size: mainly in the range of 200-400, and chain length: 2-3. ACP purified from rice-koji was also allowed to react with various synthetic peptides, and it was found that ACP of rice-koji could not rapidly hydrolyze low-molecular-size peptides, such as dipeptides or tripeptides. Acid protease (AP) purified from rice-koji released peptides of molecular sizes mainly in the range of 300-600 or above from rice protein under acidic conditions (pH 3.6; the pH of sokujomoto). When AP and ACP were allowed to act at the same time on rice protein, mainly low-molecular-size peptides (molecular sizes mainly in the range of 200-400) were produced. From these results, it was estimated that AP released peptides with molecular sizes mainly in the range of 300-600 or above from rice protein and ACP degraded the relatively higher molecular size peptides among them to lower molecular size peptides; consequently only low-molecular-size peptides with molecular sizes mainly in the range of 200-400 were released in the supernatant of sokujo-moto.     

A 64-Mb DRAM with meshed power line

A 64-Mb dynamic RAM (DRAM) has been developed with a meshed power line (MPL) and a quasi-distributed sense-amplifier driver (qDSAD) scheme. It realizes high speed, t_RAS=50 ns (typical) at V_cc=3.3 V, and 16-b input/output (I/O). This MPL+qDSAD scheme can reduce sensing delay caused by the metal layer resistance. Furthermore, to suppress crosstalk noise, a V_SS shield peripheral layout scheme has been introduced, which also widens power line widths. This 64-Mb DRAM was fabricated with 0.4-μm CMOS technology using KrF excimer laser lithography. A newly developed memory cell structure, the tunnel-shaped stacked-capacitor cell (TSSC), was adapted to this 64-Mb DRAM     

A vehicular-mounted vertical space diversity antenna for a landmobile radio

A vertical space-diversity antenna has been developed in order to achieve a diversity scheme while maintaining the simple appearance of a trunk-lid antenna. It is shown that small correlation coefficients can be achieved by a separation of approximately 0.5 wavelengths. Differences in the upper and lower antenna radiation patterns are clarified as being caused by mutual coupling of these antennas, and an incoming wave spread of more than 20° is the main reason for reduction of the correlation coefficients. Field tests in the Tokyo metropolitan area have indicated that adequate correlation coefficients and an adequate received signal level can be achieved. Moreover, calculation estimations are confirmed by the experimental results     

Self‐Healing Reduced Graphene Oxide Films by Supersonic Kinetic Spraying

The industrial scale application of graphene and other functional materials in the field of electronics has been limited by inherent defects, and the lack of simple deposition methods. A simple spray deposition method is developed that uses a supersonic air jet for a commercially available reduced graphene oxide (r‐GO) suspension. The r‐GO flakes are used as received, which are pre‐annealed and pre‐hydrazine‐treated, and do not undergo any post‐treatment. A part of the considerable kinetic energy of the r‐GO flakes entrained by the supersonic jet is used in stretching the flakes upon impact with the substrate. The resulting “frozen elastic strains” heal the defects (topological defects, namely Stone‐Wales defect and C₂ vacancies) in the r‐GO flakes, which is reflected in the reduced ratio of the intensities of the D and G bands in the deposited film. The defects can also be regenerated by annealing.     

Fast and scalable parallel layout decomposition in double patterning lithography

For 32/22 nm technology nodes and below, double patterning (DP) lithography has become the most promising interim solutions due to the delay in the deployment of next generation lithography (e.g., EUV). DP requires the partitioning of the layout patterns into two different masks, a procedure called layout decomposition. Layout decomposition is a key computational step that is necessary for double patterning technology. Existing works on layout decomposition are all single-threaded, which is not scalable in runtime and/or memory for large industrial layouts. This paper presents the first window-based parallel layout decomposition methods for improving both runtime and memory consumption. Experimental results are promising and show the presented parallel layout decomposition methods obtain upto 21× speedup in runtime and upto 7.5×reduction in peak memory consumption with acceptable solution quality.     

A channel-erasing 1.8-V-only 32-Mb NOR flash EEPROM with a bitlinedirect sensing scheme

A 1.8-V-only 32-Mb NOR flash EEPROM has been developed based on the 0.25-μm triple-well double-metal CMOS process. A channel-erasing scheme has been implemented to realize a cell size of 0.49 μm² , the smallest yet reported for 0.25-μm CMOS technology. A block decoder circuit with a novel erase-reset sequence has been designed for the channel-erasing operation. A bitline direct sensing scheme and a wordline boosted voltage pooling method have been developed to obtain high-speed reading operation at low voltage. An access time of 90 ns at 1.8 V has been realized     

CNS: a new energy efficient transmission scheme for wireless sensor networks

We present in this paper a new energy-efficient communication scheme called CNS (Compression with Null Symbol) that combines the power of data compression and communication through silent symbol. The concept of communication through silent symbol is borrowed from the energy efficient schemes proposed in Sinha (Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009), Ghosh et al. (Proceedings of 27th IEEE international performance computing and communications conference (IPCCC), USA, pp. 85–92, 2008), and Sinha and Sinha (Proceedings of international conference on distributed computing and internet technologies (ICDCIT), LNCS, pp. 139–144, 2008). We show that the average theoretical energy saving at the transmitter by CNS is 62.5%, assuming an ideal channel and for equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length. Next, we propose a transceiver design that uses a hybrid modulation scheme utilizing FSK and ASK so as to keep the cost/complexity of the radio devices low. Considering an additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and a non-coherent detection based receiver, CNS shows a saving in transmitter energy by 30% when compared to binary FSK, for equal likelihood of all possible binary strings of a given length. Simultaneously, there is a saving of 50% at the receiver for all types of data modulation due to halving of the transmitted data duration, compared to binary encoding. In contrast, RBNSiZeComm proposed in Sinha (Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009), TSS proposed in Ghosh et al. (Proceedings of 27th IEEE international performance computing and communications conference (IPCCC), USA, pp. 85–92, 2008) and RZE proposed in Sinha and Sinha (Proceedings of international conference on distributed computing and internet technologies (ICDCIT), LNCS, pp. 139–144, 2008) generate average transmitter energy savings of about 41, 20, and 35.2%, respectively. Also, at the receiver side, while RBNSiZeComm does not generate any saving, TSS and RZE produce about 36.9 and 12.5% savings on an average, respectively. Considering certain data types that may occur in the context of some wireless sensor networks (WSN) based applications (e.g., remote healthcare, agricultural WSNs, etc.), our simulation results demonstrate that for AWGN noisy channels, the transmitter side savings vary from about 33–50% on an average, while for RBNSiZeComm, this saving is about 33–61% on the same data set (Sinha in Proceedings of 6th IEEE consumer communications and networking conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, pp. 1–5, 2009). Thus, taking into account the low cost/complexity of the proposed transceiver, these results clearly establish that CNS can be a suitable candidate for communication in low power wireless sensor networks, such as in remote healthcare applications, body area networks, home automation, WSNs for agriculture and many others.