Low RF noise and power loss for ion-implanted Si having an improved implantation process

Very-low-transmission line noise of <0.25 dB at 18 GHz and low power loss /spl les/0.6 dB at 110 GHz have been measured on transmission lines fabricated on proton-implanted Si. In contrast, a standard Si substrate gave much higher noise of 2.5 dB and worse power loss of 5 dB. The good RF integrity of proton-implanted Si results from the high isolation impedance to ground, as analyzed by an equivalent circuit model. The proton implantation is also done after forming the transmission lines at a reduced implantation energy of /spl sim/4 MeV. This enables easier process integration into current VLSI technology.     

Key management approaches to offer data confidentiality for secure multicast

Multicasting is an efficient way to deliver data to a large group of users in applications such as Internet stock quotes, audio and music delivery, file and video distribution, etc. Many of these applications require the security feature of data confidentiality, which is not readily offered by the "open" nature of multicast. In order to offer such confidentiality, the encryption and decryption keys must be constantly changed upon a membership change. In this article, after discussing some performance criteria to offer secure multicast, we present a number of the proposed key management schemes for data confidentiality. We categorize these schemes into four groups: key tree-based approaches, contributory key agreement schemes supported by the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, computational number theoretic approaches, and secure multicast framework approaches. Through examples, we describe the operation of the schemes and compare their performances.     

Semiautomatic implementation of protocols using an Estelle-Ccompiler

The basic ideas underlying an Estelle-C compiler, which accepts an Estelle protocol specification and produces a protocol implementation in C, are presented. The implementation of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) class-2 transparent protocol, using the semiautomatic approach, is discussed. A manual implementation of the protocol is performed and compared to the semiautomatic implementation. The semiautomatic approach to protocol implementation offers several advantages over the conventional manual one, including correctness and modularity in protocol implementation code, conformance to the specification, and reduction in implementation time. Finally, ongoing development of a new Estelle-C compiler is presented     

Effect of magnesium on the composition,microstructure and mechanical properties of carbon fibres

This work was undertaken in order to provide more detailed information on the chemical and mechanical behaviour of carbon fibres during the elaboration of graphite-magnesium composite materials. For this purpose, PAN-based T300, pitch-based P55 and P100 carbon fibres were isothermally heat treated, at temperatures ranging from 450 to 700 °C, under a saturated vapour pressure of magnesium. The composition, microstructure and tensile strength of the resulting samples were characterized by chemical and electron probe microanalysis, Raman spectrometry, X-ray diffraction and mechanical test of single filaments. From the results obtained, it has been concluded that highly graphitized fibres such as pitch-based P55 or P100 are not affected by long-time annealing in the presence of magnesium vapour, whereas impure and disorded fibres such as PAN-based T300 undergo some chemical and microstructural modifications decreasing their mechanical properties.     

Orbital volume measurement in the management of pure blowout fractures of the orbital floor

With the recent advent of accurate orbital volume assessment by computed tomography, a retrospective analysis was made of 31 patients with 'pure' blowout fracture of the orbital floor, managed either surgically or conservatively, to determine whether orbital volume measurement could provide an additional parameter of use in the management of such fractures. There was a significant difference in orbital volume discrepancy between patients managed surgically or conservatively suggesting that this investigation may be of use in decision making on surgical intervention in patients with orbital blowout fractures.     

Error Concealment Based on Semantic Prioritization with Hardware‐Based Face Tracking

With video compression standards such as MPEG‐4, a transmission error happens in a video‐packet basis, rather than in a macroblock basis. In this context, we propose a semantic error prioritization method that determines the size of a video packet based on the importance of its contents. A video packet length is made to be short for an important area such as a facial area in order to reduce the possibility of error accumulation. To facilitate the semantic error prioritization, an efficient hardware algorithm for face tracking is proposed. The increase of hardware complexity is minimal because a motion estimation engine is efficiently re‐used for face tracking. Experimental results demonstrate that the facial area is well protected with the proposed scheme.     

Birefringence in benzocyclobutene strip optical waveguides

We report the fabrication of benzocyclobutene strip optical waveguides and the measurement of their birefringence properties. To take into account the stress-induced birefringence in the waveguide, we generalize the formulas reported previously for the analysis of strip waveguides. Our experimental results are shown to agree closely with the theoretical calculation. The condition for achieving zero modal birefringence by control of the aspect ratio of the strip of the waveguide is highlighted. The dependence of the birefringence in the waveguides on the temperature is also measured and discussed.     

Reliability evaluation and optimisation of imperfect inspections for a component with multi-defects

In this paper, a model is developed to evaluate the reliability and optimise the inspection schedule for a multi-defect component. The model uses a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) method in conjunction with a delay time approach. The inspections are designed to detect any defects in the component, however it can be imperfect. The defect is a definable state before a functional failure happens to the component. Occurrences of defects are assumed to follow an NHPP and a defect will be minimally repaired if it is identified during an inspection. It is shown that the failures occurring in an interval of inspection will also follow an NHPP. The situation of imperfect inspections and non-constant inspection intervals are considered. An algorithm is presented to optimise the intervals of inspections in order to maximise the reliability of the component, and the properties of the algorithm are shown. A numerical example with parametric study is given to show the performance of the model and the algorithm.     

Signal classification through multifractal analysis and complex domain neural networks

This paper describes a system capable of classifying stochastic self-affine nonstationary signals produced by nonlinear systems. The classification and the analysis of these signals are important because these are generated by many real-world processes. The first stage of the signal classification process entails the transformation of the signal into the multifractal dimension domain, through the computation of the variance fractal dimension trajectory (VFDT). Features can then be extracted from the VFDT using a Kohonen self-organizing feature map. The second stage involves the use of a complex domain neural network and a probabilistic neural network to determine the class of a signal based on these extracted features. The results of this paper show that these techniques can be successful in creating a classification system which can obtain correct classification rates of about 87% when performing classification of such signals without knowing the number of classes.