Micro-tribology is a key technology in micro-machine. Atomic-scale wear and friction fluctuations degrade the performance of micro-machines. New wear-resistant, low friction materials should be useful in reducing micro- and macro-tribological wear and friction fluctuations. Our investigation of the frictional characteristics of polished CVD diamond films by FFM (friction force microscope), AFM (atomic force microscope) and conventional reciprocating tribometer and trial micro processing of diamond produced three main results. First, the friction coefficient of diamond film increases rapidly with decreasing load in the micro-load region. This is partially due to the surface tension of adsorbed water on the surface under high humidity. In the macro-load region also, the friction coefficient increases with decreasing load, but, in this case it is due to elastic deformation. The second result is that diamond film has excellent wear resistance in the micro-load region compared with silicon and diamond-like carbon (DLC) film. Finally, a micro-diamond gear and diamond shaft were fabricated by laser machining and thermo-chemical etching, and then assembled.

This paper presents experiments on a PR4 (Partial Response Class 4) transceiver aimed at using existing telephone-grade twisted pairs. The achievable loop length for typical line codes is first estimated for a wide range of bit rates, assuming that near-end crosstalk (NEXT) is the crucial degrading factor on TTPs. It is shown that a PR4 line code makes it possible to transmit 4 Mbps of data over a loop up to 450 meters long. A low-cost transceiver adopting a newly developed timing extraction method, called LDT (Logically Decided Timing extraction) , is implemented and evaluated. It is experimentally confirmed that 4Mbps transmission over existing TTPs was achieved in the presence of crosstalk and impulse noise.