In recent years, various Portable Navigation Devices (PND) such as smart-phones are becoming popular as a vehicle navigation device. To compare with a conventional built-in navigation system, PND has advantages that it is low cost and easily mounted to the vehicle. On the other hand, PND has also disadvantage that in the most case it cannot obtain the reliable vehicle speed information such as wheel pulse information and that induces degradation of vehicle trajectory estimation (dead-reckoning). The vehicle trajectory estimation is the positioning method using inertial sensors, and generally used when GPS is not available. So in urban area where GPS signals are blocked or reflected by tall buildings, the degradation of vehicle trajectory estimation may cause the severe increase of position error. Accordingly, in this study two approaches are proposed to improve vehicle trajectory estimation with PND. The first one is the accurate speed estimation using time-series tightly coupled integration of accelerometer, gyro, and Doppler shift of GPS. And the second one is the correction of trajectory error using backward refinement that can work even in real-time processing. The experimental result in Shinjuku which is dense urban city shows that the error of vehicle trajectory estimation was reduced to 1/4 compared with the previous method.

The paper addresses a scheme of lightly supervised training of an acoustic model, which exploits a large amount of data with closed caption texts but not faithful transcripts. In the proposed scheme, a sequence of the closed caption text and that of the ASR hypothesis by the baseline system are aligned. Then, a set of dedicated classifiers is designed and trained to select the correct one among them or reject both. It is demonstrated that the classifiers can effectively filter the usable data for acoustic model training. The scheme realizes automatic training of the acoustic model with an increased amount of data. A significant improvement in the ASR accuracy is achieved from the baseline system and also in comparison with the conventional method of lightly supervised training based on simple matching.

In this paper, we propose a tightly coupled asymmetrically tapered bend to suppress differential-to-common mode conversion caused by bend discontinuity in a pair of differential lines. Tightly coupled symmetrically tapered bends have been so far proposed to suppress the mode conversion by decreasing the path difference in the bend. This approach makes the path difference shorter so that the differential lines are coupled more tightly but the path difference of twice the sum of the line width and the line separation still remains. To suppress the remaining path difference, this paper introduces the use of asymmetric tapers. In addition, two-section tapers are applied to reduce differential-mode reflection increased by the tapers and hence improve differential-mode propagation. A full-wave simulation of a right-angled bend demonstrates that the forward differential-to-common mode conversion is decreased by almost 30 dB compared to the symmetrically tapered bend and that the differential-mode reflection coefficient is reduced to the same amount as that of the classic bend. Also, the generality of the proposed bend structure is discussed.

In this study, flexible organic solar cells (OSCs) employing a solution-processed hole-transporting layer (HTL) and low temperature annealing active layer have been fabricated. Vanadium oxide (V$_{2}$O$_{5})$, poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), V$_{2}$O$_{5}$/PEDOT:PSS or PEDOT:PSS/V$_{2}$O$_{5}$ is used as the HTL. Poly(3-hexythiophene) (P3HT):[6,6]-phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) is used as the active layer. HTL and active layer are all formed by a spin coating method on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. The OSC configuration has been optimized in the study to be PET/ITO/V$_{2}$O$_{5}$/PEDOT:PSS/P3HT:PCBM/LiF/Al. Based on a low annealing temperature of 90$^{circ}$C for P3HT:PCBM and parameters optimization of solution-processed V$_{2}$O$_{5}$/PEDOT:PSS, the OSC demonstrates a current density (JSC) and power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 6.08, mA/cm$^{2}$ and 1.57%, while an OSC without the HTL has PCE around 0.06%. The V$_{2}$O$_{5}$/PEDOT:PSS stacked HTL provides not only a stepwise hole-transporting energy diagram configuration but a smooth film surface for coating P3HT:PCBM active layer, which subsequently increases charge carrier transporting capability and extracts holes from the active layer to the anode.

We propose a temperature sensor employing a ring oscillator composed of poly-Si thin-film transistors (TFTs). Particularly in this research, we compare temperature sensors using TFTs with lightly-doped drain structure (LDD TFTs) and TFTs with offset drain structure (offset TFTs). First, temperature dependences of transistor characteristics are compared between the LDD and offset TFTs. It is confirmed that the offset TFTs have larger temperature dependence of the on current. Next, temperature dependences of oscillation frequencies are compared between ring oscillators using the LDD and offset TFTs. It is clarified that the ring oscillator using the offset TFTs is suitable to detect the temperature. We think that this kind of temperature sensor is available as a digital device.

In this paper, we propose a broadband 3-dB rat-race ring coupler that uses tightly coupled lines. An aperture compensation technique that can simplify the fabrication of tightly coupled lines, is also discussed here. The effective bandwidth of the proposed rat-race coupler with a return loss better than -20 dB can be increased by 14.3%, in comparison with that of March's. Its isolation is always below -20 dB and the phase shift errors less than 6.

This paper proposes a new strategy for reducing contention for a critical section in a multiprocessor system and shows that the strategy can improve CPU utilization by several percent. Using simulation and queueing theory, it also discusses when the strategy is superior to conventional ones.