In order to highlight a rapid progress attained in the field of millimeter waves in Japan, this paper describes several key topics including transistors, integrated circuits, planar antennas, millimeter wave photonics, and others.

This paper gives an overview of the research and development trends in millimeter-wave short-range application systems, such as communication systems and sensing systems, in Japan and other countries. Frequency management trends are also described. Major research and development efforts in Japan have currently been concentrated on the 59-64 GHz band. The first major achievement resulting from those efforts was the allocation of the 60-61 GHz band to the automotive radar systems. Test productions of automotive radars in this band have already started. Further technological developments to reduce the cost and size of radar products are, however, required in order for such radar systems to be widely used. Development of broadband wireless LAN systems has also been intensively made in the 60 GHz band. In addition, technical issues related to standardization of millimeter-wave wireless LAN systems in the 60 GHz band have been examined at the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses. The application areas of millimeter-waves in the future are expected to become more diverse. Research and development trends of future application systems, such as broadband mobile communication systems and imaging radar systems, are also described. These systems require more advanced millimeter-wave technologies, such as smart antennas, low power-consumption devices, and more sensitive detectors. Efforts to develop these technologies must be strengthened.

A V-band compact monolithic up-converter and down-converter were designed and tested. Each frequency converter was highly integrated with RF and LO amplifiers into a single compact chip. To avoid undesirable resonance, the chip width was limited to 0.9 mm. The up-converter has a balanced configuration to suppress undesired LO leakage. Using the uniplanar concept, the chip size of each frequency converter was greatly reduced to only 2.6 mm². Measured performance of the up-converter includes conversion gain of-10.6 dB3.3 dB for a bandwidth of 10 GHz, and LO leakage is more than 10 dB below LO input. The down-converter shows a conversion gain of -0.4 dB2.0 dB.

Because 60 GHz frequency band has been allotted for the research and development purpose of millimeter wave systems in Japan, various circuit components and systems have been fabricated by using printed transmission lines. The NRD guide (nonradiative dielectric waveguide) is another candidate as a transmission medium for millimeter wave integrated circuit applications since its performance has been shown to be excellent in this frequency band. This paper is concerned with the development of a 60 GHz digital transceiver for millimeter wave LAN use based on NRD guide technologies. The trans-ceiver consists of frequency stabilized Gunn oscillator, circulator, PIN diode modulator, balanced mixer, directional coupler and transmitting and receiving pyramidal horn antennas. The notable advantages of the circuit components are the high reliability of the Gunn oscillator, the wide bandwidth of the circulator, and the high frequency operation of the PIN diode modulator beyond 100 Mbps. Interference between transmitted and received signals, which must be caused by coupling between transmitting and receiving antennas, is eliminated by simple techniques such as introducing filters in the base band and IF circuits. By using NRD guide digital transceivers, both-way data transmission between two computers can be achieved simultaneously and a 60 GHz wireless LAN system has been developed successfully.

A slotted waveguide planar array using a single-layer feed circuit is applied to high frequency and high gain use. The remarkable efficiency of 75.6% is realized for the gain of 35.9 dBi in 22 GHz band and 64% is realized for 35.1 dBi in 60 GHz band. Each antenna consists of only two components; a slotted plate and a groove base plate, and are highly mass produceable.

For quasi millimeter-wave and millimeter-wave high-speed wireless communications over wireless LANs and wireless ATMs, narrow beam antennas have been shown to provide high transmission quality by suppressing the troublesome multipath effect. However, the diameter of sector antennas needed to create the narrow beams rapidly increases with the sector number. In addition, the cylindrical shape of typical sector antennas does not suit portable terminals. This paper shows a methodology for designing planar sector antennas that overcomes these problems. The proposed antenna uses two kinds of beams and the antenna gains are equalized in all sectors. The antenna is developed as a 4-beam subarray fed by a planar Butler matrix circuit. The design method of the subarray and an evaluation of its characteristics in the 20 GHz band are discussed.

We propose a novel feeding circuit for a 30 GHz planar multibeam antenna applied to high-speed wireless communication systems. The feeding circuit is a bi-layer 8-port Butler matrix constructed with phase adjusted slot-coupled hybrids and branch-line hybrids. The new circuit configuration eliminates troublesome vias and line crossings, so it can be manufactured by traditional photolithograph. The feeding circuit is designed by using the spectral domain moment method considering bonding film effects. A prototype of a multibeam antenna which has seven pencil-beams with 10 beamwidths is manufactured and tested; the beam scan angle error is less than 3 at 30 GHz.

This paper describes a millimeter-wave (MMW) transmission system over fiber-optic links applicable for high-speed mobile communications. The system design is presented considering both the MMW radio link and fiber-optic link. To prove the capability of the MMW fiber-optic link, an experimental system has been constructed. The results of in-door transmission experiments showed that this system could be capable of transmitting 118 Mbps digital signals with a BER of less than 10^-6. The developed system is easily applicable to a wireless access system which can connect subscribers with a broadband optical fiber network.

This paper presents a method for simply estimating characteristics of signals received by a millimeter wave car radar. In this method, the substitution of a radar target with a set of scattering points is introduced to take account of the phenomenon that only a part of the target is irradiated with the radio wave from the radar antenna with a sharp beam; the phenomenon is peculiar to the car radar which operates in a compact range. The positions of these scattering points and the RCS values for the scattering points are appropriately determined on the basis of a measured RCS image for the target. The RCS image means a spatial distribution of RCS values on the surface of the target. In addition, influence of the ground, which is a dominant clutter in car radar environments, and characteristics of the car radar hardware can be included in the estimation method. The estimated characteristics of the signal received by the car radar are compared with the measured ones under typical cases in the car radar environments. The comparison verifies not only that the received signal characteristics are well estimated even when the range is rather short but also that the substitution of the target with scattering points is valid. The proposed method can realize the estimation of the received signal characteristics. Furthermore, the method can be developed into a computer simulation for evaluating the target detection performance of the car radar.

We propose a method for accomplishing accurate RCS (Radar Cross Section ) images of a car in a compact range. It is an improved method based on an ISAR (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar) technique. To obtain accurate RCS values, an idea of an image correction function for the Fourier transform used in the ISAR processing is introduced. The role of the image correction function is to compensate the difference of the propagation loss as to the different scattering points on a target. As a result, `sensitivity' of imaging in the compact range is kept uniform. Hamming window is suitable for the Fourier transform to accomplish RCS images because of its low sidelobe level and the sharpness of a mainlobe. When hamming window is adopted, the spatial resolution is approximately twice the size of granularity which is determined by the ISAR parameters. To verify the improvement of the RCS images obtained by means of our method, several numerical target models are employed. The results of the investigation show that uniformity of `sensitivity' for obtained RCS images is achieved in the compact range and accurate images with the resolution of twice the size of granularity are accomplished without blurs or distortions in the unambiguous area. RCS images for rear aspects of a passenger car are investigated with the spatial resolution of 50 mm in the 60 GHz band. The RCS image varies with the aspect angle of the car and the specular reflection occurs for the millimeter wave. When the curvature on the car edge is small, a blurred RCS image is observed. The reason is that a scattering center of the specular reflection moves so widely that it can't be regarded as a fixed point. This causes elongation of the RCS image. A peak value in the dominant area for each aspect angle is less the 0 dBsm and no remarkable areas where the RCS value exceeds-20 dBsm is found any more on the car except such the dominant area.

An important aspect of traffic safety is the development of aids that extend the driver's time and motion perception. One promising candidate is the compact, lightweight millimeter-wave FM-CW radar now being widely studied. Although the homodyne FM-CW radar is well known form its simplicity, it has a relatively low S/N ratio. This paper describes the principles behind our newly-developed heterodyne FM-CW radar and it's evaluation results. The heterodyne FM-CE radar generates sidebands by switching a front-end amplifier and also uses the heterodyne detection technique for gaining sensor sensitivity. The heterodyne FM-CW radar's signal to noise ratio was 19.5 dB better than previously designed homodyne FM-CW radar.

In outdoor fields such as construction, mining and agriculture, there is an increasing demand for autonomous vehicles to reduce labor costs. Also, a positioning system is one key technology required for autonomous vehicle systems. For the purpose of expanding the potential of millimeter-wave applications, we have developed a positioning system in the 77-79 GHz frequency band, using the hyperbolic radio navigation method. This system operates in a restricted area with a radius of about a few hundred meters. A spread spectrum with a PN code is used as the ranging signals. We realized about 0.1 m in positioning accuracy.

The millimeter wave (MMW) radar has good compromise characteristics of both microwave radar and optical sensors. It has better angular and range resolving abilities than microwave radar, and a longer penetrating range than optical sensors. We used the MMW radar to detect targets located in the sea and among sea ice clutter based on fractals, wavelets, and neural networks. The wavelets were used as feature extractors to decompose the MMW radar images and to extract the feature vectors from approximation signals at different resolution levels. Unsupervised neural classifiers with parallel computational architecture were used to classify sea ice, sea water and targets based on the competitive learning algorithm. The fractal dimensions could provide a quantitative description of the roughness of the radar image. Using these techniques, we can detect targets quickly and clearly discriminate between sea ice, sea water, and targets.

Recently , a short range millimeter wave or a microwave sensing system has been extensively studied to estimate a target position or a source location. It can be applied to indoor propagation analysis, carborne applications, etc. The application of the superresolution technique has been proposed to obtain a high resolution performance in the time domain or the spatial domain. However, the availability of the polarization synthesis in the receiving antennas has not been considered. In this paper, we use a pair of polarized swept frequency data and propose two modifications of the MUSIC algorithm to enhance the resolution of time delay. One modification is the correlation matrix formulation which relates to the total signal power, and the other is a polarization filtering applied to the correlation matrix. These modifications have advantages such that. 1)Reduction of the estimation problem to the delay time estimation only; 2)Easy implementation. Experimental results are illustrated to show the availability of the methods, and to confirm the high resolution performance compared with the conventional method.

This paper analyzed the connection points of Main Distribution Frames (MDF), which are installed between outside plants and inside plants (service nodes). This paper also proposes a connecting system for forthcoming FITL (Fiber In The Loop) networks. NTT has developed the Subscriber Line Cross-Connecting Module (LXM) for the FITL network and will continue to introduce LXMs and deploy optic subscriber networks in big cities throughout Japan.

The polymer matrix for the number of N in-puts/outputs, N stages and 2x2-switches is denoted as the 1-D Spanke-Benes (SB) network. Throughout the paper, the 1-D SB-network, which equals the diamond cellular array, is extended to arbitrary dimensions by a mathematical transformation (a 1-D network provides the interconnection of 1-D data). This transformation determines the multistage architecture completely by providing size, location, geometry and wiring of the switches as well as it preserves properties of the networks, e.g., the capability of sorting. The SB-networks of dimension 3 are analysed and sorting is applied.

One of the functions that should be provided in ATM LANs is multicast communication. For multicast communication on ATM LANs, the architecture of switch fabric and protocols for signaling have been studied. However, when data communication using a multicast connection such as LAN emulation service is provided, ABR service on a multicast connection (Multicast ABR) is also required. ABR service has been actively discussed in the ATM forum. Unfortunately, the study on flow control mechanism for Multicast ABR is not enough. This paper discusses the suitable flow control mechanism for Multicast ABR and shows its performance.

Two simple and high performance multichannel distributed queue dual bus (MDQDB) protocols based on the wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network technology are proposed, and the network architecture and operations are presented. To be suited for a high speed network, they inherit the advantages of the DQDB protocol such as node simplicity, network flexibility and distributed operations of individual nodes. The network capacity can also be greatly increased with marginal increase of node complexity. Simulation has been done to estimate the performances such as throughput and average access delays for individual nodes. The influence of the bandwidth balancing mechanism on the two protocols is considered at medium, high, and overload conditions. We also investigate the fairness characteristics in asymptotic conditions for various initial states.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is considered to bo the key technology for realizing B-ISDN. This paper discusses current research on ATM switching nodes for high-speed communication networks. Although some ATM switching nodes have been deployed, much work continues for resolving problems as regards operations and maintainability, such as ATM layer performance evaluation including layered management scheme upon detection of line failure, function test methods regarding channel connectivity for multicasting, and real-time ATM traffic-monitoring mechanism with QoS control. To achieve sufficient ATM node maintainability, the ATM cell transfer quality on the VP and VC levels should be ensured both within the ATM nodes and between adjacent ATM nodes. Since ATM switching nods handle many kinds of virtual paths and virtual channels, each channel's connectivity must be confirmed. This paper proposes ATM layer performance evaluation concept, layered management scheme upon detection of line failure, function test methods for a multicast switch using test cells that periodically pass through pre-determined switching path routes. It also proposes the concept of test cell generation for simulating multiplexed ATM test cells taking ATM truffic characteristics into account. Furthermore, this paper describes a fault diagnosis scheme using test cells that can continually observe the entire ATM connection length in the system. A real-time traffic monitoring hardware configuration and an interface with software control are also discussed and it is clarified that the required functions can be realized by using commercially available DSPs.

A mechanism of an integrated switching system architecture where PS, CS, and ATM switching functions are integrated based on a hierarchical memory system concept is discussed. A packet buffering control mechanism, and practical random time-slot assignment mechanism for CS traffic, which are composed of multiple bearer rate data traffic are then described. The feasibility of the random time-slot assignment mechanism is also confirmed by a practical experimental system using VLSI technology, particularly, content addressable memory (CAM) technology. The required queuing delay between the nodes for the corresponding call set up procedure is also shown and its application is clarified. For practical digital networks that provide various types of data communications including voice, data, and video services, it is highly desirable to evaluate the transmission efficiency of integrating packet switching (PS) type non-real time traffic and circuit switching (CS) type real time traffic. Transmission line utilization improvement is expected when the random time-slot assignment and the movable boundary scheme on a TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) data frame are adopted. The corresponding control procedure by signaling between switching nodes is also examined.

A very simple but general scheme has been developed to calculate burst error occurrences due to cycle slip in clock recovery on frequency-selective Nakagami-Rice fading channels. The scheme, which we call the "Equivalent Transmission-Path Model," plays a role in connecting "wave propagation" with "digital transmission characteristics" in a general manner. First computer simulations assuming various types of delay profiles identify the "key parameters in Nakagami-Rice fading" that principally dominate the occurrence of cycle slips. Following this a simple method is developed to calculate the occurrence frequency of cycle slips utilizing the nature of the key parameters. Then, the accuracy of the scheme is confirmed through comparison between calculated values and simulation results. Finally, based on the scheme, calculated results on cycleslip occurrences are presented in line-of-sight fading environments.

A complex fuzzy adaptive decision feedback equalizer based on the RLS algorithm is proposed. The proposed equalizer not only improves the performance but also reduces the computational complexity compared with the conventional complex fuzzy adaptive equalizers under the assumption of perfect knowledge of the linear and nonlinear channels.