A pneumoperitoneum apparatus includes: a gas feeding conduit; a gas feeding flow rate variable section; a first pressure measurement section coupled with the gas feeding conduit; a conduit for pressure measurement; a conduit for pressure measurement coupling part coupled with the conduit for pressure measurement; a second pressure measurement section coupled with the conduit for pressure measurement coupling part, and configured to measure pressure in the conduit for pressure measurement; a gas leaking part configured to communicate the gas in the conduit for pressure measurement to an outside to leak the gas in the conduit by a predetermined leakage; and a control section configured to determine that the conduit for pressure measurement is crushed when pressure measured by the second pressure measurement section is smaller than a predetermined threshold.

1. Field of the Invention
An embodiment of the present invention relates to a pneumoperitoneum apparatus, in particular, to a pneumoperitoneum apparatus that measures pressure in a body cavity in real time through a dedicated tube for pressure measurement that is coupled with the cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, to suppress invasion into a patient, a laparoscopic surgical operation is performed in which therapeutic treatment is performed without an abdominal operation. In the laparoscopic surgical operation, for example, a first trocar that guides an observation endoscope into a body cavity, and a second trocar that guides treatment instruments to a treated site are pierced into an abdomen of the patient. In the laparoscopic surgical operation, treatment, etc. is performed while the treated site and the treatment instruments that are inserted into the body cavity through an insertion hole of the second trocar are observed with use of the endoscope that is inserted into the body cavity through an insertion hole of the first trocar.
In such a laparoscopic surgical operation, a pneumoperitoneum apparatus is used in order to secure a visual field of the endoscope and to secure a region in which the treatment instruments are operated. The pneumoperitoneum apparatus injects, for example, carbon dioxide as pneumoperitoneum gas into the body cavity to expand the cavity at a predetermined pressure, thereby securing the visual field of the endoscope and the operation region of the treatment instruments.
Typically, the pneumoperitoneum apparatus uses a gas feeding tube that feeds gas into the cavity, to measure pressure in the cavity. Therefore, the pneumoperitoneum apparatus temporarily stops the gas feeding and then measures the pressure in the cavity, after feeding the gas into the cavity for a predetermined time period. Further, the pneumoperitoneum apparatus performs such intermittent gas feeding until the pressure in the cavity reaches a set pressure (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 8-126606).
An apparatus disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,299,592 detects crushing of an RTPS tube with use of the fact that, in a case where a small amount of gas is fed to the RTPS tube, excess pressure is applied to an inside of the tube when the tube is crushed.


A system and method operates with a document collection in which documents are represented as normalized document vectors. The document vector space is partitioned into a set of disjoint clusters and a concept vector is computed for each partition, the concept vector comprising the mean vector of all the documents in each partition. Documents are then reassigned to the cluster having their closest concept vector, and a new set of concept vectors for the new partitioning is computed. From an initial partitioning, the concept vectors are iteratively calculated to a stopping threshold value, leaving a concept vector subspace of the document vectors. The documents can then be projected onto the concept vector subspace to be represented as a linear combination of the concept vectors, thereby reducing the dimensionality of the document space. A search query can be received for the content of text documents and a search can then be performed on the projected document vectors to identify text documents that correspond to the search query.

1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer document retrieval systems and, more particularly, to computer document content search and classification.
2. Description of the Related Art
Large sets of computer-readable text documents are now increasingly common. For example, the xe2x80x9cWorld-Wide-Webxe2x80x9d presently contains over 300 million pages and is growing rapidly. The Internet-based xe2x80x9cPatent Serverxe2x80x9d document service of the International Business Machines Corporation (xe2x80x9cIBM Corp.xe2x80x9d) includes more than 20 million patents. The database of the Lexis-Nexis division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. contains more than 1 billion documents. Furthermore, an immense amount of text data exists on private corporate intranets, in archives of media companies, and in scientific and technical publishing houses.
Applying efficient search techniques to such collections of text data is of great practical interest. Search engine websites on the Internet are among the most popular sites on the World Wide Web. The IBM Corp. Patent Server and the Lexis-Nexis system mentioned above both incorporate text search and retrieval mechanisms. Document search and retrieval systems are widely deployed within business organizations, typically accessible through corporate intranets. The search techniques being used for these systems include machine learning and statistical algorithms such as clustering, classification, principal component analysis, and discriminant analysis.
A starting point for applying such search techniques to unstructured text data is to create a vector space model for text data. This involves representing documents as vectors of the document words in a word-by-document matrix whose rows are words and columns are documents. Thus, a large collection of documents in a vector space representation can easily comprise a matrix with 100Kxc3x97100K entries. One methodology for such representations is first (a) to extract unique content-bearing words from the set of documents and treat these words as features, and then (b) to represent each document as a vector of certain weighted word frequencies in this feature space. Typically, a large number of words exist in even a moderately sized set of documentsxe2x80x94a few thousand words are common. Hence, the document vectors are very high-dimensional. Nevertheless, most individual documents contain many fewer words, from 1% to 5% of the words or less, in comparison to the total number of words in the entire document collection. Hence, the document vectors are very sparse. Understanding and exploiting the structure of such vector space models is a major contemporary scientific and technological challenge.
In a text search and retrieval context, it has been proposed to use latent semantic indexing (LSI), which uses truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) or principal component analysis to discover xe2x80x9clatentxe2x80x9d relationships between correlated words and documents. One may interpret LSI as a matrix approximation scheme. Based on earlier work for image compression, a memory efficient matrix approximation scheme known as semi-discrete decomposition has been developed. Others have used an xe2x80x9cimplicitxe2x80x9d matrix approximation scheme based on context vectors. Still others have proposed computationally efficient matrix approximations based on random projections.
Clustering has been used to discover xe2x80x9clatent conceptsxe2x80x9d in sets of unstructured text documents, and to summarize and label such collections. Various classical clustering algorithms are known, such as the xe2x80x9ck-meansxe2x80x9d algorithm and its variants, hierarchical agglomerative clustering, and graph-theoretic methods. Clustering is a way of processing the vector space of a document collection to discover similar documents, based on the fact that documents related to similar topics tend to cluster in the document vector space. A categorization or classification of the documents can therefore take place through clustering techniques.
The k-means algorithm assumes that the document vectors have been normalized to have unit L2 norm, that is, the documents can be thought of as points on a high-dimensional unit sphere. Such normalization mitigates the effect of differing lengths of documents. In this way, the document vectors should be differentiated solely on the basis of their word content. It is known to measure xe2x80x9csimilarityxe2x80x9d between such vectors by the inner product between them. This measure is known as cosine similarity. The more closely located any two document vectors are to each other, the more closely related are the documents. The results of the k-means technique applied to a collection of documents can be valuable in locating desired documents and discovering latent content similarities. The processing involved, however, can require relatively large matrix operations. As noted above, the document vectors can easily comprise a database with upwards of 100Kxc3x97100K matrix size.
From the discussion above, it should be apparent that there is a need for a text search and retrieval technique that more efficiently implements clustering to identify similar text documents in a collection. The present invention fulfills this need.
The present invention provides a system and method in which documents of a collection are represented as normalized document vectors of word frequencies. The document vector space is then partitioned into a set of disjoint clusters and a concept vector is computed for each partition, the concept vector comprising the normalized mean vector of all the documents in each partition. Documents are then reassigned to the cluster having their closest concept vector, and a new set of concept vectors for the new partitioning is computed. From an initial partitioning, the concept vectors are iteratively calculated to a stopping threshold value, leaving a concept vector subspace of the document vectors. The documents can then be projected onto the concept vector subspace to be represented as a linear combination of the concept vectors, thereby reducing the dimensionality of the document space. The reduced dimensionality provides more efficient representation of documents as linear combinations of concept vectors, and permits simpler document searching and categorization of the documents. In this way, the invention provides text search and retrieval technique that more efficiently implements clustering to identify similar text documents in a collection.
In one aspect of the invention, a disjoint clustering partition of the document vectors is computed, and a xe2x80x9cnormalized centroidxe2x80x9d referred to as the concept vector is computed for each of these clusters. The cluster concept vectors are iteratively computed to a predetermined threshold, forming a set of concept vectors that define a vector subspace of the document vector space. Any document in the document vector space can then be represented as a linear combination in the concept vector subspace. The invention can exploit the sparsity of the text data, it can be efficiently parallelized, and converges quickly (to a local maxima). Moreover, from a statistical perspective, the invention generates concept vectors that serve as a xe2x80x9cmodelxe2x80x9d which may be used to classify future documents.
Other features and advantages of the present invention should be apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiments, which illustrate, by way of example, the principles of the invention.


A cooperative conveyor system for a lumber production line. The production line has a canting station and a sawing station spaced at a distance from each other and interconnected by a powered conveyor system. The cants are fed at a higher rate through the canting station than through the sawing station. The conveyor system is arranged to receive cants from the canting station at a high feed rate and transport the cants to and into a sawing station at a lower feed rate. The cants are fed through the canting station at controlled intervals so that the resulting gap between succeeding cants received on the conveyor are at a desired spacing to maximize the production of the sawing station. The cant exiting from the canting station is forced to overrun the conveyors feed rate and thereby reduces the gap between it and a preceding cant. The conveyor then transports the cant to and into the sawing station at the desired feed rate for the sawing station. In one embodiment, the sawing station has two saws. The conveyor system is arranged to shift the cant exiting the canting station into alignment with the saw selected to perform the sawing operation.

Lumber production requires a series of operations including bucking logs into lengths, debarking the logs, scanning the logs for optimal cutting pattern, canting the logs by squaring up the sides, cutting the canted log into flitches or boards, edging the boards, etc.
Each of the operations has its own peculiarity and one of the objectives and/or challenges of a lumber mill is to coordinate the operations so as to maximize production. The particular operations to which the present invention is directed is the canting and sawing operations.
Canting, as contemplated herein for the preferred embodiment, involves feeding of a two-sided cant (flattened on the top and bottom) through chipping heads located to flatten the opposed sides. The chipping heads are typically rotating disks that each carry specialized knives which generate the opposed flat parallel sides. The cant (now having all four sides flattened), is then sawn into boards. The saws that accomplish this operation are typically multiple saw blades (a gang saw) spaced apart the desired width of the boards that are to be sawn from the cant.
The feeding process for this combination of canting and sawing operations involves (a) placing the two-sided cant at the entry of the canter, (b) setting the chipping disks of the canter to the desired spacing, (c) feeding the cant through the canter and then onto a conveyor, (d) positioning the four-sided cant on the conveyor to align the cant with the gang saw blades, and (e) feeding the canted log through the saw.
Inefficiency in the operation of the canter and saw in part results from the fact that the canter is capable of canting a log at a feed rate (e.g., 400 feet per minute) that is substantially greater than the feed rate that can be tolerated by the saws (e.g., 255 feet per minute). To slow the speed of the canter to match the speed of the saw is an unacceptable solution. Heretofore, sawmills would typically provide one canter for two saws as a way to maximize the production of the canter.
Not considered in the above two-saws-for-one-canter solution is the substantial gap that exists between the cants as they exit the canter. As described above, each log that is to be canted requires a different setting of the chipping disks. The new setting cannot commence until the prior cant has completely passed through the canter. The time required to reset the canter and place a following cant at the entry to the canter results in a spaced feeding of the cants through the canter. The cants exit the canter at spaced intervals, e.g., an end-to-end gap between the cants of 12 feet or more. The saw blade settings remain the same from one cant to the next. Some spacing is required to adjust the feed rollers that control entry into the saws but nothing like the gap required by the canter. A one-foot gap between cants is acceptable for sawing.
The problem of inefficient utilization of the saws is aggravated by having to stop or slow the conveyance of the cants while the cants are being aligned with the saws. Considering this time for alignment in addition to the lengthy gaps between the cants, saws are sawing only about half of the time. Yet the industry has heretofore concluded that it takes two of the saws to accommodate a single canter running at optimum speed.

Cooperative conveyor system for canter and saw


A method and apparatus are provided for measuring the magnitude of spherical hardness testing indentations in solid surfaces by scanning the indentations with a light beam. Scanning is achieved by tilting the beam in one or several planes perpendicular to the testpiece surface through a point which is the center of rotation for the beam tilting as well as the center of curvature of the indentation area in the plane of tilting. At least the part of the indenter making contact with the indented surface is spherically shaped, and the scanning light spot follows an arcuate path in the indentation being measured. The scanning light beam is sent through a transparent indenter, or scanning is carried out directly on the indentation after removal of the indenter. The intensity of the light reflected from the indentation in the direction of incidence is continuously measured, and the angle between the two principle intensity variations on each scan serves for determining the magnitude of the indentation and thus the Brinell hardness of the tested surface.

This invention relates to methods and apparatus for measuring the magnitude of spherical indentations made for testing the hardness of the surfaces of solid material, and more particularly to such methods and apparatus which scan and measure spherical indentations with a light beam, the light beam being tilted in one or more planes through the center of the curvature of the indentation as well as perpendicular to the axis of tilting as it is scanned across the indentation being measured.
In my co-pending application Ser. No. 004,325, a method for measuring hardness indentations made in solid surfaces is disclosed in which a concentrated light beam is directed against the testpiece surface in a vertical direction. The light beam is translated parallel to the testpiece surface in at least one direction such that the light spot completely transverses the indentation at least once. During the crossing of the indent, the intensity of the light reflected from the indentation is measured within a predetermined angular range. The light intensity variation occurring when an edge of the indent is crossed, serves as an indicator for marking the initial and the final edge points of the scanned indentation which correspond to the distance between the two edge points of the indentation.
In an especially simple embodiment of the aforesaid application, a light spot is provided which moves along a straight line running through the center of the indent. Then the length of the distance travelled between two intensity variations occurring on the edges of an indent can be measured directly by means of a mechanical or electronic micrometer.
The aforesaid method has certain drawbacks when it is applied to measuring spherical indentations.
An especially designed generally ring-shaped photodetector is required in the aforesaid method. The light-sensitive area of a photodetector which is suitable for the Brinell test becomes relatively large owing to the big angular range of the reflected light, extending from approximately 30.degree. to 80.degree. measured against the vertical. If the measurement is attempted through a spherical indenter, the optical design for the above-mentioned angular range becomes complex. Also, the light that is reflected from the center region of the spherical indentation does not reach the photodetector. In a video display of an X-Y scan of a spherical indentation, the center region would appear as a dark spot of circular shape. Special electronic logic is required to account for the lack of signal when the scanning beam passes through the center region of the indent. Also, the scanning displacements .DELTA.x corresponding to the distances between two edge points are rather small, and so are the corresponding rotation angles .DELTA..phi. of the beam deflecting glass plate or prism. Then too, in most applications where a laser beam is used, a beam expander has to be incorporated in the system in order to get the necessary small spot diameter.

Method and apparatus for the measurement of hardness testing indentations


Polyacetal resin compositions capable of providing a molded article having exceptionally reduced surface gloss characteristics but which maintain the inherent mechanical properties and moldability of polyacetal resin include (A) 100 parts by weight of a polyacetal base resin and, incorporated therein, (B) between 1 to 50 parts by weight of a polyalkylene terephthalate copolymer having a melt flow temperature of 210.degree. C. or below, and (C) between 0.1 to 10 parts by weight of an isocyanate or isothiocyanate compound, or a derivative thereof.

Polyacetal resin is used in diverse fields as an engineering plastic due to its excellent physical properties, such as mechanical, electrical and chemical properties (e.g., chemical and heat resistances). However, the identification of new end-use applications for polyacetal resins often requires further property alterations and/or enhancements.
One such property that is needed when polyacetal resin is employed to form molded parts used for automotive trim or optical instruments is a relatively low surface gloss. A low surface gloss will thus reduce the light reflectivity property of the molded part. As a result, low surface gloss on molded parts will tend to cause less eye irritation (i.e., since less light will be reflected from the part's surface). Furthermore, low surface gloss on molded parts fabricated from engineering plastics tends to impart a more aesthetically pleasing high-grade appearance to the part.
An ability to "engineer" the surface gloss characteristics would also be beneficial in instances where molded parts fabricated from polyacetal resin (which inherently exhibits a relatively high surface gloss) are used in cooperation with molded pairs formed of other non-polyacetal resins. That is, it would be especially desirable to reduce the surface gloss of polyacetal resin to an extent where it is substantially equivalent to the molded parts of non-polyacetal resin in which it is cooperatively used. An inability to date to reduce the surface gloss of polyacetal resins by controlled amounts so that it is visually imperceptible with parts molded from non-polyacetal resins has thus been one barrier to using polyacetal resin in end-use applications (e.g., as parts for electric and electronic devices) where the polyacetal part will be visible.
Attempts in the past to reduce the inherently high surface gloss of polyacetal resins have included incorporating inorganic filler material, such as calcium carbonate or talc, in a polyacetal base resin. However, large amounts of such inorganic filler material must typically be added to the polyacetal base resin before the desired low surface gloss appearance is realized. The addition of relatively large amounts of inorganic filler material, however, is disadvantageous since it has a tendency to reduce the mechanical characteristics (especially elongation and toughness) normally associated with polyacetal resins. Thus, for example, the mechanical properties may be degraded by the addition of relatively large amounts of filler material to the point where molded parts of such a highly filler-loaded polyacetal resin break during assembly or when dropped.
Another technique to reduce the surface gloss of molded articles has been attempted whereby the surfaces of a mold have been texturized ( i.e. "grained") so that the texture is transferred to the surface of the molded article. In the specific case of polyacetal resins, however, due to their relatively high crystallinity, satisfactory reduction in surface gloss by graining has not been achieved.
Accordingly, what has been needed in this art are polyacetal resin compositions which exhibit their inherent desirable mechanical and physical properties while also having reduced surface gloss characteristics. It is toward providing such polyacetal resin compositions that the present invention is directed.
Broadly, the present invention relates to polyacetal resin compositions having reduced surface gloss characteristics by blending with a polyacetal base resin, a specific polyester resin and a specific isocyanate compound. More particularly, the present invention is directed to novel polyacetal resin compositions which include (A) 100 parts by weight of a polyacetal base resin, (B) between 1 to 50 parts by weight of a polyalkylene terephthalate copolymer having a melt flow temperature of 210.degree. C. or below, and (C) between 0.1 to 10 parts by weight of an isocyanate or isothiocyanate compound, or modifications thereof. Molded articles formed of such compositions exhibit desirable reduced surface gloss characteristics.
Further aspects and advantages of this invention will become more clear after careful consideration is given to the detailed description of the preferred exemplary embodiments thereof which follow.

Polyacetal resin composition exhibiting reduced surface gloss characteristics and molded articles thereof


Methods and systems are used to share data as authorized by a provider for review by a recipient. Rich content, such as video, still images and audio, may be captured and automatically uploaded to a network-accessible location. The uploaded rich content may then be shared with a recipient (e.g., a recipient designated by the provider, etc.). As the recipient reviews the uploaded rich content, the amount of the rich content played by the recipient can be tracked, and the provider may be notified of whether or not the recipient has accessed the shared information and/or the extent to which the shared information was reviewed.

Email has commonly been used to send messages between different people, or even between different groups of people. In practice, email allows a user to send a message text and potentially include other items as attachments. Not surprisingly, text is often a poor mechanism for communication. While text itself can convey valuable information, text does not often provide sufficient information on a person's tone. Sarcasm, humor, and other items that may readily be apparent when listening to a person are often lost in text, or if included in text must by explicitly added in text, thereby increasing the length of a message and the time needed to read and understand the message.
Email and other similar communication may also not result in a person understanding the received message. In particular, many people are more likely to retain information that is conveyed to them audibly or visually. As a result, a person may read pages of text but may retain little of the information. Moreover, the person sending the message often does not know if the message was read, let alone whether it was understood. For example, email systems now allow a user to send a message that includes a so-called "read receipt." Upon opening the email, the read receipt may send a message back to the sender indicating that the message was opened. The read receipt does not, however, give the user an idea as to whether or not the recipient read the full message. The sender may therefore be left wondering whether or not the recipient read or understood the message, and often may follow up with a phone call or subsequent email to see if the message was understood. As a result, time may be wasted just to see if information was accurately interpreted or even received.

This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.

Uploading and streaming of video and other rich content


Disclosed are various embodiments for an order management service. Orders may be correlated with an existing order to create a group order. The group order may include items picked up or delivered to the same or geographically proximate locations. Incentives may be used to incite participation in a group order, thereby saving on overall delivery costs.

A third party service can facilitate the placement of orders for delivery from a provider. For example, the third party service may allow users to place orders with various restaurants for delivery. In some circumstances, a group of customers may wish to place orders together, such as when a group of customers wishes to eat together. These orders may be placed with the same or different restaurants through the third party service.


An electronic censer includes a censer body, a driving device and an incense branch. The censer body defines a recess on a top end thereof. The driving device is received in the recess of the censer body. The incense branch is inserted in the censer body and extends from the recess to external environment of the censer body. The incense branch includes a frame and an LED light source located at an upper end of the frame. The LED light source is electrically connected with the driving device. The frame has a first portion and a second portion. The first portion of the frame is pivotally connected with the second portion of the frame, thereby making the second portion of the frame rotatable around the first portion of the frame.

1. Technical Field
The disclosure generally relates to an electronic device, and particularly to an electronic censer with LED (light emitting diode) light source.
2. Description of Related Art
Traditional censers are used for accommodating incenses, each of which mainly includes a rod made of bamboo and aromatic biotic materials coated on the rod. When burned, the aromatic biotic materials release large amounts of smoke. The burning incenses may ignite surrounding articles to fire; furthermore, the released smoke not only pollutes the environment, but also is harmful to health.
Generally, electronic censers are used to replace the traditional censers. An electronic censer includes a censer body and an incense branch extending upwardly from the censer body. The incense branch has an LED (light emitting diode) light source on a top end thereof to imitate a burning tip of the traditional incense. However, the incense branch is relatively long and is therefore easy to break in transportation.
What is needed, therefore, is an electronic censer which can overcome the described limitations.


A power amplifier includes an outphasing amplifier. The outphasing amplifier includes a first amplifier and a second amplifier, and is configured to provide a first amplified RF signal and a second amplified RF signal that is phase shifted from the first amplified RF signal. The power amplifier further includes an output circuit that is configured to combine RF power of the first and second amplified RF signals at a summing node. The output circuit includes a first branch connected between the first amplifier and a summing node and a second branch connected between the second amplifier and the summing node. The first and second branches are each configured to match an output impedance of the first and second amplifiers and to phase shift the first and second amplified RF signals for an outphasing operation using common reactive components for the match of the output impedance and the outphasing operation.

RF power amplifiers are used in a variety of applications such as base stations for wireless communication systems etc. The signals amplified by the RE power amplifiers often include signals that have a high frequency modulated carrier having frequencies in the 400 megahertz (MHz) to 4 gigahertz (GHz) range. The baseband signal that modulates the carrier is typically at a relatively lower frequency and, depending on the application, can be up to 300 MHz or higher.
RF power amplifiers are designed to provide linear operation without distortion. RF transistors may have low input and output impedances (e.g., around 1 ohm or less for high power devices). Input and output impedance matching circuits are used to match the input and output impedances of the RE transistors to impedance matching networks from an external device, such as a circuit board.
A device package for an RE power amplifier can include a transistor die (e.g., MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor), LDMOS (laterally-diffused metal-oxide semiconductor), HEMT (high electron mobility transistor), along with an input and output impedance matching circuit incorporated therein. The input and output impedance matching circuits typically include LC networks that provide at least a portion of an impedance matching circuit that is configured to match the impedance of the transistor die to a fixed value. The device package may also include tuning circuits that are configured to filter out higher order harmonic components of the fundamental frequency to improve amplifier efficiency.
A Chireix amplifier is one type of RF power amplifier that is gaining increased attention and popularity. The Chireix amplifier was first proposed by H. Chireix in 1935, and is described in "High power outphasing modulation," Proc. IRE, Vol. 23, No. 11, pp. 1370-1392, November 1935, the content of which is incorporated by reference in its entirety. A Chireix amplifier utilizes an outphasing technique to amplify two phase-shifted constant envelope signals. The Chireix amplifier offers highly efficient and linear amplification without distortion. However, one source of inefficiency in a Chireix amplifier is attributable to the relative complexity of the output circuitry. Conventional Chireix amplifier designs that include impedance matching circuits and power combiner circuitry require a substantial number of components that can degrade efficiency and performance, and introduce substantial phase delay in the amplified signal.

Compact chireix combiner and impedance matching circuit


A video display device includes: an image display device including: a signal operating unit which operates image quality of a source image; a first OSD unit which generates a first OSD signal; a control unit for controlling the image display device, and a memory which is connected to the control unit; and a video device including: a second OSD unit which generates a second OSD signal; and a video device control unit for controlling the video device, wherein the OSD signal output is always displayed with constant image quality, image quality data of the second OSD display stored in the memory is used as the image quality data of the signal operating unit when the second OSD display is performed, and, if the OSD display is finished, the image quality data of the display returns to the image quality data of the source image.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus including a video device such as a medium playback device, and more particularly, to an image forming apparatus including a video device, which can perform on-screen display (OSD) of the image forming apparatus and the video device with the same quality or the substantially same quality.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a TV receiver and a video device such as VTR and DVD playback devices, an on-screen display (OSD) means for displaying various kinds of setting items of the device on a portion of an image display unit and allowing a user to set the items while checking the state of the device is employed. For example, in the OSD display of the DVD, the display of a chapter and a title, the switch of an aspect ratio of a screen, an angle, a stereo sound and a caption, and the state of selecting or controlling the setting items can be controlled while checking the state of the device. In addition, a display unit for the setting items need not be separately provided and the screen or the sound can be controlled while viewing a source image.
Furthermore, even in a case of separately providing the display unit, a user must view the display unit at a distant place as a monitor becomes enlarged. Accordingly, it is difficult to set the items while viewing the display unit provided in the DVD playback device. In addition, similarly, even in the TV receiver or the VTR, it is possible to set the setting items of the TV receiver and the VTR while viewing the image display unit.
Recently, a TV receiver including a video display device and a recording medium playback device, such as a combination of a TV receiver and a VTR playback device and a combination of a TV receiver and a DVD playback device, has increased. This TV receiver need not be connected to various devices and can be installed in a minimum space.
For example, in a TV receiver including a DVD playback device, the state of selecting or controlling the setting items of the TV receiver (image quality such as brightness and contrast, channel setting, time setting, and so on) is OSD-displayed on an image display unit of the TV receiver using an OSD device included in a control unit of the TV receiver. Meanwhile, the state of selecting or controlling the setting items of the DVD playback device (the display of a chapter and a title, the switch of an aspect ratio of a screen, an angle, a stereo sound and a caption, and so on) is OSD-displayed on the image display unit of the TV receiver using a OSD device included in a decode device of the DVD playback device.
Generally, in a case of displaying a source image of satellite broadcasting, ground-based broadcasting, or a DVD on the TV receiver of the video display device, image quality may be frequently changed in accordance with the atmosphere of a place or the image of the respective source. In a case of performing the OSD display using the OSD device included in the TV receiver, a constant image quality is always maintained, regardless of the image quality of the source image. Meanwhile, in a case of performing the OSD display using the OSD device of the DVD playback device, the OSD signal output from the OSD device is transmitted to a signal control unit of the TV receiver as an image signal. Accordingly, the OSD display of the DVD playback device is performed with the image quality of the source image which was displayed just before the OSD display (see JP-A-11-146288, JP-A-2002-57959 and JP-A-2002-152621).

Video display device including video device


A rotor type open-end spinning unit has a collecting section collecting an opened and supplied fiber to make a fiber bundle. The fiber bundle is drawn through a yarn drawing passage to spin a yarn while twisting the fiber bundle. A rotatable outer rotor has an open end, a closed end and a peripheral wall. The peripheral wall has the collecting section on an inner surface thereof. The collecting section is located on a plane perpendicular to the rotational axis of the rotor. An inner rotor is located in the outer rotor and is driven independently. The inner rotor faces an end of the yarn drawing passage. A yarn path is provided with the inner rotor for guiding the fiber bundle from the collecting section to the yarn drawing passage. A first guide is provided with the inner rotor for contacting the fiber bundle guided to the yarn drawing passage through the yarn path from a frontward location with respect to the rotational direction of the inner rotor. A second guide is located frontward of the first guide and between the first guide and the inner surface of the outer rotor. The second guide guides the yarn toward the yarn drawing passage in cooperation with the first guide.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rotor type open-end spinning unit. More particularly, this invention relates to a spinning frame that has an outer rotor, which is provided with a collecting section for collecting opened fibers supplied, and an inner rotor, which is provided inside the outer rotor and is driven independently of the outer rotor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an ordinary rotor type open-end spinning frame, a supplied sliver is opened by a combing roller and foreign matter is expelled. The opened fibers are supplied into a rotor by an airstream produced in a fiber transport channel due to negative pressure in the rotor, that rotates at a high speed. The fibers are then collected at a fiber-collecting section at the largest inner diameter portion of the rotor. The collected fibers are drawn from a guide hole or a yarn drawing passage, provided in the center of a navel, by a draw roller, and is simultaneously twisted in accordance with the rotation of the rotor to form a yarn. The yarn is then wound around a bobbin as a package.
It is known that open-end spinning frames have a higher productivity than ring spinning frames. In general, however, a fabric woven with yarn produced by an open-end spinning frame (hereinafter called open-end yarn) has a poorer texture than a fabric woven with yarn produced by a ring spinning frame (hereinafter called ring yarn). When fibers flown into the twisting area are wound around yarn that is being formed, the appearance of the yarn is deteriorated. Further, the open-end yarn has a lower strength than the ring yarn.
The present inventor thought that the poor texture of the manufactured fabric could be the result of the difference in structure between the open-end yarn and the ring yarn. The conventional open-end yarn has a prominent rough surface as if formed by twisting a ribbon or a tape, whereas the ring yarn has a relatively smooth outer surface. This may be because, in the conventional open-end spinning frame, as shown in FIG. 26, a fiber bundle F to be drawn to the guide hole (not shown) from a fiber-collecting section 72 of a rotor 71 is drawn from a separation point P almost vertically to the inner wall of the rotor 71. Because the angle .theta. between the fiber bundle F (yarn Y) at the separation point P and the inner wall of the rotor 71, or the twisting angle .theta. with respect to the fiber bundle F, is substantially 90 degrees, the fiber bundle F is bent by nearly 90 degrees so that tension is always applied to the outer fiber at the bent portion of the fiber bundle F while the inner fiber become slack. As the fiber bundle F is twisted under this condition, yarn is formed with fibers with lower tension wound around higher-tension fibers located at the center. As a result, the produced yarn becomes wavy and prominently shows a rough outer surface.
As a solution to the shortcoming of the conventional open-end yarn, another apparatus is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 51-64034. This apparatus has a rotor having a fiber-collecting section or an outer rotor, and a draft rotor or an inner rotor, which is provided inside the outer rotor. This apparatus has a yarn drawing hole for drawing a fiber bundle collected at the collecting section and makes a differential rotation with respect to the outer rotor.
As shown in FIG. 27, this apparatus has an inner rotor 74 concentrically provided inside an outer rotor 73. The inner rotor 74 rotates slightly faster than the outer rotor 73 and the fiber bundle F is drawn through a yarn drawing hole 75 of the inner rotor 74. Accordingly, this apparatus spins out the fiber bundle F while drafting it. The aforementioned publication also discloses an apparatus that has a small disk 76, which is attached to the inner rotor 74 and revolves and rotates while being pressed against the fiber bundle F collected at the collecting section, as shown in FIG. 28(a). This apparatus spins out the fiber bundle F while drafting it with the floating of the fiber bundle F suppressed.
When the rotation speeds of both rotors 73 and 74 in the apparatus shown in FIG. 27 are relatively low, about 30,000 rpm, the fiber bundle F separated from the collecting section can be spun out along a gentle curve from the separation point P to the yarn drawing hole 75 as indicated by the solid line in FIG. 27. When the rotational speeds of the rotors become as fast as about 90,000 rpm, however, the fiber bundle F moving toward the yarn drawing hole 75 from the collecting section is stretched straight to very near the collecting section by the increased centrifugal force as indicated by the chain line. Consequently, the twisting angle becomes approximately 90 degrees, raising the above-discussed problem of the conventional open-end spinning frame having no inner rotor 74.
In the apparatus with the small disk 76 as shown in FIG. 28(a), it is possible to set the separation point P at a position immediately downstream of the position where the small disk 76 presses the fiber bundle F against the collecting section as shown in FIG. 28(a) by increasing the yarn drawing speed (winding speed) to increase the draft ratio when the rotational speed of the rotor becomes high. However, if the draft ratio is increased, the pressure by which the fiber bundle F contacts a point D of the end portion of the yarn drawing hole 75 raises so that twisting is hardly transmitted upstream from the point D, as shown in FIG. 28(b). This prevents the fibers collected at the collecting section from being drawn out. When the twisting force is increased to transmit twisting to the separation point P, bridge fibers Fb are produced between the inlet of the yarn drawing hole 75 and the point P and are wound around the fiber bundle F in a coil form. This yields so-called neck-wound fibers, which deteriorate the appearance of the yarn. This yarn reduces the texture quality of a fabric that is produced with the yarn.
When the pressure at which the small disk 76 contacts the outer rotor 73 is large, the inner rotor 74 causes the outer rotor 73 to rotate, making it difficult to rotate the inner rotor 74 and the outer rotor 73 with a predetermined speed difference. As the small disk 76 rotates while being in contact with the outer rotor 73, the small disk 76 or the outer rotor 73 is likely to wear.

Rotor type open-end spinning unit having outer and inner rotors

Kabushiki Kaisha Toyoda Jidoshokki Seisakusho


The present invention is relates to a method for purifying a .gamma.-carboxylase from Conus snails and to a method for assaying the activity of this .gamma.-glutamyl carboxylase.

The present invention is relates to a method for purifying a .gamma.-glutamyl carboxylase (also referred to herein as .gamma.-carboxylase) from Conus snails and to a method for assaying the activity of this .gamma.-carboxylase.
The publications and other materials used herein to illuminate the background of the invention, and in particular, cases to provide additional details respecting the practice, are incorporated by reference, and for convenience are referenced in the following text by number and are listed numerically in the appended List of References.
The vitamin K-dependent .gamma.-carboxylation of glutamate residues was originally discovered as a novel post-translational modification in the blood coagulation cascade (1); some of the key clotting factors such as prothrombin must be .gamma.-carboxylated in order for proper blood clotting to occur. Somewhat later, this post-translational modification was also found in certain bone proteins (2). This modification was restricted to these rather specialized mammalian systems until a very unusual peptide, conantokin-G, was described from the venom of the predatory marine snail, Conus geographus (3). Conantokin-G is a 17-amino acid peptide that inhibits the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (4). Unlike most Conus peptides, which are multiply disulfide-bonded, conantokin-G has no disulfide cross-links but has five residues of .gamma.-carboxyglutamate residues; this remains the highest density of .gamma.-carboxyglutamate found in any functional gene product characterized to date.
Most of the biologically active components of the Conus venom are multiply disulfide bonded peptides (the conotoxins). These have been shown to be initially translated as prepropeptide precursors, which are then post-translationally processed to yield the mature disulfide-crosslinked conotoxin. Conantokin-G differs strikingly from most conotoxins not only in having .gamma.-carboxyglutamate residues, but also because it has no disulfide crosslinks. We report below an analysis of a cDNA clone encoding the conantokin-G precursor. Furthermore, we establish the probable function of one region of the precursor that is excised during the maturation of the functional conantokin-G peptide.
The presence of .gamma.-carboxyglutamate in a non-mammalian system was initially controversial because vitamin K-dependent carboxylation of glutamate residues had primarily been thought to be a highly specialized mammalian innovation. However, we have found that conantokin-G is only one member of a family of peptides; a variety of other conantokins have been found including conantokin-T and conantokin-R from two other fish-hunting cone snails (5, 6). All three peptides have a high content of .gamma.-carboxyglutamate (4-5 residues). .gamma.-Glutamyl carboxylase has been purified from mammalian sources (7, 8) and has been expressed both in mammalian and insect cell lines (9, 10). Recently it was shown that, as is the case in the mammalian system, the carboxylation reaction in Conus venom ducts absolutely requires vitamin K, and the net carboxylation increases greatly in the presence of high concentrations of ammonium sulfate. In these respects, the mammalian and the Conus .gamma.-carboxylation venom systems are very similar (11).
The propeptides of vitamin K-dependent blood coagulation proteins share extensive sequence similarity. This sequence is believed to interact with the carboxylase and constitutes the .gamma.-carboxylation recognition sequence (.gamma.-CRS). In this report, we analyze the conantokin-G precursor sequence for potential .gamma.-CRS sequences. The results described below identify a sequence present in the -1 to -20 region of the conantokin-G prepropeptide which, when covalently linked to the N-terminal of the substrate enzyme, stimulates carboxylation by the Conus enzyme.

Methods for purifying and assaying a conus .gamma.-carboxylase


The specification discloses a method for constructing an improved cutter cone (12) for a food processing machine (10). A plurality of elongated slits (32) are cut axially along the surface of the frustroconical surface (40). A selected edge of each of the slits (32) is bent internally of the conical surface (40) at a predetermined angle to the cone to form a louvered surface (42). The inside of each louvered surface (42) is ground by means of an emery wheel to form a cutting edge (36). Each louvered surfaces (42) is then bent outwardly of the conical surface (40) at a predetermined angle to form a series of working surfaces each having an interiorly beveled cutting edge (36). The exterior of the working surfaces (34) is then polished by means of a buffing wheel to eliminate burrs.

In certain food processing machines for domestic use, the food to be cut or chopped is placed into a hopper where it comes into contact with a rotating cutting cone driven by a crank. The cutter cones used in such devices are typically of frustroconical shape having a series of elongated slits cut axially along the surface thereof with one edge of each slit sharpened and bent outwardly of the surface for slicing or cutting food in the hopper. In the conventional method for constructing these cones, the edge of each slit which will come into contact with the food as the cone is rotated is bent outwardly of the conical surface to form a working surface and the exterior side of the working surface is beveled to a cutting edge. Burrs formed on the inside of the working surface during the grinding step are then removed and the cutting edges are polished.
When contrasted with cones constructed in accordance with the present invention, cutter cones of this construction are somewhat inefficient in the processing of food because the working surface beveled from the outside of the working surface to form a cutting edge has a tendency to push food away as it comes into contact. Moreover, a disadvantage of constructing such cones by the conventional process compared with the process of this invention is that when the exterior of the working surface is ground to form the cutting edge, burrs will be formed on the inside of the working surface between the cutting edge and the conical surface. Since there is very little clearance between the working surface and conical surface, it is difficult to remove these burrs and hand machining may be required, which increases the labor and cost of the process.

Method for fabricating improved cutter cones for a food processing machine


A process for supporting the roof of a mine shaft includes drilling a hole into the roof and then inserting a multi-stranded cable into the hole. The cable has a duct therein to allow the exit of air during its insertion. During the insertion, the cable is rotated and a bonding agent is introduced into the annulus between it and the surface of the hole.

The development of mine roof supporting systems has progressed from the use of wooden braces to roof bolting systems with elongate tensioned steel bolts and, more recently, to the grouting of bore holes.
As a seam of coal or ore is removed in the course of mining, the static vertical and horizontal pressures previously exerted by that seam no longer are available to maintain equilibrium within the surrounding strata. As a consequence, there occurs a slight heaving upward of the floor, an inward bulging at the sides and a drooping of the roof of the shaft. This vertical and horizontal displacement of the roof, sidewalls and floor occurs rapidly until a semi-static equilibrium is reached. However, a slow creep often will continue until the floor or a sidewall collapses.
Traditionally, roof bolting has been carried out by drilling a series of holes into a mine wall or roof strata, following which a steel anchor bolt with an expandable anchor on the upper end is inserted into each bore. A bearing plate is mounted on the lower end of the bolt to abut against the roof or wall surface. Next, the bolt is tightened both to lock the upper anchor and to tension the bolt, thus compressing the strata.
Recent theories describing roof collapse assert that a mere compression of the roof strata may not be adequate. The inadequacy stems from the side-slipping within the strata which may totally negate the support supplied by tensioned bolts. Such side-slipping can shift the direction of overburden pressures to negate the supportive effect of tensioned roof bolts. Thus, investigators have proposed that side-slipping of the overburden can be avoided by completely filling each roof bore with a dowel. As a consequence, as the stratum begins to shift, the incipient motion immediately will be opposed by the dowel surface. By comparison, conventional steel roof bolts are much slimmer than the roof bores in which they are inserted and strata slippage is permitted beyond a critical point leading to failure.
In the average underground coal mine, the seam of coal being excavated is about thirty inches in height. Thus, machines and apparatus used within such mines must be designed to operate under ceilings of that height. Accordingly, the current practice for inserting roof bolts is to flex the steel bolt through an angle of about 90.degree. before it is inserted within a roof bore. Generally, a thirty inch length of the bolt initially is inserted; then the bolt is straightened to the extent possible; the straightened part is inserted next; and this sequence continues until the bolt is completely inserted and the bearing plate and bolt head are in operable position.


A co-processor is configured for performing vector matrix multiplication (VMM) to solve computational problems such as partial differential equations (PDEs). An analog Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) can be implemented by invoking VMM of input signals with Fourier basis functions using analog crossbar arrays. Linear and non-linear PDEs can be solved by implementing spectral PDE solution methods as an alternative to massively discretized finite difference methods, while exploiting inherent parallelism realized through the crossbar arrays. The analog crossbar array can be implemented in CMOS and memristors or a hybrid solution including a combination of CMOS and memristors.

A memristor is a device that behaves as an electrical resistance switch that can retain a state of internal resistance based on history of applied voltage and current. The memristor can store and process information, and offers several performance characteristics that exceed that of conventional integrated circuit technology. An important class of memristive device is a two-terminal resistance switch based on ionic motion, which is built from a simple conductor-insulator-conductor thin-film stack. For large scale applications, the memristor device can be used in the form of crossbar array.


In a thermoplastic-photoconductor holographic recording medium in the form of several transparent layers over a transparent substrate, such as an optically transparent electrically conductive layer, then a photoconductor layer and a thermoplastic layer over such as glass or Mylar, a conventional material such as gold or platinum has been used as a transparent conductive layer. It is desired to use a less precious metal such as nickel-chromium (NiCr) as the conductive layer, however a limitation has been found in that an unwanted dark charge injection occurs from the NiCr to the photoconductive layer. This causes poor charge acceptance and therefore results in poor halogram formation. Herein a mono atom thick layer of the NiCr is treated and becomes on oxide layer which forms an effective charge blocking layer to dark charge injection.

Thermoplastic-photoconductor holographic recording medium has generally been in the form of several transparent layers over a transparent substrate. Thus a substrate such as nesa glass or a flexible substrate such as Mylar is first coated thereon an optically transparent electrically conductive layer, then a photoconductor layer, and finally a thermoplastic layer.
In prior U.S. Pat. No. 4,131,462, assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, an optically transparent electrically conductive layer is described as a thin film of metal such as gold or indium-tin oxide, the photoconductive layer is described as polyvinyl carbazole (PVK) doped with trinitrofluorenone (TNF) and the top layer is described as a thermoplastic such as resin or synthetic polymers. The transparent conductor layer beneath the thermoplastic-photoconductor medium can also be a number of other materials such as platinum, aluminum, and nickel-chromium (NiCr). NiCr used as the conductor layer has advantages both of low cost and of low reflectivity at the PVK-NiCr interface. This low reflectivity of the NiCr is beneficial to hologram recording and the lower cost is attractive. NiCr presents problems, however, in that when electrostatic charges are applied across the capacitor formed by the free surface and the NiCr electrode, electrons tend to be injected into the PVK causing poor charge acceptance and therefore resulting in poor or no hologram formation. Ideally, the interface between the photoconductor layer and the conductive layer should be a perfect blocking contact (no dark charge injection from NiCr into the photoconductive layer) so that a desirable field ratio (close to 1) between the photoconductor and thermoplastic layers can be maintained. Thus, the charge contrast created during exposure can be retained, resulting in high diffraction efficiency holograms. In reality, however, the NiCr conductive layer departs from the desirable characteristics in that there tends to be an injection of charge into the photoconductive layer. Measurements show the photoconductor layer loses the electric field as the device is charging which results in loss of the field and in loss of charge contrast during and after it is exposed. Thus, the resulting diffraction efficiency of the hologram is weak or none at all. That is to say the NiCr-PVK interface forms a poor blocking contact. This is a problem which does not exist when the more expensive gold is used as the conduction layer.
The present invention is directed to treating the NiCr surface with chemically active species of oxygen such as free radical oxygen, ionized oxygen or atomic state oxygen. This can be carried out in an oxygen plasma environment, for example. In so treating the NiCr surface a mono atom thick layer of the surface of NiCr becomes an oxide layer which is an effective charge blocking layer. After the treatment, the thermoplastic-photoconductor device shows improved performance in terms of cycle-to-cycle repeatability and diffraction efficiency. The problem of charge leakage at the PVK-electrode interface is not unique to NiCr. It occurs also to a lesser extent with indium-tin oxide and it can be corrected by the same technique.


Probe-based query processing for a database system that loosely integrates a structured database and a text retrieval system is described. The query processing constructs a query plan that efficiently evaluates a conjunctive query having joins of structured and textual data by sending to the text retrieval system one or more text search/retrieve operations.

1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to database systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for optimizing queries accessing both structured data and text data.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a growing number of text information sources available today. These text information sources range from traditional library information systems such as Library of Congress LOCIS and Stanford University FOLIO, to on-line services such as Dialog, and eventually to comprehensive digital libraries. Many applications and end users need to combine the retrieval of text information from these sources with structured data retrieved from other database systems. For example, a hospital information system may permit physicians to access a patient's medical record, progress notes, medical literature and drug formularies which are stored in one or more database systems.
Although structured database systems provide powerful query languages for querying structured data, such database systems are not well suited for storing or querying text information. For example, Structured-Query-Language (SQL) provides only rather primitive string matching operations. Text retrieval systems, on the other hand, use indexing techniques and processing algorithms that are specialized for querying text information, but have limited query languages. In particular, text retrieval systems do not support join-like operations for combining data from multiple sources.
Extensible database systems are known to provide "tight" integration of structured data and text. See e.g., M. Carey and L. Haas, "Extensible Database Management Systems," ACM SIGMOD Record, December 1990. These systems provide hooks in the data model, query language, and implementation architecture that allow new data types (e.g., text, maps, images) to be added.
However, it is important to distinguish between "tight" and "loose" integration. Tight integration assumes that the new data types are to be stored and processed within the database system, i.e., that the access methods and evaluation methods are visible to the query processor (and may in fact be modified to match the query processing strategies). See e.g., Bertino et al., "Query Processing in a Multimedia Document System," ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 6(1), 1988; W. Lee and D. Woelk, "Integration of Text Search with Orion," IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 13(1), 1990; and C. A. Lynch and M. Stonebraker, "Extended User-defined Indexing with Application to Textual Databases," VLDB, 1988. This previous work on tight integration considered query processing and optimization for queries on only textual data. On the other hand, loose integration assumes that the new data types are to be managed by external data managers. Once these specialized data managers have been registered with the database system, queries can include operations (sometimes called "foreign functions") over the new data types and operations that span multiple data types. Since the problem overcome by the invention relates to accessing external data sources, loose integration of a database system with external text sources is the only option available.
There has also been previous work on general frameworks for extensible query optimization. See e.g., H. Pirahesh et al., "Extensible/Rule Based Query Optimization in Starburst," SIGMOD, 1992; S. Chaudhuri and K Shim, "Query Optimizing in the Presence of Foreign Functions," VLDB, 1994; A. Kemper et al., "A Blackboard Architecture for Query Optimization in Object Bases," VLDB, 1993; and G. Mitchell et al. "Control of an Extensible Query Optimizer," VLDB, 1993. These previous works do not concern the problem of query processing for operations that span different data types or the impact of these methods on query optimization.
Further, query processing and optimization in the presence of foreign functions was examined in LDL (D. Chimenti et al., "Towards an Open Architecture for LDL," VLDB, 1989) and Papyrus (T. Connors et al., "The Papyrus Integrated Data Server," Proceedings of the First international Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Miami Beach, Fla., Dec. 1991). However, in these works, the only join method used was tuple substitution and its variants. Tuple substitution corresponds to a nested loop join, with the relation as the outer operand and the document set as the inner. However, since it involves repeated invocations of the external data manager, in many cases tuple substitution will be prohibitively expensive.
There is recent work on optimizing queries over structured documents. See e.g., S. Abiteboul et al., "Querying and Updating the File," VLDB, 1993; V. Christophides, "From Structured Documents to Novel Query Facilities," SIGMOD, 1994; and M. P. Consens and T. Milo, "Optimizing Queries on Files," SIGMOD, 1994. The focus of this work was to reduce the amount of data retrieved from the text system for queries with complex selection conditions. This work did not address or provide a solution to the problem of integration between a database system and a text retrieval system.
Thus, there is need to loosely integrate the capabilities of both structured database systems and text retrieval systems to support uniform ad hoc queries over structured data and text.

Method and apparatus for processing and optimizing queries having joins between structured data and text data


Embodiments of the inventions relate to granular management of data storage blocks in a data storage system. In one aspect, status values are employed to track “used”, “free”, and “claimed free” storage blocks. A storage block having stored data is identified as used, a storage block available to store data is identified as free, and a storage block having previously stored data removed that has not been reclaimed is identified as claimed free. These values are maintained on a map to track each data block within the data storage system. Available claimed free data blocks are prioritized for data block allocation over available free data blocks for efficient storage, including enabling efficient reclamation of data blocks and minimizing data movement needed for reclamation-oriented de-fragmentation.

This invention is related to efficient management of data storage blocks of thin-provisioned storage that uses virtualization technology to give the appearance of having more storage space than is actually available. More specifically, status values are employed to facilitate granular management of the data storage blocks, including both allocation and reclamation of data storage blocks to achieve higher efficiency when using thin-provisioned storage.
In data management, a data storage block is a group of storage bytes on a storage device that are manipulated as units. The size of a storage block is typically 512 bytes, although the size can vary. Storage is typically assigned as logical disks (or volumes). Each logical disk has a size. Blocks within a logical disk are accessed through a logical block address (LBA) within the containing logical disk. Traditional storage devices pre-allocate physical space to a logical disk for all of its blocks. This can be wasteful because the application using this logical disk may not actually write data to many or even most of the blocks within the logical disk, or does so only after a long period of time. To address this inefficiency, thin-provisioning storage devices allocate a storage block only when data is written to its corresponding logical block address. Such allocation is usually done in a larger unit, e.g. greater than a data block, known as partition, although other terms may be used by different storage products, whose size can vary from hundreds of kilobytes to gigabytes of storage space. The physical space of all blocks of a partition is allocated when any block within the partition is written.
Once a partition on the storage controller is allocated physical space, the allocated space remains allocated until the data storage system informs the storage controller that all the blocks within the partition can be reclaimed. State-of-the-art data storage systems do not identify free blocks that already have claimed space. Free data blocks that contain claimed space are indistinguishable from free data blocks that contain no claimed space according to the storage controller. Free blocks with claimed space can remain unused while other free data blocks without claimed space become used, causing extra physical storage to be allocated.

Efficient allocation and reclamation of thin-provisioned storage

International Business Machines Corporation


A golf club head of which the face height is larger than the sole width, a so-called "iron" club, having at least the striking face made of a copper or copper alloy or plated with a copper.

The present invention relates to a novel and improved golf club head of which the face height is larger than the sole width, namely a so-called "iron" club head.
The heads of the conventional golf clubs of this type are made of a material such as stainless steel, iron, synthetic resin or the like, and the striking faces of the club heads are also made of a material such as stainless steel, titanium, iron, carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP), aluminum or the like.
The conventional golf club heads have not created so much back spin on the ball and so it was difficult with the conventional club head to stop the ball dead, roll it back a short way or check the ball from running on too far when the ball landed on the ground. As shown in FIG. 4, for example, the turning speed of the ball to which a back spin was imparted when the ball was struck by an average golfer A with a No. 9 iron club head made of a soft iron by forging, was 3,800 rpm, and 5,200 rpm by another average golfer B and a professional golfer C.


A semiconductor device with a semiconductor-on-insulator (SOI) structure is provided including an insulating layer and a semiconductor layer formed on the insulating layer and a fuse. The fuse includes a first at least partially silicided raised semiconductor region with a first silicided portion and, adjacent to the first at least partially silicided raised semiconductor region, a second at least partially silicided raised semiconductor region with a second silicided portion. The second silicided portion is formed in direct physical contact with the first silicided portion.

1. Field of the Invention
Generally, the present disclosure relates to the field of manufacturing of integrated circuits and semiconductor devices, and, more particularly, to electrically programmable fuses, for example, in SOI configurations.
2. Description of the Related Art
The fabrication of advanced integrated circuits, such as CPUs, storage devices, ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) and the like, requires the formation of a large number of circuit elements on a given chip area according to a specified circuit layout. In a wide variety of electronic circuits, field effect transistors represent one important type of circuit element that substantially determines performance of the integrated circuits. Generally, a plurality of process technologies are currently practiced for forming field effect transistors, wherein, for many types of complex circuitry, MOS technology is currently one of the most promising approaches due to the superior characteristics in view of operating speed and/or power consumption and/or cost efficiency. During the fabrication of complex integrated circuits using, for instance, MOS technology, millions of transistors, e.g., N-channel transistors and/or P-channel transistors, are formed on a substrate including a crystalline semiconductor layer. Miniaturization and increase of circuit densities represent ongoing demands.
In order to improve the product yield, a technique has been developed of "trimming" or electrically excluding circuit blocks which are no longer operable. This technique, particularly used during manufacturing of memory arrays, relies on redundant circuit blocks which can be incorporated into the main integrated circuit and activated once a defective circuit portion has been detected. On the other hand, the defective circuit block may be trimmed or electrically removed by blowing a fuse or a group of fuses which can electrically disconnect the defective block from the main circuit when in the open configuration. Reprogramming of an integrated circuit is thus rendered possible in a dynamic manner, even after the chip has been manufactured.
Electronic fuses (e-fuses; the terms "fuse" and "e-fuse" are used as interchangeable terms herein) may be used in complex integrated circuits as important mechanisms to allow adapting the performance of certain circuit portions to comply with performance of other circuit portions, for instance after completing the manufacturing process and/or during use of the semiconductor device, for instance when certain critical circuit portions may no longer comply with corresponding performance criteria, thereby requiring an adaptation of certain circuit portions, such as re-adjusting an internal voltage supply, thereby re-adjusting overall circuit speed and the like.
Electronic fuses provided in the semiconductor devices represent electronic switches that may be activated once in order to provide a desired circuit adaptation. Hence, the electronic fuses may be considered as having a high impedance state, which typically represents a programmed state, and having a low impedance state, typically representing a non-programmed state of the electronic fuse. Since these electronic fuses may have a significant influence on the overall behavior of the entire integrated circuit, a reliable detection of the non-programmed and the programmed state has to be guaranteed, which is accomplished on the basis of appropriately designed logic circuitry. Furthermore, since typically these electronic fuses may be actuated only once over the lifetime of the semiconductor device under consideration, a corresponding programming activity has to ensure that a desired programmed state of the electronic fuse is reliably generated in order to provide well-defined conditions for the further operational lifetime of the device.
The programming of an e-fuse typically involves the application of a voltage pulse, which in turn induces a current pulse of sufficient current density in order to cause a permanent modification of a specific portion of the fuse. Thus, the electronic behavior of the fuse and the corresponding conductors for supplying the current and voltage to the fuse have to be precisely defined to obtain a reliable programmed state of the fuse. For this purpose, polysilicon is conventionally used for the fuse bodies, for instance in combination with a metal silicide, in which electromigration effects, in combination with other effects, caused by the current pulse, such as a significant heat generation, may then result in a permanent line degradation, thereby generating a high-Ohmic state of the fuse body.
The cross-section of a conventionally formed e-fuse 100 is shown in FIG. 1. The e-fuse 100 is formed on an isolation region 112 formed in a substrate (not shown). The substrate may be any appropriate carrier for a semiconductor integrated device. The isolation region 112 may, for example, have been formed by means of shallow trench isolation (STI). The e-fuse 100 includes a metal layer 124 formed above the surface of the isolation region 112. The material or material mixture constituting the layer 124 is typically the same as a material or material mixture used for a gate metal layer in devices fabricated using high-k/metal-gate (HKMG) technology. Although not shown in FIG. 1, a high-k dielectric layer may be interposed between the metal layer 124 and the surface of the isolation region 112.
A semiconductor layer 144 is then formed on the metal layer 124. The semiconductor layer 144 is preferably the same material used for forming the gate material layer on the gate metal layer. Thus, the semiconductor layer 144 is usually comprised of polysilicon. A metal silicide layer 164, typically nickel silicide, is finally formed on the surface of the semiconductor layer 144. The metal silicide layer 164 is conveniently formed during the same silicidation process used for forming electrical contacts to the electrodes (gate, source and drain) of a FET. The metal silicide layer 164 includes a first electrode 164a and a second electrode 164c arranged at opposite ends of the layer 164. The first electrode 164a and the second electrode 164c could, for example, be the anode and the cathode of the e-fuse 100. Contact terminals 174a and 174b are then formed so as to provide an electrical connection to the first electrode 164a and the second electrode 164c, respectively. The contact terminals 174a and 174b are typically comprised of a metal with a high electrical conductivity. When the e-fuse 100 is un-programmed, the metal silicide layer 164 is continuous and provides an electrical connection between the first electrode 164a and the second electrode 164c, thus presenting a low electrical resistance between terminals 174a and 174b.
The e-fuse 100 may then be programmed by applying a predetermined electrical bias between terminals 174a and 174b, thereby inducing a current to flow across the e-fuse 100. Since the resistivity of the semiconductor layer 144 is much greater than that of the silicide layer 164, almost all current flows through the silicide layer 164. If the current intensity exceeds a predetermined threshold, electromigration occurs in the silicide layer 164, resulting in transport of the metal silicide material constituting the layer 164 towards the anode. After a sufficient amount of material has been transferred to one of the two electrodes 164a and 164c representing the anode, the e-fuse 100 switches to the programmed state when a gap (not shown) is formed in the metal silicide layer 164, thereby resulting in an open circuit between the two terminals 174a and 174b. The electrical resistance of the programmed e-fuse 100 thus rises by several orders of magnitude with respect to the resistance in the un-programmed state.
However, in the course of aggressive downscaling, for example, in the context of sub 28 nm or even sub 22 nm Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) Circuits CMOS technologies, the conventional manufacture of e-fuses as the one shown in FIG. 1 proves to be very complicated and bears the risk of severe failures, for example, caused by insufficient electrical isolation between the HKMG and the silicided layer. Moreover, conventionally formed e-fuses have a demand for relatively large areas and e-fuses realized in back end-of-line (BEoL) stacks typically suffer from the need for relatively high currents for blowing the fuses. Fuses located in silicon layers of non-SOI device portions of a semiconductor substrate show bad thermal isolation due to the relatively high thermal conductivity of silicon.
In view of the situation described above, the present disclosure provides a new kind of e-fuse and techniques for the formation of the same that overcome the above-mentioned problems and provide for reliable operation at relatively low programming currents and with good thermal isolation.


An intermittent wiper cleaning system for removing debris from the surface of a wiper of a windshield or the like formed as a clearing field including at least two rows of projections or depressions formed either in a base member or in the windshield. According to one embodiment, the projections and depressions are provided with full radius rounded ends. According to another embodiment the projections and/or the base member embody micro encapsulated concentrate to better clean the wiper and windshield. In any case the spacing is such that the projections or depressions of one row are arranged to be parallel to the projections or depressions of an adjacent row.

1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the improvement of the performance of wipers on windshields and other such surfaces.
2. Prior Art
Maintaining good visibility is essential for safety when operating a vehicle such as a motor vehicle, in an inclement environment, (rain, snow and the like). The prior art is replete with unrewarded efforts to clean or restore wipers on windshields to improve visibility without creating other problems.
For example, German Pat. 1911911 issued to Neubauer abrades to restore wiper blades by teaching and showing rough surfaces and saw-tooth like profile lips for the retention of grinding media.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,974,340 and 4,685,168 issued to Kopezynski and Mastromoro, respectively share in common a thick rectangular strip, to which construction Kopezynski applied a single row of parallel ribs, while Mastromoro's strip remained blank. Another U.S. Pat. No. 3,908,222 issued to Scott comprises a single row of individual, points oriented diamond shapes.
In addition, in the presence of moisture, the natural environment for wipers, undue wear to the wipers is accelerated by points that pick (tear) and roughness that abrades (cuts).
Until now, those skilled in the art considered the problem solved by the present invention as insoluble. Perserverance has led to the systems of U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,934,013 and 5,007,130, as well as the improvement represented by the present invention, all of which solve a long felt, long existing, but unsolved need.


To specify a failure location in a semiconductor integrated circuit chip in operation, an emission image of a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip and an emission image of a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis are detected and compared with each other to analyze a failure. As a test pattern generated by a function tester is supplied to good and defective semiconductor integrated circuit chips, hot electrons are emitted from where the operational semiconductor integrated circuit chip fails and are detected as an emission image by an emission analyzer. Then, an image processing unit performs image processing to subtract an emission image corresponding to the defective semiconductor integrated circuit chip from an emission image corresponding to a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip to extract the emission image of the failure location, which is displayed on a monitor.

This application is based upon and claims the benefit of priority from the prior Japanese Patent Applications No. 11-320007, filed Nov. 10, 1999; and No. 2000-164692, filed Jun. 1, 2000, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
The present invention relates to a failure analyzing apparatus and a failure analyzing method for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which specify or localize the location of a failure (hereinafter referred to as xe2x80x9cfailure locationxe2x80x9d) by using an emission image formed by hot electrons that are emitted from the surface of a semiconductor integrated circuit chip.
Due to the recent ever-improving scale and integration density of very large scale semiconductor integrated circuits (VLSIs), it has become significantly important to develop the technique of specifying failure locations and shorten the analyzing time.
The typical analysis on the function failure of a VLSI is a failure location specifying scheme which uses a simulator and electron beam (EB) tester.
This conventional scheme using a simulator and EB tester establishes a link to a CAD (Computer Aided Design) unit, generates a failure dictionary and narrows down probe points based on the results of the actual simulation analysis and failure simulation results, and then performs failure analysis by actually using a simulator and EB tester. The conventional scheme therefore requires a significant amount of pre-analysis processing, which is likely to increase the time needed to specify a failure location.
There is a standby EMS (Emission Micro Scope) scheme which holds a device, such as a semiconductor integrated circuit chip, in a standby state or a stable operational state, integrates hot electrons that are generated from a failure location to acquire an emission image, and specifies the failure location based on the emission image.
This scheme cannot however accomplish EMS analysis on dynamic type products which are not easily held at a stable operational state and analog-mixed products that have a circuit in which a through current always flows.
In short, the conventional failure analyzing apparatus and method that use a simulator and EB tester undesirably requires a long time for specifying a failure location. Further, the conventional failure analyzing apparatus and method that employ the standby EMS scheme cannot perform failure analysis on dynamic type products and analog-mixed products.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a failure analyzing apparatus and failure analyzing method for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which can shorten the time needed to specify a failure location and can perform failure analysis on dynamic type products and analog-mixed products.
It is another object of this invention to provide a failure analyzing apparatus for a semiconductor integrated circuit which can specify a real failure location.
To achieve the above objects, according to one aspect of this invention, there is provided a failure analyzing apparatus for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which comprises a test signal generating section for generating test signals for operating a semiconductor integrated circuit chip; an emission image detecting section for detecting an emission image formed by hot electrons emitted from a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip and an emission image formed by hot electrons emitted from a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis, both chips being operable upon reception of the test signal; and an image processing section, connected to the emission image detecting section, for specifying a failure location in the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip based on both emission images detected by the emission image detecting section.
According to another aspect of this invention, there is provided a failure analyzing method for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which comprises the steps of operating a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip and a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis by supplying test signals to the good semiconductor integrated circuit chip and the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip from a testing device; detecting an emission image formed by hot electrons emitted from the good semiconductor integrated circuit chip and an emission image formed by hot electrons emitted from the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip by using an emission analyzer; and specifying a failure location in the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip by performing image processing on both emission images detected.
According to a further aspect of this invention, there is provided a failure analyzing apparatus for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which comprises a function tester for generating test signals and supplying the test signals to a semiconductor integrated circuit chip to execute a function test thereof; an emission analyzer for detecting an emission image formed by hot electrons emitted from the semiconductor integrated circuit chip when the function test is performed by the function tester; an image processing device, connected to the emission analyzer, for specifying a failure location in a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis, based on an emission image of a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip detected by the emission analyzer and an emission image of the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip; and a display device, connected to the image processing device, for displaying the failure location specified by the image processing device.
According to a still further aspect of this invention, there is provided a failure analyzing apparatus for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which comprises a function tester for generating supply voltages and test signals and supplying the supply voltages and the test signals to a semiconductor integrated circuit chip to execute a function test thereof; an emission analyzer for detecting an emission image by integrating hot electrons emitted from the semiconductor integrated circuit chip when the function test is performed by the function tester, an integration time for the hot electrons being variable; an image processing device, connected to the emission analyzer, for specifying a failure location in a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis, based on an emission image of a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip detected by the emission analyzer and an emission image of the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip; a display device, connected to the image processing device, for displaying the failure location specified by the image processing device; and a condition providing device for altering an operational condition by variously changing at least a value of the supply voltages generated by the function tester and/or the integration time for hot electrons in the emission analyzer, causing the function tester to operate the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip in each alteration to check a number of occurrences of false emission caused by emission images detected by the emission analyzer, and acquiring that operational condition under which the number of occurrences of false emission becomes equal to or smaller than a predetermined value, whereby an operation of the function tester and/or an operation of the emission analyzer is controlled based on the operational condition acquired by the condition providing device.
According to a yet still further aspect of this invention, there is provided a failure analyzing apparatus for a semiconductor integrated circuit, which comprises a function tester for generating supply voltages and test signals and supplying the supply voltages and the test signals to a semiconductor integrated circuit chip to execute a function test thereof; an emission analyzer for detecting an emission image by integrating hot electrons emitted from the semiconductor integrated circuit chip when the function test is performed by the function tester, an integration time for the hot electrons being variable; an image processing device, connected to the emission analyzer, for specifying a failure location in a target semiconductor integrated circuit chip to be subjected to failure analysis, based on an emission image of a good semiconductor integrated circuit chip detected by the emission analyzer and an emission image of the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip, and outputting coordinate data of the failure location; a display device, connected to the image processing device, for displaying the failure location specified by the image processing device; a condition providing device for altering an operational condition by variously changing at least a value of the supply voltage generated by the function tester and/or the integration time for hot electrons in the emission analyzer, causing the function tester to operate the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip in each alteration to check a number of occurrences of false emission caused by emission images detected by the emission analyzer, and acquiring that operational condition under which the number of occurrences of false emission becomes equal to or smaller than a predetermined value, whereby an operation of the function tester and/or an operation of the emission analyzer is controlled based on the operational condition acquired by the condition providing device; a navigation device, connected to the image processing device, for storing net data and coordinate data of the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip and generating node data and coordinate data which are associated with a node of a preceding circuit of a node corresponding to the coordinate data output from the image processing device; a potential measuring device, connected to the navigation device, for measuring a potential of a surface of the semiconductor integrated circuit at a position corresponding to the coordinate data generated by the navigation device; a potential comparing device, connected to the potential measuring device and the navigation device, for storing expected value data of potentials at all nodes of the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip and comparing the potential measured by the potential measuring device with an expected value of a node corresponding to the node data provided by the navigation device; and a coordinate data outputting device, connected to the potential comparing device, for outputting coordinate data of the node corresponding to the node data provided by the navigation device to the display device as coordinate data corresponding to a failure location in the target semiconductor integrated circuit chip when the potential measured by the potential measuring device does not match with the expected value of the node corresponding to the node data provided by the navigation device.
Additional objects and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be obvious from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out hereinafter.

Failure analyzing apparatus and failure analyzing method for semiconductor integrated circuit


Circuit arrangement for calculating matrix operations, such as those which recur frequently in signal processing, specifically in conjunction with neural networks, having a systolic array of multipliers and adders, downstream from which a recursive accumulator is connected. In addition to products, sums and differences of matrices, this circuit arrangement also allows squares, absolute magnitudes of sums and differences and squares of sums and differences of two matrices to be calculated very efficiently. Furthermore, with the aid of the recursive accumulator, it is possible to transpose matrices, to calculate row sums and column sums, and to search for minimum or maximum matrix elements.

The invention relates to a circuit arrangement for calculating matrix operations which recur frequently, such as those in signal processing, especially in the context of neural networks. Since the computation operations which are required for calculating neural networks can be reduced to a comprehensible number of elementary matrix operations, it is sensible from the point of view of the necessary high computation speed in the execution of these operations to implement such computation operations in hardware, rather than to carry them out with the aid of software.
A prior art which is closest to the invention is reproduced in the publication by U. Ramacher, "Design of a first Generation Neurocomputer", VLSI Design of Neural Networks, edited by U. Ramacher, U. Ruckert, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Nov. 1990. This publication describes a circuit arrangement which is constructed from a systolic arrangement of multipliers and adders. This systolic arrangement makes it possible to calculate matrix products, the matrices which are to be multiplied being split into blocks of size 4.times.4, and it being possible to multiply submatrices of this size with the aid of the systolic arrangement in each case. The computation operations which can be carried out using this circuit arrangement are suitable for the calculation of specific neural network types, for example multilayer perceptron networks with feedback.
The disadvantages of this circuit arrangement, as it is described in the publication by U. Ramacher 1990, are primarily that:
the transposition, addition and subtraction are not supported by matrices,
result matrices cannot be squared or cannot be multiplied by a scalar, and that
the calculation of row and column sums and the search for extreme matrix elements are not supported by this circuit arrangement.
Furthermore, in the case of this circuit arrangement, there is no monitoring of the value range of the matrix coefficients, and the value ranges of the matrix elements are not limited if an overflow occurs.

Circuit arrangement for calculating matrix operations in signal processing