[110]-surface strained-SOI CMOS devices

We have newly developed [110]-surface strained-silicon-on-insulator (SOI) n- and p-MOSFETs on [110]-surface relaxed-SiGe-on-insulator substrates with the Ge content of 25%, fabricated by applying the Ge condensation technique to SiGe layers grown on [110]-surface SOI wafers. We have demonstrated that the electron and the hole mobility enhancement of [110]-surface strained-SOI devices amounts to 23% and 50%, respectively, against the mobilities of [110]-surface unstrained MOSFETs. As a result, the electron and the hole mobility ratios of [110]-surface strained-SOI MOSFETs to the universal mobility of (100)-surface bulk-MOSFETs increase up to 81% and 203%, respectively. Therefore, the current drive imbalance between n- and p-MOS can be reduced. Moreover, both the electron and the hole mobilities of the [110]-surface strained-SOIs strongly depend on the drain current flow direction, which is qualitatively explained by the anisotropic effective mass characteristics of the carriers on a [110]-surface Si. As a result, the [110]-surface strained-SOI technology with optimization of the current flow directions of n- and p-MOS is promising for realizing higher speed scaled CMOS.     

Hepatitis GB virus C genome in the serum of aplastic anaemia patients receiving frequent blood transfusions

GB virus C (GBV-C) RNA was detected in five of 18 patients with aplastic anaemia who had received blood transfusions, whereas it was not detected in eight patients who had not received any transfusions. Antibody against hepatitis C virus (anti-HCV) was detected in nine patients in the transfusion group, compared with one of eight who had not received any transfusions. Therefore, the route of transmission of both GBV-C and HCV in these patients appeared to have been multiple blood transfusion. Since all of the GBV-C RNA-positive patients harboured anti-HCV, GBV-C seems to frequently superinfect with HCV. Neither GBV-C nor HCV is likely to have been a causative agent of the anaemia in the cases examined.     

S06 桂花幻想之月夜——梦天

作为厦门园博会风景园林师园之一,本园以"梦天"为主题,结合东端开阔的水面条件,以月、桂、石为材,以天气的变化、月亮的位置、植物的变化、庭园本身的变化为主轴进行设计,使其成为一座可持续的庭园.     

Comparative study on the assay for IgE antibodies specific for Chamaecyparis obtusa pollen between AlaSTAT and CAP-RAST

Titers of IgE antibody specific for the pollen of Chamaecyparis obtusa (C. obtusa) were determined by AlaSTAT and CAP-RAST in 221 patients with Japanese cedar pollinosis. IgE antibody to C. obtusa tested positive by CAP-RAST at a higher rate (80.5%) than by AlaSTAT (52.6%). The results obtained from the two assays were compared with those from intradermal skin test. CAP-RAST had a higher sensitivity than that of AlaSTAT. Because the two methods showed no differences in the determination of IgE antibody specific for Cryptomeria japonica, the above differences between AlaSTAT and CAP-RAST are surmised to be ascribable to the differences of C. obtusa antigen used in the both assays.     

Screening of Inhibitors Targeting Heat Shock Protein 47 Involved in the Development of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis

Heat shock protein 47 (HSP47), a collagen-specific molecular chaperone, is causally related to fibrotic diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The identification of Compounds that interfere with the HSP47-collagen interaction is essential for the development of relevant therapeutics. Herein, we prepared human HSP47 as a soluble fusion protein expressed in E. coli and established an assay system for HSP47 inhibitor screening. We screened a natural and synthetic Compound library established at Nagasaki University. Among 1023 Compounds, 13 exhibited inhibitory activity against human HSP47, of which three inhibited its function in a dose-dependent manner. Epigallocatechin-3-O-gallate, one of these three Compounds, is a typical polyphenol Compound derived from tea leaves. Structurally related Compounds were synthesized and examined for their activity, revealing a hydroxyl group at A-ring position 5 as important for its activity. The present findings provide valuable insight for the development of natural product-derived therapeutics for fibrotic diseases, including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.     

Copolymerization of ethanesultam with 2-methyl-2-oxazoline

Summary This paper describes the so-called No Catalyst Copolymerization between dioxo-1,1-thiazetidine-1,2(Ethanesultam; ESm) and 2-methyl-2-oxazoline. The copolymerization took place without any added initiator to produce copolymers of MeOZO and ESm. The structure of the copolymer was determined by the IR and NMR spectra, elemental analysis, as well as by the result of an alkaline hydrolysis of the copolymer. The reaction scheme of the copolymerization via zwitterion mechanism (Eq 3–5) was proposed.     

A high‐performance sorting algorithm for multicore single‐instruction multiple‐data processors

Many sorting algorithms have been studied in the past, but there are only a few algorithms that can effectively exploit both single‐instruction multiple‐data (SIMD) instructions and thread‐level parallelism. In this paper, we propose a new high‐performance sorting algorithm, called aligned‐access sort (AA‐sort), that exploits both the SIMD instructions and thread‐level parallelism available on today's multicore processors. Our algorithm consists of two phases, an in‐core sorting phase and an out‐of‐core merging phase. The in‐core sorting phase uses our new sorting algorithm that extends combsort to exploit SIMD instructions. The out‐of‐core algorithm is based on mergesort with our novel vectorized merging algorithm. Both phases can take advantage of SIMD instructions. The key to high performance is eliminating unaligned memory accesses that would reduce the effectiveness of SIMD instructions in both phases. We implemented and evaluated the AA‐sort on PowerPC 970MP and Cell Broadband Engine platforms. In summary, a sequential version of the AA‐sort using SIMD instructions outperformed IBM's optimized sequential sorting library by 1.8 times and bitonic mergesort using SIMD instructions by 3.3 times on PowerPC 970MP when sorting 32 million random 32‐bit integers. Also, a parallel version of AA‐sort demonstrated better scalability with increasing numbers of cores than a parallel version of bitonic mergesort on both platforms. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Well-posedness analysis of switch-driven piecewise affine systems

The well-posedness problem (existence and uniqueness of solutions) of a class of multi-modal piecewise affine systems is addressed, where binary-switches individually act under autonomous switching. First, a new transition rule on the discrete state, called the switch-based transition rule, is introduced and some relations with the mode-based transition rule are discussed. Next, a sufficient condition for such a multi-modal system to be well-posed for all external inputs is derived in terms of well-posedness of its subsystems of lower complexity "bimodal systems". Finally, an easily checkable condition for the bimodal system to be well-posed for all external inputs is given, which consequently allows us to algebraically determine well-posedness of the multi-modal systems in question.     

Efficient distribution-free population learning of simple concepts

We consider a variant of the ‘population learning model’ proposed by Kearns and Seung [8], in which the learner is required to be ‘distribution-free’ as well as computationally efficient. A population learner receives as input hypotheses from a large population of agents and produces as output its final hypothesis. Each agent is assumed to independently obtain labeled sample for the target concept and output a hypothesis. A polynomial time population learner is said to PAC-learn a concept class, if its hypothesis is probably approximately correct whenever the population size exceeds a certain bound which is polynomial, even if the sample size for each agent is fixed at some constant. We exhibit some general population learning strategies, and some simple concept classes that can be learned by them. These strategies include the ‘supremum hypothesis finder’, the ‘minimum superset finder’ (a special case of the ‘supremum hypothesis finder’), and various voting schemes. When coupled with appropriate agent algorithms, these strategies can learn a variety of simple concept classes, such as the ‘high–low game’, conjunctions, axis-parallel rectangles and others. We give upper bounds on the required population size for each of these cases, and show that these systems can be used to obtain a speed up from the ordinary PAC-learning model [11], with appropriate choices of sample and population sizes. With the population learner restricted to be a voting scheme, what we have is effectively a model of ‘population prediction’, in which the learner is to predict the value of the target concept at an arbitrarily drawn point, as a threshold function of the predictions made by its agents on the same point. We show that the population learning model is strictly more powerful than the population prediction model. Finally, we consider a variant of this model with classification noise, and exhibit a population learner for the class of conjunctions in this model. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.