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The use of a quality management approach in the product design/development process is to control and monitor the design activities to improve the consistency of design, and further help to produce quality products that meet the customer needs. This is of particular importance to the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) due to their natural constraints. The aim of this study has been firstly to examine relationship between the ISO 9000 approach and the Quality Award Business Excellence Models to see to what extent they can be applied in the SMEs. Secondly, several different techniques including metrics of the new view of value engineering using a design process 'model' as framework were developed theoretically and applied in practical terms during the product design process to improve the efficiency of quality management on design for the SMEs. The conclusions are that, in the case of the ISO 9000 approach and the Models, it is appropriate for the SMEs to use in order to maintain competitiveness provided they are considered as process management disciplines. The concept of the new view of value engineering can be widely and consistently used to facilitate the generation process of design efficiency for the SMEs through a two-level of validation processes including a checklist. Such concept can only be fulfilled in practice with the positive recognition that achieving high worth instead of high value for the stages in the design process is a key factor.

In order to optimise the performance of high-speed bipolar logic circuits, one would like to have an analytical expression that explicitly relates the propagation delay of a circuit to its electrical parameters. Such an expression provides a better insight into the relationship between the propagation delay of a circuit and its electrical parameters, and therefore it is very useful in design, optimisation and performance prediction of high-speed bipolar logic circuits. A linearity study of the propagation delay was carried out by using a SPICE circuit analysis program. It is found that the behaviour of the propagation delay is quite linear over a wide electrical parameter range and hence the propagation delay expressions for ECL, CML and XOR circuits are derived by means of the sensitivity analysis. The validity of these expressions are carefully checked over a wide range of transistor and circuit parameters by comparison with SPICE simulations and reported experimental data in the literature. With advances in gigabit per second communication systems, the need for very high-speed frequency dividers has become more important. A novel method was used to analyse frequency dividers by relating their performances to that of constituent XOR gates. Therefore, the XOR propagation delay expression is used to accurately predict the maximum toggle frequency of frequency dividers. Figures of merit have been derived for silicon and AlGaAs/GaAs HBT circuits. These expressions show that there is an optimum value of the load resistance (or the collector current density) for bipolar circuits in order to achieve a minimum propagation delay. By comparing the predicted optimum collector current densities with the current densities of maximum fT, it is found that increasing the current density of maximum fT is very important for silicon transistors, while reductions in τF, RB and RE are desirable for AlGaAs/GaAs transistors. The signal propagation delay due to large interconnect and off-chip output capacitances is a major factor determining the speed of VLSI circuits. In view of the driving capability of bipolar transistors, a BiCMOS buffer is usually adopted to drive the heavy capacitive load. An accurate BiCMOS delay expression is derived and influence of device parameters on BiCMOS circuit speed discussed. In order to predict the future performance of BiCMOS circuits, figure of merit is derived from the BiCMOS delay expression. Using the expression, it is predicted that future CMOS circuits can operate faster than BiCMOS circuits under the internal logic circuit assumption, while BiCMOS circuits can keep the speed advantage over CMOS circuits down to submicron dimensions under the constant load capacitance assumption.

The purpose of this work is to summarize our present knowledge of the Acereous plants of Chinai, since Pax published his last monograph of Aceraceae in 1902. The multiplicity of new species and the huge collections of material which are not easily identified, have particularly emphasized the somewhat pressing requirement for a critical review and the necessity for supplementary descriptions and special notes. This work was continued over a period of more than five years. During this time various herbaria were visited where type- specimens and numerous collections were carefully examined. The main work has been done at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

The first part of this thesis concerns the development of fast algorithms for computing the linear least-squares prediction and smoothing estimates of two-dimensional random fields from noisy observations on a polar raster. These algorithms exploit an assumed Toeplitz-plus-Hankel structure of the covariance function of the random field, to reduce the enormous amount of computation that would otherwise have been required. To minimize time required, both the algorithms and hardware implementations must be taken into account as a whole. Hence, some VLSI hardware architectures are proposed to implement these highly parallelizable algorithms, to further minimize computation time. To utilize these fast algorithms, the covariance function must have a Toeplitz-plus-Hankel structure. So we propose some methods for Toeplitz-plus-Hankel approximation to the data covariance matrix. Smoothing filters are also recursively derived from the available prediction filters, with the aid of a discrete version of the Bellman-Siegert-Krein resolvent identity. The applications of these algorithms to image coding and restoration are also discussed, to demonstrate their validity. In the second part, 2-D linear prediction theory on a polar raster is further explored. A Radon transform approach is proposed to compute estimates of the 2-D power spectral density. This approach first interpolates the discrete data into continuous function using gaussian functions, computes the Radon transform of this continuous function, and applies familiar one-dimensional linear prediction techniques to each slice. This results in high-resolution spectral estimates for data defined on a polar raster. Generalizations of the lattice filter and spectral factorization problems to the polar raster are also addressed.