Charge Transport Calculation along Two-Dimensional Metal/Semiconductor/Metal Systems

Two-dimensional transistors are promising candidates for the next generation of nanoscale devices. Like the other alternatives, they also encounter problems such as instability under standard condition (STP), low channel mobility, small band gaps, and difficulty to integrate metal contacts. The latter poses a great challenge since metal/semiconductor interface significantly affects the transistor‘s performance. Some of these obstacles can be solved by using two-dimensional transition metal di-chalcogenides (TMDC) materials. In this study, we performed charge transport calculation based on density functional theory (DFT) followed by wave dynamics to evaluate the performance of six two-dimensional TMDC metal/semiconductor/metal systems. Each semiconductor monolayer was laterally connected, at both ends to metal contacts consisting of VS₂ or FeS₂ monolayers. We found that charge transport was more efficient in systems containing a CrS₂ semiconductor monolayer compared to systems with MoS₂ or WS₂ as the semiconductor monolayer. The electronic characterization of the monolayer TMDC materials by DFT estimates well the trend in charge transport efficiency calculated using wave packet dynamics.     

Conformational Molecular Switches for Post-CMOS Nanoelectronics

Theoretical treatments forecast that bistable CMOS devices using electronic charge as a state variable will operate at their maximum thermal dissipation limit possibly as early as 2012. The problem is further compounded by increasing manufacturing challenges associated with the ever decreasing logic switch dimensions. These challenges require the development of new fabrication strategies that replace or complement current top-down lithography with bottom-up protocols using controlled self-assembly of nanomaterial building blocks. To answer some of these issues, this paper focuses on a new device paradigm consisting of an arene-metal-arene conformational switch, addressable through capacitive, inductive, or resonant-tunneling field coupling. The operating principle is based on voltage-tunable modulation in quantum electron transmission. The switch is open (off) when the metal ion is displaced to a position at a C-H bond on the arene ring due to an externally applied bias. Conversely, when the external bias is removed, the metal ion moves to an axis- symmetric position on the arene ring, and the switch is closed (on). The paper presents a summary of the architecture, operating principle, and advantages of the conformational switch, along with associated findings from proof-of-concept theoretical and experimental studies of its target specifications and performance. The paper also discusses opportunities and challenges related to the integration of conformational switches into hybrid CMOS-molecular and monolithic (all molecular) circuits.     

Ensuring primary realization of pressure unit in the vacuum range without typically utilized static expansion system

After the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993 the primary metrological standards authority almost fully remained in Slovakia. So we had to build our primary vacuum metrology anew. But we could do it using uptodate techniques that are more effective and they enable us to fulfil our task more effectively and in a shorter time.The steady demand to widen the lower pressure range and a steady demand for maximal accuracy collide with the financial possibilities open to a small country. So it is impossible to follow the classical pattern for the vacuum standards: liquid columns, static expansion system and dynamic expansion system. But it is possible to utilize contemporary progress in construction of piston manometers. This enables us to discard liquid column and static expansion techniques in favour of piston technique [Tesar J, Prazak D. Vacuum 2002; 67: 311, Tesar J, Prazak D, Krajicek Z. In:Proceedings of international symposium on Pressure and Vacuum, 2003. p. 169, Tesar J, Repa P, Prazak D, Krajicek Z, Peksa L. Vacuum 2004; 76: 491.]. Such system fulfils all the needs of a little industrial country and is economically acceptable.     

A multivariate classification of individual household census data for Italy

Never before have regional scientists had access to individual census data for an entire country. The paper describes the application of a taxonomic procedure to classify the 15.6 million households identified by the 1971 Italian census. The results are important both for what they reveal about Italian social structure and because they provide a basis for a constructing aggregate census data so that within area variations are retained.     

Catalyst instabilities during the liquid phase partial oxidation of methane

A promising catalytic system for the low temperature oxidation of methane to a methanol derivative has been investigated under both batch and semi-continuous operation in two different reactor types. The system comprises of a bimetallic palladium and copper(II) chloride catalyst contained in a trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) and an aqueous phase. Methane, oxygen and a co-reductant carbon monoxide constitute the gas phase. Typical operating conditions were a temperature of 85 °C and a pressure of 83 bar.

The yields of the methyl trifluoroacetate product observed in this present work were less than those obtained in other batch autoclave works, which employed only 4 ml of liquid phase, compared with 50 ml in this study. Furthermore, an encouraging initial product formation rate of ca. 40 mol/m³ h, quickly decreased after the first hour, and came to an apparent end after only 2 h. This observation had not been reported previously.

Work performed in a semi-continuous porous tube reactor (300 ml of re-circulating liquid phase) also showed the same reaction characteristics as in the batch reactor. Thus, the deteriorating product formation rate cannot be attributed to gaseous reactant depletion (batch operation). The results suggest problems associated with catalyst instabilities, e.g. with the previously elucidated Wacker chemistry.     

Testability-analysis driven test-generation of analogue cores

A new definition of the testability transfer factor for circuit components that provides better sensitivity with respect to parametric deviations is presented. New equations for the testability measures in a mixed-signal core are given. Testability analysis is used for test-pattern generation and for consideration of inserting wrapper cells. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the approach.     

Analysis of Interconnected Oscillators by Dissipativity Theory

This paper employs dissipativity theory for the global analysis of limit cycles in particular dynamical systems of possibly high dimension. Oscillators are regarded as open systems that satisfy a particular dissipation inequality. It is shown that this characterization has implications for the global stability analysis of limit cycle oscillations: i) in isolated oscillators, ii) in interconnections of oscillators, and iii) for the global synchrony analysis in interconnections of identical oscillators     

HotSpot: a compact thermal modeling methodology for early-stage VLSI design

This paper presents HotSpot-a modeling methodology for developing compact thermal models based on the popular stacked-layer packaging scheme in modern very large-scale integration systems. In addition to modeling silicon and packaging layers, HotSpot includes a high-level on-chip interconnect self-heating power and thermal model such that the thermal impacts on interconnects can also be considered during early design stages. The HotSpot compact thermal modeling approach is especially well suited for preregister transfer level (RTL) and presynthesis thermal analysis and is able to provide detailed static and transient temperature information across the die and the package, as it is also computationally efficient.     

Mechanistic Insight in the Ethane Dehydrogenation Reaction over Cr/Al2O3 Catalysts

A Cr/Al₂O₃ alkane dehydrogenation catalyst exhibits a maximum in ethylene yield during an ethane dehydrogenation cycle. Isotopic labelling experiments with monolabelled ¹³C-ethane and deuterium were used to elucidate whether the initial activity increase could be due to formation of an active, larger hydrocarbon intermediate on the surface. The results strongly indicate that this is not the case, and instead point to a traditional reaction cycle involving adsorption of ethane to form an ethyl species, followed by desorption of ethene and hydrogen. Transient kinetic data suggest that ethane adsorption is the rate-determining step of reaction.     

Face detection by structural models

Despite the successes in the last two decades, the state-of-the-art face detectors still have problems in dealing with images in the wild due to large appearance variations. Instead of leaving appearance variations directly to statistical learning algorithms, we propose a hierarchical part based structural model to explicitly capture them. The model enables part subtype option to handle local appearance variations such as closed and open month, and part deformation to capture the global appearance variations such as pose and expression. In detection, candidate window is fitted to the structural model to infer the part location and part subtype, and detection score is then computed based on the fitted configuration. In this way, the influence of appearance variation is reduced. Besides the face model, we exploit the co-occurrence between face and body, which helps to handle large variations, such as heavy occlusions, to further boost the face detection performance. We present a phrase based representation for body detection, and propose a structural context model to jointly encode the outputs of face detector and body detector. Benefit from the rich structural face and body information, as well as the discriminative structural learning algorithm, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on FDDB, AFW and a self-annotated dataset, under wide comparisons with commercial and academic methods.