Hydrogen annealing effect on DC and low-frequency noise characteristics in CMOS FinFETs

The hydrogen annealing process has been used to improve surface roughness of the Si-fin in CMOS FinFETs for the first time. Hydrogen annealing was performed after Si-fin etch and before gate oxidation. As a result, increased saturation current with a lowered threshold voltage and a decreased low-frequency noise level over the entire range of drain current have been attained. The low-frequency noise characteristics indicate that the oxide trap density is reduced by a factor of 3 due to annealing. These results suggest that hydrogen annealing is very effective for improving device performance and for attaining a high-quality surface of the etched Si-fin.     

A concise process technology for 3-D suspended radio frequency micro-inductors on silicon substrate

In this letter, a concise process technology is proposed for the first time to enable the fabrication of good quality three-dimensional (3-D) suspended radio frequency (RF) micro-inductors on bulk silicon, without utilizing the lithography process on sidewall and trench-bottom patterning. Samples were fabricated to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed process technology.     

Low-temperature CV dispersion in MOS devices

A study is reported of the dispersion seen in the accumulation and depletion regions, of the C-V curve in n-channel MOS devices in the temperature range 30-45 K. It is concluded that the dispersion observed in these experiments is caused by time-constant effects, due to the substrate resistance and not caused by dopant atom emission time constant effects. From the measured admittance as a function of temperature and frequency, the acceptor energy level is determined to within ±0.4 meV     

Evaluation of hot hardness and creep of a 350 grade commercial maraging steel

The hardening response and the indentation creep of a 350 grade commercial maraging steel were evaluated using a hot hardness tester. The hardness versus temperature plot exhibited three distinct regions. Hardness response was noted between 500–800 K. The unusually high values of activation energy and stress exponent obtained during the creep experiment could be rationalized by a novel concept of introducing a back stress term in the indentation creep relation. The corrected value of the activation energy was found to be reasonably in agreement with the activation energy for diffusion of Ni in iron. Results are supplemented with microstructural observation.     

Disorder in cellulosic fibers

Ruland's concept of an isotropic disorder function is applied to estimate the disorder parameter and the degree of crystallinity in a few cellulosic fibers: two cottons, native ramie, and a high-tenacity rayon. The results indicate an increase in disorder without any change in crystallinity on mercerization of native celluloses. On hydrolysis, with or without a pretreatment of mercerization, the samples exhibit a higher crystallinity, disorder remaining the same as for native celluloses. A ball-milled sample of “amorphous” cellulose is still found to be fairly crystalline with the lowest disorder. On being wetted in water and oven-dried, a distorted form of cellulose II with higher crystallinity and disorder was obtained. The polynosic fiber, Tufcel, has low values for the degree of crystallinity, disorder parameter, as well as crystallite dimension. A strong dependence of the degree of crystallinity on the crystallite size, particularly the lateral, is observed.     

Parallelization of a dynamic SVD clustering algorithm and its application in information retrieval

We describe an implementation of a parallel document clustering scheme based on latent semantic indexing, which uses singular value decomposition. Given a set of documents, the clustering algorithm is dynamic in the sense that it automatically infers the number of clusters to be output. The parallel version has been implemented on a LAN and on a dual‐core system. Experimental evaluation of the algorithm shows an average speed‐up of 6.22 for the LAN implementation and an average speed‐up of 3.71 for the dual‐core implementation, while still maintaining a precision and recall in the range [0.85, 1]. To put these implementations in the context of information retrieval, we use the parallel clustering algorithm and develop a document similarity search system. The similarity search system shows good performance in terms of precision and recall. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Studies on electrical and optical properties of vanadium-incorporated ion-deficient perovskites

Partial substitution of V⁵⁺ for Ti⁴⁺ in SrTiO₃ has been carried out and the effect of the cation vacancies so created on the polarity of the bonds in the substrate has been investigated. With this end in view compounds with the general formula Sr_{(1–x/2) x/2}Ti _(1–x) ⁴⁺ V _(x ⁵⁺ O₃, where x0.5, have been prepared, and their optical and electrical properties studied. A comparison of the results with those obtained for a similar perovskite having all the cation vacancies filled up by potassium ions suggested an increase in covalency of the B-O bond in the peroskite due to the incorporation of V⁵⁺.     

CMOS scaling into the nanometer regime

Starting with a brief review on 0.1-μm (100 nm) CMOS status, this paper addresses the key challenges in further scaling of CMOS technology into the nanometer (sub-100 nm) regime in light of fundamental physical effects and practical considerations. Among the issues discussed are: lithography, power supply and threshold voltage, short-channel effect, gate oxide, high-field effects, dopant number fluctuations and interconnect delays. The last part of the paper discusses several alternative or unconventional device structures, including silicon-on-insulator (SOI), SiGe MOSFET's, low-temperature CMOS, and double-gate MOSFET's, which may lead to the outermost limits of silicon scaling     

Evolution of multiprotocol label switching

Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is rapidly emerging as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard intended to enhance the speed, scalability, and service provisioning capabilities in the Internet. MPLS uses the technique of packet forwarding based on labels, to enable the implementation of a simpler high-performance packet forwarding engine. This also decouples packet forwarding from routing, facilitating the provision of varied routing services independent of the packet forwarding paradigm. The authors track the evolution of this technology in relation to other existing technologies. Then an overview of the MPLS architecture and design is provided. In addition, some of the work that was a precursor to MPLS is discussed, as well as related issues and debates