N-Type Field-Effect Transistors Using Multiple Mg-Doped ZnO Nanorods

Nanorod field-effect transistors (FETs) that use multiple Mg-doped ZnO nanorods and a SiO₂ gate insulator were fabricated and characterized. The use of multiple nanorods provides higher on-currents without significant degradation in threshold voltage shift and subthreshold slopes. It has been observed that the on-currents of the multiple ZnO nanorod FETs increase approximately linearly with the number of nanorods, with on-currents of ~1 muA per nanorod and little change in off-current (~4times10^-12). The subthreshold slopes and on-off ratios typically improve as the number of nanorods within the device channel is increased, reflecting good uniformity of properties from nanorod to nanorod. It is expected that Mg dopants contribute to high n-type semiconductor characteristics during ZnO nanorod growth. For comparison, nonintentionally doped ZnO nanorod FETs are fabricated, and show low conductivity to compare with Mg-doped ZnO nanorods. In addition, temperature-dependent current-voltage characteristics of single ZnO nanorod FETs indicate that the activation energy of the drain current is very low (0.05-0.16 eV) at gate voltages both above and below threshold     

2D Image Construction from Low Resolution Response of a New Non‐invasive Measurement for Medical Application

This paper presents an application of digital signal processing to data acquired by the radio imaging method (RIM) that was adopted to measure moisture distribution inside the human body. RIM was originally developed for the mining industry; we are applying the method to a biomedical measurement because of its simplicity, economy, and safety. When a two‐dimensional image was constructed from the measured data, the method provided insufficient resolution because the wavelength of the measurement medium, a weak electromagnetic wave in a VHF band, was longer than human tissues. We built and measured a phantom, a model simulating the human body, consisting of two water tanks representing large internal organs. A digital equalizer was applied to the measured values as a weight function, and images were reconstructed that corresponded to the original shape of the two water tanks. As a result, a two‐dimensional image containing two individual peaks corresponding to the original two small water tanks was constructed. The result suggests the method was applicable to biomedical measurement by the assistance of digital signal processing. This technique may be applicable to home‐based medical care and other situations in which safety, simplicity, and economy are important.     

WLAN chip antenna mountable above the system ground plane of a mobile device

A novel wireless local-area network (WLAN) chip antenna suitable to be mounted above the system ground plane of a mobile device is presented. The antenna in the study is easily fabricated from folding a single metal plate onto a foam base, and mainly comprises a short-circuited radiating strip and an antenna ground. The antenna ground occupies the bottom surface and two adjacent side surfaces of the foam base. When the antenna is mounted at the corner of the system ground plane, this antenna ground structure is expected to effectively reduce the antenna's possible fringing electromagnetic fields inside the mobile device. In this case, when the associated element such as the radio-frequency shielding metal case is placed under the proposed antenna, small or negligible variations in the antenna performance are obtained. Design considerations of the proposed antenna for WLAN operation in the 2.4 GHz band are described, and results of the constructed prototypes are presented.     

Design and analysis of low-power cache using two-level filter scheme

Power consumption is an increasingly pressing problem in modern processor design. Since the on-chip caches usually consume a significant amount of power, it is one of the most attractive targets for power reduction. This paper presents a two-level filter scheme, which consists of the L1 and L2 filters, to reduce the power consumption of the on-chip cache. The main idea of the proposed scheme is motivated by the substantial unnecessary activities in conventional cache architecture. We use a single block buffer as the L1 filter to eliminate the unnecessary cache accesses. In the L2 filter, we then propose a new sentry-tag architecture to further filter out the unnecessary way activities in case of the L1 filter miss. We use SimpleScalar to simulate the SPEC2000 benchmarks and perform the HSPICE simulations to evaluate the proposed architecture. Experimental results show that the two-level filter scheme can effectively reduce the cache power consumption by eliminating most unnecessary cache activities, while the compromise of system performance is negligible. Compared to a conventional instruction cache (32 kB, two-way) implemented with only the L1 filter, the use of a two-level filter can result in roughly 30% reduction in total cache power consumption. Similarly, compared to a conventional data cache (32 kB, four-way) implemented with only the L1 filter, the total cache power reduction is approximately 46%.     

Decreasing miscibility with greater heterogeneity in ternary polymer blend: poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate), poly(α‐methyl styrene) and poly(4‐methyl styrene)

A ternary blend system comprising poly(cyclohexyl methacrylate) (PCHMA), poly(α‐methyl styrene) (PαMS) and poly(4‐methyl styrene) (P4MS) was investigated by thermal analysis, optical and scanning electron microscopy. Ternary phase behaviour was compared with the behaviour for the three constituent binary pairs. This study showed that the ternary blends of PCHMA/PαMS/P4MS in most compositions were miscible, with an apparent glass transition temperature (T_g) and distinct cloud‐point transitions, which were located at lower temperatures than their binary counterparts. However, in a closed‐loop range of compositions roughly near the centre of the triangular phase diagram, some ternary blends displayed phase separation with heterogeneity domains of about 1 µm. Therefore, it is properly concluded that ternary PCHMA/PαMS/P4M is partially miscible with a small closed‐loop immisciblity range, even though all the constituent binary pairs are fully miscible. Thermodynamic backgrounds leading to decreased miscibility and greater heterogeneity in a ternary polymer system in comparison with the binary counterparts are discussed. © 2003 Society of Chemical Industry     

Self-Consistent Effects on the Starting Current of Gyrotron Oscillators

Self-consistent effects on the starting current of gyrotron oscillators are examined. Field profiles in the open cavity are shown to be sensitive to the interaction dynamics. This can either significantly raise or lower the oscillation threshold, particularly for the low-Q modes. The transition from resonant-mode oscillations at the low magnetic field to backward-wave oscillations at the high magnetic field is demonstrated.     

Medium access protocol design for delay-guaranteed multicode CDMA multimedia networks

To enable multimedia real-time applications over next-generation wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) packet-switching networks, previous efforts show a proper scheduling policy is the key to provide delay-guaranteed access services to various traffic types with different bit error rate (BER) requirements. Considering the support of the prevailing Internet protocol (IP) with variable-length packets in future mobile networks, we develop a mathematically delay-optimal medium access control (MAC) protocol over multicode CDMA (MC-CDMA) environments under the continuous-time assumption. From our investigations, we suggest that a good MAC protocol should be designed by using a proper single-server scheduling policy to guarantee packet-delay, and controlling the maximal number of simultaneous spreading-code transmissions to maintain the required BER. We further evaluate the performance of some MC-CDMA MAC protocols supporting QoS on BER and packet-delay, and show that MAC schemes conforming to our design rules give better performance on packet-delay when maintaining acceptable BER of various traffic types.     

Catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene with carbon dioxide: promotional effect of antimony in supported vanadium–antimony oxide catalyst

Alumina-supported vanadium oxide, VO_x/Al₂O₃, and binary vanadium–antimony oxides, VSbO_x/Al₂O₃, have been tested in the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation with carbon dioxide and characterized by S_BET, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, hydrogen temperature-programmed reduction and CO₂ pulse methods. VSbO_x/Al₂O₃ exhibited enhanced catalytic activity and especially on-stream stability compared to VO_x/Al₂O₃ catalyst. Incorporation of antimony into VO_x/Al₂O₃ increased dispersion of active VO_x species, enhanced redox properties of the systems and formed a new mixed vanadium–antimony oxide phase in the most catalytically efficient V_0.43Sb_0.57O_x/Al₂O₃ system.     

An electrooptic intensity modulator with improved linearity

A highly linear electrooptic modulator has been designed, fabricated, and evaluated. The design of this modulator consists of only a simple modification to the directional coupler. Two-tone testing has demonstrated that, for an optical modulation depth of 30% per channel, the third-order intermodulation distortion is more than 30 dB lower than that of the conventional directional coupler or Mach-Zehnder modulators. This improvement was not observed to be accompanied by any increase in second harmonic distortion. Also included are results of two-tone computer simulations which predict the improvement in linearity of this device for a range of modulation depths.<>