Activation energy determination from low-temperature CV dispersion[semiconductor devices]

The response of semiconductor devices at low temperatures to changes in the voltage across the depletion region is limited by the dielectric relaxation time of the majority carriers in the bulk region. This results in a dispersion of the C-V curves at low temperatures. In this paper, we report a study of the dispersion seen in the accumulation and depletion regions of the C-V curve in n- and p-channel MOS transistors as well as in reverse biased one-sided abrupt junctions. From the admittance measured as a function of temperature and frequency, the dopant energy level is determined. The values of the activation energy measured using the diodes agree well with the corresponding values obtained using MOS devices     

Universal sine squared shaped video syncs

A digital method for generating precisely controlled sine-squared shaped video sync pulses of sixteen different wave shapes is reported. The principle involved in the technique is to store 16 sample values of the desired sine-squared shaped signal in programmable read-only memory (PROM) and to release these digital data sequentially to a digital-to-analog converter at a desired speed to produce the sine-squared shaped waveform. The application of this method is discussed     

Microstructural effects on the tensile properties and deformation behavior of a Ti-48Al gamma titanium aluminide

The effects of microstructure on the tensile properties and deformation behavior of a binary Ti-48Al gamma titanium aluminide were studied. Tensile-mechanical properties of samples with microstructures ranging from near γ to duplex to fine grained, near- and fully-lamellar were determined at a range of temperatures, and the deformation structures in these characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Microstructure was observed to exert a strong influence on the tensile properties, with the grain size and lamellar volume fraction playing connected, but complex, roles. Acoustic emission response monitored during the tensile test revealed spikes whose amplitude and frequency increased with an increase in the volume fraction of lamellar grains in the microstructure. Analysis of failed samples suggested that microcracking was the main factor responsible for the spikes, with twinning providing a minor contribution in the near-lamellar materials. The most important factor that controls ductility of these alloys is grain size. The ductility, yield stress, and work-hardening rate of the binary Ti-48Al alloy exhibit maximum values between 0.50 and 0.60 volume fraction of the lamellar constituent. The high work-hardening rate, which is associated with the low mobility of dislocations, is the likely cause of low ductility of these alloys. In the near-γ and duplex structures, slip by motion of 1/2<110] unit dislocations and twinning are the prevalent deformation modes at room temperature (RT), whereas twinning is more common in the near- and fully-lamellar structures. The occurrence of twinning is largely dictated by the Schmid factor. The 1/2<110] unit dislocations are prevalent even for grain orientations for which the Schmid factor is higher for <101] superdislocations, though the latter are observed in favorably oriented grains. The activity of both of these systems is responsible for the higher ductility at ambient temperatures compared with Al-rich single-phase γ alloys. A higher twin density is observed in lamellar grains, but their propagation depends on the orientation and geometry of the individual γ lamellae. The increase in ductility at high temperatures correlates with increased activity of 1/2<110] dislocations (including their climb motion) and twin thickening. The role of microstructural variables on strength, ductility, and fracture are discussed. This article is based on a presentation made in the symposium entitled “Fundamentals of Structural Intermetallics,” presented at the 2002 TMS Annual Meeting, February 21–27, 2002, in Seattle, Washington, under the auspices of the ASM and TMS Joint Committee on Mechanical Behavior of Materials.     

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.     

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     

Evaluation of effect of hydrogen on toughness of Zircaloy-2 by instrumented drop weight impact testing

Hydride-assisted degradation in fracture toughness of Zircaloy-2 was evaluated by carrying out instrumented drop-weight tests on curved Charpy specimens fabricated from virgin pressure tube. Samples were charged to 60 ppm and 225 ppm hydrogen. Ductile-to-brittle-transition behaviour was exhibited by as-received and hydrided samples. The onset of ductile-to-brittle-transition was at about 130 °C for hydrided samples, irrespective of their hydrogen content. Dynamic fracture toughness (K_ID) was estimated based on linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) approach. For fractures occurring after general yielding, the fracture toughness was derived based on equivalent energy criterion. Results are supplemented with fractography. This simple procedure of impact testing appears to be promising for monitoring service-induced degradation in fracture toughness of pressure tubes.     

Energy-Efficient Thermal-Aware Autonomic Management of Virtualized HPC Cloud Infrastructure

Virtualized datacenters and clouds are being increasingly considered for traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads that have typically targeted Grids and conventional HPC platforms. However, maximizing energy efficiency and utilization of datacenter resources, and minimizing undesired thermal behavior while ensuring application performance and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for HPC applications requires careful consideration of important and extremely challenging tradeoffs. Virtual Machine (VM) migration is one of the most common techniques used to alleviate thermal anomalies (i.e., hotspots) in cloud datacenter servers as it reduces load and, hence, the server utilization. In this article, the benefits of using other techniques such as voltage scaling and pinning (traditionally used for reducing energy consumption) for thermal management over VM migrations are studied in detail. As no single technique is the most efficient to meet temperature/performance optimization goals in all situations, an autonomic approach that performs energy-efficient thermal management while ensuring the QoS delivered to the users is proposed. To address the problem of VM allocation that arises during VM migrations, an innovative application-centric energy-aware strategy for Virtual Machine (VM) allocation is proposed. The proposed strategy ensures high resource utilization and energy efficiency through VM consolidation while satisfying application QoS by exploiting knowledge obtained through application profiling along multiple dimensions (CPU, memory, and network bandwidth utilization). To support our arguments, we present the results obtained from an experimental evaluation on real hardware using HPC workloads under different scenarios.