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.     

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.     

Microstructural,Optical, Morphological,Luminescence and Electrical Properties of a CdO Nanocomposite Synthesized by a Chemical Route Assisted Microwave Irradiation Technique

This article reports a CdO nanocomposite successfully synthesized by a chemical route assisted microwave irradiation technique. Sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate (SDBS) is a good surfactant and it is used in forming the nanocomposite. The microwave irradiation technique is simple and less time consuming for preparing a nanocomposite. The obtained products were characterized by different techniques such as X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), UV-Vis DRS, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), room temperature photoluminescence (PL), and DC electrical conductivity. The grain size determined by the XRD pattern was found to be 20–40 nm. The lattice fringes and nanocomposite morphology particle size were obtained by TEM. The room temperature PL spectra reveal blue and red emissions. The calculated average electrical conductivity was around 5.1 × 10⁻⁸ to 2.02 × 10⁻⁸ S/cm.

     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ab initio</Emphasis> studies on [bmim][PF<Subscript>6</Subscript>]-CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> mixture and CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> clusters

Ab initio molecular dynamics studies have been carried out on the room temperature ionic liquid, 1,n-butyl,3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate ([bmim][PF₆]) and supercritical carbon dioxide mixture at room temperature and experimental density. Partial radial distribution functions (RDF) for different sites have been computed to see the organization of CO₂ molecules around the ionic liquid. Several partial RDFs around the carbon atom of CO₂ molecule are compared to find out that the CO₂ has specific interaction with a carbon atom present in the imidazolium ring. The CO₂ is also found to be very well organized around the terminal carbon atom of the butyl chain. The partial RDFs for the oxygen atoms around oxygen and carbon atoms of the CO₂ suggests that there is very good organization of CO₂ molecules around themselves even in the [bmim][PF₆]-CO₂ mixture. The instantaneous quadrupole moment tensor has been calculated for the anion and the cation. The ensemble average of diagonal components of quadrupole moment tensor of the cation have finite values, whereas the off-diagonal components of the cation and both the diagonal and off-diagonal components of the anion have the value of zero with a large standard deviation. The CPMD studies performed on CO₂ clusters reveals the greater tendency of the clusters with more CO₂ units, to deviate from the linear geometry.     

Pulse plated zinc sulphide films and their characteristics

Zinc sulphide thin films were deposited by the pulse plating technique using AR grade Zinc sulphate and sodium thiosulphate precursors. The pH of the deposition bath was adjusted to 2. The duty cycle was varied in the range of 20–60%. Total deposition time was kept constant as 60 min in all the cases. X-ray diffraction studies indicated the formation of single phase cubic zinc sulphide films. After heat treatment the crystal structure transformed to hexagonal structure. Optical absorption measurements indicated a band gap values in the range of 3.6–4.0 eV as the duty cycle decreased. EDAX studies yielded a composition of the films deposited at 50% duty cycle is Zn = 48%, S = 52%. XPS studies indicated the formation of ZnS. The Zn 2p and S 3p peaks are observed. AFM studies indicated a rms value of surface roughness of 55 nm for the films deposited at a duty cycle of 60%.     

Spectroscopic sampling of the left side of long-TE spin echoes: a free lunch?

Objective

Use of spectroscopically-acquired spin echoes typically involves Fourier transformation of the right side of the echo while largely neglecting the left side. For sufficiently long echo times, the left side may have enough spectral resolution to offer some utility. Since the acquisition of this side is “free”, we deemed it worthy of attention and investigated the spectral properties and information content of this data.

Materials and methods

Theoretical expressions for left- and right-side spectra were derived assuming Lorentzian frequency distributions. For left-side spectra, three regimes were identified based upon the relative magnitudes of reversible and irreversible transverse relaxation rates, R ₂′ and R ₂, respectively. Point-resolved spectroscopy (PRESS) data from muscle, fat deposit and bone marrow were acquired at 1.5 T to test aspects of the theoretical expressions.

Results

For muscle water or methylene marrow resonances, left-side signals were substantially or moderately larger than right-side signals but were similar in magnitude for muscle choline and creatine resonances. Left- versus right-side spectral-peak amplitude ratios depend sensitively on the relative values of R ₂ and R ₂′, which can be estimated given this ratio and a right-side linewidth measurement.

Conclusion

Left-side spectra can be used to augment signal-to-noise and to estimate spectral R ₂ and R ₂′ values under some circumstances.

     

A new robust reference watermarking scheme based on DWT-SVD

This paper presents a new semi-blind reference watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform(DWT) and singular value decomposition(SVD) for copyright protection and authenticity. We are using a gray scale logo image as watermark instead of randomly generated Gaussian noise type watermark. For watermark embedding, the original image is transformed into wavelet domain and a reference sub-image is formed using directive contrast and wavelet coefficients. We embed watermark into reference image by modifying the singular values of reference image using the singular values of the watermark. A reliable watermark extraction scheme is developed for the extraction of watermark from distorted image. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand a variety of attacks. We show that the proposed scheme also stands with the ambiguity attack also.     

Implementation of a Gaussian process-based machine learning grasp predictor

With the goal of advancing the state of automatic robotic grasping, we present a novel approach that combines machine learning techniques and physical validation on a robotic platform to develop a comprehensive grasp predictor. After collecting a large grasp sample set (522 grasps), we first conduct a statistical analysis of the predictive ability of grasp quality metrics that are commonly used in the robotics literature. We then apply principal component analysis and Gaussian process (GP) algorithms on the grasp metrics that are discriminative to build a classifier, validate its performance, and compare the results to existing grasp planners. The key findings are as follows: (i) several of the existing grasp metrics are weak predictors of grasp quality when implemented on a robotic platform; (ii) the GP-based classifier significantly improves grasp prediction by combining multiple grasp metrics to increase true positive classification at low false positive rates; (iii) The GP classifier can be used generate new grasps to improve bad grasp samples by performing a local search to find neighboring grasps which have improved contact points and higher success rate.