Ultrathin Sticker‐Type ZnO Thin Film Transistors Formed by Transfer Printing via Topological Confinement of Water‐Soluble Sacrificial Polymer in Dimple Structure

To create ultrathin sticker‐type electronic devices that can be attached to unconventional substrates, it is highly desirable to develop printable membrane‐type electronics on a handling substrate and then transfer the printing to a target surface. A facile method is presented for high‐efficiency transfer printing by controlling the interfacial adhesion between a handling substrate and an ultrathin substrate in a systematic manner under mild conditions. A water‐soluble sacrificial polymer layer is employed on a dimpled handling substrate, which enables the topological confinement of the polymer residue inside and near the dimples during the etching and drying processes to reduce the interfacial adhesion gently, creating a high yield of transfer printing in a deterministic manner. As an example of an electronic device that was created using this method, a highly flexible sticker‐type ZnO thin film transistor was successfully developed with a thickness of 13 μm including a printable ultrathin substrate, which can be attached to various substrates, such as paper, plastic, and stickers.     

Mechanical bending of flexible complementary inverters based on organic and oxide thin film transistors

Flexible complementary inverters composed of p-channel pentacene thin-film transistors (TFTs) and n-channel amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide TFTs were fabricated on polymer substrates. The characteristics of the TFTs and inverters were evaluated at different bending radii. Throughout the bending experiments, the relationship between the performances of the inverters and the characteristics of the TFTs under mechanical deformation was analyzed. The mechanically applied strain led to a change in the voltage transfer characteristics of the complementary inverters, as well as the source–drain saturation current, field-effect mobility and threshold voltage of the TFTs. The switching threshold voltage of the fabricated inverters decreased with decreasing bending radius, which was related to changes in the field-effect mobility and the threshold voltage of the TFTs.     

Merocyanine/C60 Planar Heterojunction Solar Cells: Effect of Dye Orientation on Exciton Dissociation and Solar Cell Performance

In this study the charge dissociation at the donor/acceptor heterointerface of thermally evaporated planar heterojunction merocyanine/C₆₀ organic solar cells is investigated. Deposition of the donor material on a heated substrate as well as post‐annealing of the complete devices at temperatures above the glass transition temperature of the donor material results in a twofold increase of the fill factor. An analytical model employing an electric‐field‐dependent exciton dissociation mechanism reveals that geminate recombination is limiting the performance of as‐deposited cells. Fourier‐transform infrared ellipsometry shows that, at temperatures above the glass transition temperature of the donor material, the orientation of the dye molecules in the donor films undergoes changes upon annealing. Based on this finding, the influence of the dye molecules’ orientations on the charge‐transfer state energies is calculated by quantum mechanical/molecular mechanics methods. The results of these detailed studies provide new insight into the exciton dissociation process in organic photovoltaic devices, and thus valuable guidelines for designing new donor materials.     

A Novel Dynamic Fault Restoration Mechanism Using a Multiple Ring Approach in WDM Mesh Networks

This work describes a distributed fault restoration algorithm, called the Dynamic Multiple Ring Algorithm (DMRA), for application in WDM mesh networks. This study explores the choice of restoration paths and the assignment of fault-tolerant bandwidth when a link, node, or channel failure occurs according to the change in traffic load, number of nodes, and transmission delay including propagation and switching delays. Accordingly, the primary aim of this work is to use networking segments near faults to share the restoration load throughout a mesh network. Each node searches for restoration paths in their near environment using the proposed DMRA. Nodes use distributed control to search for neighboring nodes and to establish the relationship between them to build numerous logical rings. Nodes can also locate faults in the logical rings. These rings establish the restoration paths. The traffic load over failed links or nodes can be diverted to other paths in the networking segments. The cost of the restoration paths is computed at each node based on both the current capacity and the transmission delay. The selected restoration paths are suitable transmission routes in the network neighborhood. Hence, restoration paths can be identified and wavelength assigned quickly according to network bandwidth and traffic load. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method works extremely quickly and has a high success rate. Consequently, it is very useful for applications in real WDM networks, where the status varies from minute to minute.Corresponding author is presently a guest scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA. This research was partially supported by the Grant of National Science Council, ROC (NSC-92-2218-E-155-004 and NSC-93-2917-I-155-001).     

In‐service QoS monitoring of real‐time applications using SM MIB

Current network management needs an end‐to‐end overview of various flows rather than the information that is purely local to the individual devices. The typical manager‐centric polling approach, however, is not suitable to understand network‐wide behavior of a large‐scale Internet. In this paper, we propose a new management information base (MIB) approach called Service Monitoring MIB (SM MIB). The MIB provides a network manager with dynamic end‐to‐end management information by utilizing special packets. The special packet is an Internet control message protocol (ICMP) application that is sent to a remote network element to monitor Internet services. The SM MIB makes an end‐to‐end management feasible while it reduces management‐related traffic and manager‐to‐manager interactions. Real examples show that the proposed SM MIB is useful for end‐to‐end QoS monitoring. We discuss the accuracy of the obtained data as well as the monitoring overhead. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Blind adaptive decorrelating detector for DS-CDMA systems:auxiliary-vector detector

A blind adaptive decorrelating detector is proposed which consists of two vectors: one is the pre-assigned spreading code of the desired user and the other is orthogonal to it. The orthogonal vector is adjusted adaptively to minimise the multiple access interference (MAI). This blind adaptive detector requires no more knowledge than does the conventional single-user receiver. Simulation results show that the obtained performance is close to that of the decorrelator     

Energy‐efficient power control for uplink spectrum‐sharing heterogeneous networks

This article considers energy‐efficient power control schemes for interference management in uplink spectrum‐sharing heterogeneous networks that maximize the energy efficiency of users, protect the macro base station, and support users with QoS consideration. In the first scenario, we define the objective function as the weighted sum of the energy efficiencies and develop an efficient global optimization algorithm with global linear and local quadratic rate of convergence to solve the considered problem. To ensure fairness among individual user equipments (UEs) in terms of energy efficiency, we consider the max‐min problem, where the objective is defined as the weighted minimum of the energy efficiencies, and a fractional programming theory and the dual decomposition method are jointly used to solve the problem and investigate an iterative algorithm. As by‐products, we further discuss the global energy efficiency problem and consider near‐optimal schemes. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed algorithms over existing interference management schemes.     

A new privacy and authentication protocol for end‐to‐end mobile users

In this papecr, we propose a new privacy and authentication scheme for end‐to‐end mobile users. There are three goals in our scheme. The first allows two end‐to‐end mobile users to communicate privately each other. The second allows two end‐to‐end mobile users to distribute a session key simply. The third allows two end‐to‐end mobile users to mutually authenticate. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Determinants of Corporate R&D Investment: An Empirical Study Comparing Korea's IT Industry with Its Non‐IT Industry

In our study, we extracted the market, finance, and government factors determining R&D investment of individual firms in the IT industry in Korea. We collected the financial data of 515 individual firms belonging to IT and non‐IT industries between 1980 and 1999 from the Korea Investors Service's database and investigated the empirical relationship between the factors using an ordinary regression model, a fixed effects model, and a random effects model. The main findings of our study are as follows: i) The Herfindahl Index variable representing the degree of market concentration is statistically insignificant in explaining R&D expenditures in the IT manufacturing industry. ii) Assets, which is used as a proxy variable for firm size, have a positive and statistically significant coefficient. These two results suggest that the Schumpeterian Hypothesis may be only partially applied to the IT manufacturing industry in Korea. iii) The dividend variable has a negative value and is statistically significant, indicating that a tendency of high dividends can restrict the internal cash flow for R&D investment. iv) The sales variable representing growth potential shows a positive coefficient. v) The subsidy as a proxy variable for governmental R&D promotion policies is positively correlated with R&D expenditure. This suggests that government policy has played a significant role in promoting R&D activities of IT firms in Korea since 1980. vi) Using a dummy variable, we verified that firms reduced their R&D investments to secure sufficient liquidity under the restructuring pressure during Korea's 1998 and 1999 economic crisis.