Lycopodium Spores: A Naturally Manufactured,Superrobust Biomaterial for Drug Delivery

Herein, the exploration of natural plant‐based “spores” for the encapsulation of macromolecules as a drug delivery platform is reported. Benefits of encapsulation with natural “spores” include highly uniform size distribution and materials encapsulation by relatively economical and simple versatile methods. The natural spores possess unique micromeritic properties and an inner cavity for significant macromolecule loading with retention of therapeutic spore constituents. In addition, these natural spores can be used as advanced materials to encapsulate a wide variety of pharmaceutical drugs, chemicals, cosmetics, and food supplements. Here, for the first time a strategy to utilize natural spores as advanced materials is developed to encapsulate macromolecules by three different microencapsulation techniques including passive, compression, and vacuum loading. The natural spore formulations developed by these techniques are extensively characterized with respect to size uniformity, shape, encapsulation efficiency, and localization of macromolecules in the spores. In vitro release profiles of developed spore formulations in simulated gastric and intestinal fluids have also been studied, and alginate coatings to tune the release profile using vacuum‐loaded spores have been explored. These results provide the basis for further exploration into the encapsulation of a wide range of therapeutic molecules in natural plant spores.     

A 2.4-GHz Low-Power Low-IF Receiver and Direct-Conversion Transmitter in 0.18-μm CMOS for IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN Applications

In this paper, a low-power low-IF receiver and a direct-conversion transmitter (DCT) suitable for the IEEE standard 802.15.4 radio system at the 2.4-GHz band are presented in 0.18-mum deep n-well CMOS technology. By using vertical NPN (V-NPN) bipolar junction transistors in the baseband analog circuits of the low-IF receiver, the image rejection performance is improved and the power consumption is reduced. In addition, by applying the V-NPN current mirrored technique in a DCT, the carrier leakage is reduced and the linearity performance is improved. The receiver has 10 dB of noise figure, -15 dBm of third-order input intercept point, and 35 dBc of image rejection. The transmitter has more than -2 dBm of transmit output power, -35 dBc of local oscillator leakage, and -46 dBc of the transmit third harmonic component. The receiver and transmitter dissipate 6 and 9 mA from a 1.8-V supply, respectively     

W-band divide-by-3 frequency divider using 0.1 /spl mu/m InAlAs/InGaAs metamorphic HEMT technology

A W-band divide-by-3 frequency divider with wide bandwidth and low power dissipation is presented using harmonic injection-locking technique. A cascode FET is employed for a self-oscillating second-harmonic mixer which is injection-locked by third-harmonic input to obtain the division order of three. The fabricated frequency divider using 0.1 /spl mu/m GaAs metamorphic HEMT technology shows superior performance such as large bandwidth of 6.1 GHz around 83.1 GHz (7.3%) under small DC power consumption of 12 mW.     

Harmonic decomposition in PDE-based denoising technique for magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography

Recent progress in magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) research via simulation and biological tissue phantom studies have shown that conductivity images with higher spatial resolution and accuracy are achievable. In order to apply MREIT to human subjects, one of the important remaining problems to be solved is to reduce the amount of the injection current such that it meets the electrical safety regulations. However, by limiting the amount of the injection current according to the safety regulations, the measured MR data such as the z-component of magnetic flux density Bz in MREIT tend to have low SNR and get usually degraded in their accuracy due to the nonideal data acquisition system of an MR scanner. Furthermore, numerical differentiations of the measured Bz required by the conductivity image reconstruction algorithms tend to further deteriorate the quality and accuracy of the reconstructed conductivity images. In this paper, we propose a denoising technique that incorporates a harmonic decomposition. The harmonic decomposition is especially suitable for MREIT due to the physical characteristics of Bz. It effectively removes systematic and random noises, while preserving important key features in the MR measurements, so that improved conductivity images can be obtained. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed denoising technique is effective for MREIT, producing significantly improved quality of conductivity images. The denoising technique will be a valuable tool in MREIT to reduce the amount of the injection current when it is combined with an improved MREIT pulse sequence.     

Dielectric reliability of stacked Al2O3–HfO2 MIS capacitors with cylinder type for improving DRAM data retention characteristics

Dielectric reliability in Al₂O₃(2–3.1nm)–HfO₂(3nm) stack capacitor with Metal–Insulator–Si(MIS) structure is investigated in this paper. We propose an optimized capacitor process through the Time–Dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) data under various process conditions. Furthermore, due to asymmetric current at both negative and positive voltage stress polarities, we show different lifetime extrapolation by a fluence–driven model. As a result, the maximum allowed operating voltage is projected to be 1.7V (failure rate 10ppm during 10year @ 85°C) for Data “0” retention lifetime.     

Visual Cryptography Based on an Interferometric Encryption Technique

This paper presents a new method for a visual cryptography scheme that uses phase masks and an interferometer. To encrypt a binary image, we divided it into an arbitrary number of slides and encrypted them using an XOR process with a random key or keys. The phase mask for each encrypted image was fabricated under the proposed phase‐assignment rule. For decryption, phase masks were placed on any path of the Mach‐Zehnder interferometer. Through optical experiments, we confirmed that a secret binary image that was sliced could be recovered by the proposed method.     

Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Hierarchical Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) have emerged as one of the most important technologies, driven by the development of powerful multimedia device such as CMOS. WMSNs require several factors such as resource constraints, specific QoS, high bandwidth and so on. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical heterogeneous network model based routing protocol for WMSNs. In our proposal, proposed network model is classified into monitoring class, delivery class and aggregation class. Also we define two kinds of the routing path in order to ensure bandwidth and QoS. In simulation results, we illustrate the performance of our proposal.     

A novel hybrid silica wide-band amplifier covering S+C+L bands with 105-nm bandwidth

We report a novel hybrid optical amplifier covering S+C+L bands with 105-nm total bandwidth using a silica fiber. The principle of amplification is based on the stimulated radiative transition of Er-ions for C-band and on the stimulated Raman scattering for S- and L-band, respectively. In this letter, we analyze the amplification characteristics for two types of active fiber mediums through numerical simulation. One is a silica fiber configured with Er-doped cladding and Ge-doped core and the other is a medium consisting of Er-doped fiber and dispersion-compensating fiber. By optimizing parameters such as fiber length and pump power, we newly achieve wide-band amplification with 105-nm bandwidth showing a flat gain characteristic over the entire S+C+L bands.     

Suppression of Ge–O and Ge–N bonding at Ge–HfO2 and Ge–TiO2 interfaces by deposition onto plasma-nitrided passivated Ge substrates: Integration issues Ge gate stacks into advanced devices

A study of changes in nano-scale morphology of thin films of nano-crystalline transition metal (TM) elemental oxides, HfO₂ and TiO₂, on plasma-nitrided Ge(1 0 0) substrates, and Si(1 0 0) substrates with ultra-thin (0.8 nm) plasma-nitrided Si suboxide, SiO_x, x < 2, or SiON interfacial layers is presented. Near edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (NEXAS) has been used to determine nano-scale morphology of these films by Jahn-Teller distortion removal of band edge d-state degeneracies. These results identify a new and novel application for NEXAS based on the resonant character of the respective O K₁ and N K₁ edge absorptions. This paper also includes a brief discussion of the integration issues for the introduction of this Ge breakthrough into advanced semiconductor circuits and systems. This includes a comparison of nano-crystalline and non-crystalline dielectrics, as well as issues relative to metal gates.