The effect of pulsed laser annealing on the nickel silicide formation

The pulsed laser annealing (PLA) is used to assist nickel silicide transformation for Schottky barrier height reduction and tensile strain enhancement and the effect of different laser power are investigated. In this report, a two-step annealing process which combine the conventional rapid thermal annealing with pulsed laser annealing is proposed to achieve a smooth silicon-rich NiSi_x interfacial layer on (1 0 0) silicon. With optimized laser energy, a 0.2 eV Schottky barrier height (SBH) modulation is observed from Schottky diode electrical characterization. Furthermore, PLA provides sufficient effective temperature during silicidation which also lead to increased tensile stress of silicide film than the two-step RTA silicide is also investigated. The SBH modulation and tensile stress enhancement benefits of PLA silicidation are considered as an alternative to the conventional rapid thermal annealing for ultra-scaled devices performance enhancement.     

An intelligent system for wafer bin map defect diagnosis: An empirical study for semiconductor manufacturing

Wafer bin maps (WBMs) that show specific spatial patterns can provide clue to identify process failures in the semiconductor manufacturing. In practice, most companies rely on experienced engineers to visually find the specific WBM patterns. However, as wafer size is enlarged and integrated circuit (IC) feature size is continuously shrinking, WBM patterns become complicated due to the differences of die size, wafer rotation, the density of failed dies and thus human judgments become inconsistent and unreliable. To fill the gaps, this study aims to develop a knowledge-based intelligent system for WBMs defect diagnosis for yield enhancement in wafer fabrication. The proposed system consisted of three parts: graphical user interface, the WBM clustering solution, and the knowledge database. In particular, the developed WBM clustering approach integrates spatial statistics test, cellular neural network (CNN), adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural network, and moment invariant (MI) to cluster different patterns effectively. In addition, an interactive converse interface is developed to present the possible root causes in the order of similarity matching and record the diagnosis know-how from the domain experts into the knowledge database. To validate the proposed WBM clustering solution, twelve different WBM patterns collected in real settings are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in terms of purity, diversity, specificity, and efficiency. The results have shown the validity and practical viability of the proposed system. Indeed, the developed solution has been implemented in a leading semiconductor manufacturing company in Taiwan. The proposed WBM intelligent system can recognize specific failure patterns efficiently and also record the assignable root causes verified by the domain experts to enhance troubleshooting effectively.     

Parallel Domain-decomposed Taiwan Multi-scale Community Ocean Model (PD-TIMCOM)

The Parallel Domain-decomposed Taiwan Multi-scale Community Ocean Model (PD-TIMCOM) was developed to provide a flexible and efficient community ocean model for simulating a variety of idealized and real ocean flows over a wide range of scales and boundary conditions. The model is particularly targeted at resolving multi-scale dynamics in the ocean environment, ranging from small scale turbulence to the global circulation gyres. The novel parallel algorithm improves the efficiency of the Error Vector Propagating (EVP) method, a simple direct solver for the typical pressure Poisson equations in the PD-TIMCOM. The new approach is ideal for multiple processes and takes advantage of parallel domain-decomposition, which can significantly reduce the operational counts and computational costs simultaneously. The speed-up is proportional to the number of domains, thus making the PD-TIMCOM a practical eddy-resolving global ocean model for climate projection. We illustrate the parallel performance based on the 1/4° global adaptation of PD-TIMCOM. Our results show accurate meso-scale variability, the reasonable separation of several western boundary currents from the coast, and the appropriate watermass distribution in the global ocean. Consistent with satellite altimetry, the results also show clear mean fronts in the Kuroshio Extension and extensive Kuroshio–Oyashio interaction. This leads to a quasi-equilibrium eddy field associated with three meandering jets in the Kuroshio Extension and Gulf Stream.     

Thermoelastic Analysis of Functionally Graded Rotating Disks with Variable Thickness Involving Non-Uniform Heat Source

The research aims to investigate thermoelastic behavior of functionally graded rotating disks with variable thickness involving a non-uniform heat source. We assume material properties and thickness of rotating disks to vary in the radial direction. Axisymmetric thermal loads including non-uniform heat source, heat flux, and temperature boundary conditions are considered. To conduct corresponding simulations, two user subroutines are edited and incorporated into the commercial finite-element code ABAQUS. For verification, analytical formulations are derived and solved uniquely by symbolic calculations using the computing software Mathematica. The developed finite-element technique is then verified with very good agreement between results by ABAQUS and Mathematica.     

Adaptive blind receivers for MC‐CDMA communication systems

In this paper, we propose three adaptive blind algorithms for multiuser multicarrier code division multiple‐access systems in multipath fading channels. The proposed adaptive blind receivers are based on the property of the discreteness of the input data symbol and are updated in every symbol interval. We also use the concept that the variance of the output signal approaches to the variance of the desired signal to get the cost function. The three proposed receiver structures are the traditional finite impulse response (FIR) structure, the despreading (DES) filter structure and the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) structure. The advantage of the FIR filter is that the length of the filter weights does not have to be the same length as the spreading code. For the DES filter, the combination of the adaptive weight and the despreading code has the simplest structure than the other two proposed receiver structures. The constrained GSC filter is superior to the other two proposed receiver structures in the environments dominated by multiple‐access interference. By this constraint, the blind GSC filter can guarantee to converge to the desired solution. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness and comparison of the proposed adaptive blind receivers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.