Durable electrochromic coatings prepared from electronically conductive poly(3HT-co-3TPP)-silica hybrid materials

In this paper, a series of organic-inorganic hybrid materials, consisting of heterocyclic conjugated poly(3-hexylthiophene), P3HT, network, and silica particles, were successfully prepared for electrochromic studies. First, the heterocyclic co-polymer of poly[3-hexylthiophene-co-N-(3-trimethoxysilylpropyl) pyrrole], P(3HT-co-3TPP), containing trimethoxysilyl functional groups in the co-polymer backbone as the sol-gel precursor were prepared by conventional oxidative polymerization. Subsequently, P(3HT-co-3TPP)-silica hybrid sol-gel materials in the form of coatings were prepared by baking the microslides and ITO-coated electrodes that had been cast with homogeneous blending solutions containing co-polymer, acid-dopant, tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS), and a few drops of water. The microstructures of silica particles formed in the P(3HT-co-3TPP)-silica hybrid materials were investigated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The as-prepared hybrid coatings had improved adhesion capability on inorganic glass substrates relative to the pure P3HT on the basis of electrochemical cyclic voltammetric studies and Scotch tape test evaluations. During potential cycling, the film color of P(3HT-co-3TPP)-silica hybrid materials and P3HT coated on ITO electrode changed from orange yellow (i.e., reduced form) to dark blue (i.e., oxidized form) as the redox reactions proceeded. Effects of the material composition of P3HT along with hybrid materials on the electrochemistry, spectroelectrochemistry, thermal stability, and electrical conductivity were also studied.     

Required bandwidth, unwanted emission, and data power efficiencyfor residual and suppressed carrier systems-a comparative study

This paper presents a new concept for required bandwidth along with a method for computing this bandwidth and the associated undesired emission for the classes of PCM/PSK/PM, PCM/PM and BPSK signals. The PCM/PSK/PM signals considered here employ either a square wave or sine-wave subcarrier with NRZ data format. On the other hand, the PCM/PM and BPSK signals use either a Bi-phase or an NRZ data format. Furthermore, the maximum allowable required bandwidth in the presence of noise and the data power efficiency for these modulation schemes will also be investigated. The term “data power efficiency” as considered in this paper consists of two principal components, namely, the amount of power contained in the data channel, and the symbol signal-to-noise ratio (SSNR) degradation due to the presence of intersymbol interference (ISI) for a specified required bandwidth. This paper evaluates both of these components numerically for the modulation schemes considered and the results are then compared. Furthermore, the impact of baseband filtering on the required bandwidth is also investigated in this paper     

High Electromagnetic Shielding of a 2.5-Gbps Plastic Transceiver Module Using Dispersive Multiwall Carbon Nanotubes

A novel polyimide film, consisting of finely dispersed multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) in an ionic liquid (IL), is demonstrated to be high shielding effectiveness (SE) for use in packaging a 2.5-Gbps plastic transceiver module. The IL-dispersed MWCNT composite exhibits a high SE of 40 ~ 46 dB. By comparison, the composite fabricated by nondispersive process requires a higher loading of MWCNTs at 50 wt- % than the IL-dispersed process at only 30 wt-%. The electromagnetic susceptibility (EMS) performance is experimentally evaluated by the eye diagram and bit-error-rate for a 2.5-Gbps lightwave transmission system. The package housing fabricated by the dispersive MWCNT composites shows an enhanced EMS performance, an improved mask margin, and a lower-power penalty. These results indicate that the IL-dispersed MWCNT composites are suitable for packaging low-cost and high-performance optical transceiver modules used in the fiber to the home lightwave transmission systems.     

OBDD-based network reliability calculation

An efficient method for evaluating the terminal-pair reliability based on an edge expansion tree and using an OBDD (ordered binary decision diagram) is presented. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on the larger benchmarks collected in previous work. One notable case of the experimental results for a 2×20 lattice network is that the number of nodes in the OBDD is linearly proportional to the number of stages. This is significantly superior to previous algorithms which are based on the sum of disjoint products and has exponential complexity     

Motor control and torque coordination of an electric vehicle actuated by two in-wheel motors

In this research, an electric vehicle actuated by two in-wheel DC motors is developed. By properly coordinating the motor torques, both drive-by-wire and electrical steering can be achieved. Two critical issues respectively related to the design of motor controllers and the coordination of the two motor torques under control saturation are investigated in this study. Firstly, as for the in-wheel motors that are used for driving and steering simultaneously, their operation covers a wider dynamic range that forward acceleration (deceleration), and reverse acceleration (deceleration) may occur alternately. To perform driving and steering smoothly and efficiently, each motor should be switched to an appropriate mode to generate the torque demanded. Secondly, during the high-speed maneuvering, the high back-emf voltage in the motor coil substantially reduces the motor’s torque generating capability. Since the electrical steering depends on the differential torque of two wheels, when electrical steering is demanded in this case, torque/current saturation may occur in either one of the motors and the electrical steering performance could be seriously degraded. To address these issues, controllers of two levels are proposed. For the low-level controller (the motor controller), it operates the motor automatically in an appropriate mode for performance and efficiency consideration. An input transformation is introduced to cancel the nonlinearity in current dynamics so as to control the motor torque easily and precisely regardless of mode switching. For the high-level controller (the torque coordination controller), besides generating reference commands to the low-level controllers, during control saturation it can also properly re-distributes control signals to maintain consistent steering performance and provides compensation for integrator windup. The control system is implemented and the performance is experimentally and numerically validated.     

Influence of La substitution on the electrical properties of metal-ferroelectric (BiFeO3)-insulator (CeO2)-semiconductor nonvolatile memory structures

Metal-multiferroic (La-substituted BiFeO₃)-insulator (CeO₂)-semiconductor (MFIS) capacitors has been fabricated. The crystalline phase and amount of La³⁺ substitution at Bi-site were investigated by XRD and XPS in the postannealing temperature range from 500 to 700 °C, respectively. The microstructure and interfacial layer between CeO₂ and Si substrate were characterized by HRTEM. The memory windows as functions of insulator film thickness and DC power for La were measured. The maximum memory window is about 1.9 V under ±6 V applied voltage. The ferroelectric polarization increases with increasing substitution amount. The morphologies of La-substituted BiFeO₃ films were also studied by AFM.     

The impacts of high tensile stress CESL and geometry design on device performance and reliability for 90 nm SOI nMOSFETs

The thickness effects of high-tensile-stress contact etch stop layer (HS CESL) and impact of layout geometry (length of diffusion and gate width) on mobility enhancement of 100/(100) 90 nm SOI nMOSFETs were studied in detail. Additionally, we also inspected the low frequency characteristic with low-frequency noise investigation for FB-SOI nMOSFETs. Experimental results show that devices with 1100 Å HS CESL possess worse characteristics and hot-carrier-induced degradations than devices with 700 Å HS CESL due to serious stress-induced defects happen. The lower plateau of Lorentzian noise spectrum observed from input-referred voltage noise (S_vg) implies higher leakage current for the devices with 1100 Å HS CESL. On the other hand, we found that devices with narrow gate widths possess higher driving capacity because of larger fringing electric fields and higher compressive stress in direction perpendicular to the channel. Owing to the more serious impact of compressive stress in direction parallel to the channel, the device performance was degraded particularly for devices with shorter LOD.     

Fast Intra-Network and Cross-Layer Handover (FINCH) for WiMAX and Mobile Internet

To support fast and efficient handovers in mobile WiMAX, we propose Fast Intra-Network and Cross-layer Handover (FINCH) for intradomain (intra-CSN) mobility management. FINCH is a complementary protocol to Mobile IP (MIP), which deals with interdomain (inter-CSN) mobility management in mobile WiMAX. FINCH can reduce not only the handover latency but also the end-to-end latency for MIP. Paging extension for FINCH is also proposed to enhance the energy efficiency. The proposed FINCH is especially suitable for real-time services in frequent handover environment, which is important for future mobile WiMAX networks. In addition, FINCH is a generic protocol for other IEEE 802-series standards. This is especially beneficial for the integration of heterogeneous networks, for instance, the integration of WiMAX and WiFi networks. Both mathematical analysis and simulation are developed to analyze and compare the performance of FINCH with other protocols. The results show that FINCH can support fast and efficient link layer and intradomain handovers. The numerical results can also be used to select proper network configurations.     

Metal‐Free Growth of Nanographene on Silicon Oxides for Transparent Conducting Applications

Conventional methods to prepare large‐area graphene for transparent conducting electrodes involve the wet etching of the metal catalyst and the transfer of the graphene film, which can degrade the film through the creation of wrinkles, cracks, or tears. The resulting films may also be obscured by residual metal impurities and polymer contaminants. Here, it is shown that direct growth of large‐area flat nanographene films on silica can be achieved at low temperature (400 °C) by chemical vapor deposition without the use of metal catalysts. Raman spectroscopy and TEM confirm the formation of a hexagonal atomic network of sp²‐bonded carbon with a domain size of about 3–5 nm. Further spectroscopic analysis reveals the formation of SiC between the nanographene and SiO₂, indicating that SiC acts as a catalyst. The optical transmittance of the graphene films is comparable with transferred CVD graphene grown on Cu foils. Despite the fact that the electrical conductivity is an order of magnitude lower than CVD graphene grown on metals, the sheet resistance remains 1–2 orders of magnitude better than well‐reduced graphene oxides.     

Temperature and current-density distributions in flip-chip solder joints with Cu traces

Three-dimensional simulation was performed to investigate the temperature and current density distribution in flip-chip solder joints with Cu traces during current stressing. It was found that the Cu traces can reduce the Joule heating effect significantly at high stressing currents. When the solder joints were stressed by 0.6 A, the average temperature increases in solder bumps with the Al traces was 26.7°C, and it was deceased to 18.7°C for the solder joint with the Cu traces. Hot spots exist in the solder near the entrance points of the Al or Cu traces. The temperature increases in the hot spot were 29.3°C and 20.6°C, for solder joints with the Al traces and Cu traces, respectively. As for current density distribution, the maximum current density inside the solder decreased slightly from 1.66×10⁵ A/cm² to 1.46×10⁵ A/cm² when the Al traces were replaced by the Cu traces. The solder joints with the Cu traces exhibited lower Joule heating and current crowding effects than those with the Al traces, which was mainly attributed to the lower electrical conductivity of the Cu traces. Therefore, the solder joints with the Cu traces are expected to have better electromigration resistance.