Effect of Colloidal Silver on Optical Transmittance Characteristics of Bulk Cadmium Zinc Telluride Crystals

Colloidal silver is observed to affect the transmittance of p-type Cd_1−y Zn _y Te (CZT) single-crystal substrate material at room temperature. The optical transmittance spectra have been analyzed in the near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) regions. The transmittance characteristics of CZT showed significant reduction in absorption due to split-off valance band transitions in the NIR region and intervalence band absorption in the MIR region upon coating CZT substrates with silver paste. This reduction in absorption has been explained to be due to the compensation of the acceptor defects (native and foreign). Silver atoms incorporated from the silver coating help in compensation of these defects. A similar effect on transmittance characteristics of mercury cadmium telluride (MCT) epilayers grown on CZT substrates after coating silver paste on the CZT substrate side was also observed. An improvement in the transmittance of CZT substrates after the application of silver paste was observed. A similar improvement in transmittance is usually achieved by annealing the substrates in a Cd/Zn atmosphere. The results are explained by considering the formation of neutral complexes of acceptors (cadmium vacancies) and the interstitial silver. This study also points to the important conclusion that silver paste on CZT should be applied with caution for measurement purposes since it diffuses even at room temperature and modifies the optical characteristics.     

Kaschierverfahren für feste Beschichtungsstoffe im Kostenvergleich

The cost comparison of modern coating, systems published in this magazine some years ago is being brought up to date. Subsequent to part 1 on non-thermal and thermo-coating processes, double-band pressing and short-cycle pressing will be described. After defining individual types of costs used in this comparison, they are applied to the processes mentioned and, finally, discussed.     

A data mining approach to classify serum creatinine values in patients undergoing continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis

Wireless Networks - Continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) is a treatment used by patients in the end-stage of chronic kidney diseases. Those patients need to be monitored using blood...     

An efficiently implementable maximum likelihood decoding algorithm for tailbiting codes

Convolutional tailbiting codes are widely used in mobile systems to perform error-correcting strategies of data and control information. Unlike zero tail codes, tailbiting codes do not reset the encoder memory at the end of each data block, improving the code efficiency for short block lengths. The objective of this work is to propose a low-complexity maximum likelihood decoding algorithm for convolutional tailbiting codes based on the Viterbi algorithm. The performance of the proposed solution is compared to that of another maximum likelihood decoding strategy which is based on the A* algorithm. The computational load and the memory requirements of both algorithms are also analysed in order to perform a fair comparison between them. Numerical results considering realistic transmission conditions show the lower memory requirements of the proposed solution, which makes its implementation more suitable for devices with limited resources.     

Variational optical flow computation in real time.

This paper investigates the usefulness of bidirectional multigrid methods for variational optical flow computations. Although these numerical schemes are among the fastest methods for solving equation systems, they are rarely applied in the field of computer vision. We demonstrate how to employ those numerical methods for the treatment of variational optical flow formulations and show that the efficiency of this approach even allows for real-time performance on standard PCs. As a representative for variational optic flow methods, we consider the recently introduced combined local-global method. It can be considered as a noise-robust generalization of the Horn and Schunck technique. We present a decoupled, as well as a coupled, version of the classical Gauss-Seidel solver, and we develop several multgrid implementations based on a discretization coarse grid approximation. In contrast, with standard bidirectional multigrid algorithms, we take advantage of intergrid transfer operators that allow for nondyadic grid hierarchies. As a consequence, no restrictions concerning the image size or the number of traversed levels have to be imposed. In the experimental section, we juxtapose the developed multigrid schemes and demonstrate their superior performance when compared to unidirectional multgrid methods and nonhierachical solvers. For the well-known 316 x 252 Yosemite sequence, we succeeded in computing the complete set of dense flow fields in three quarters of a second on a 3.06-GHz Pentium4 PC. This corresponds to a frame rate of 18 flow fields per second which outperforms the widely-used Gauss-Seidel method by almost three orders of magnitude.     

Thermoelectric Properties of NaCo<Subscript>2–<Emphasis Type="Italic">x</Emphasis></Subscript>Fe<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">x</Emphasis></Subscript>O<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">y</Emphasis></Subscript>

NaCo₂O₄ has one of the highest figures of merit among all ceramic thermoelectric materials. Because of its large thermopower and low resistivity, the ceramic oxide NaCo₂O₄ is a promising candidate for potential thermoelectric applications. NaCo₂O₄ is, moreover, a ceramic compound with high decomposition temperature and chemical stability in air and it does not contain any toxic elements. Like all 3-d transition ions, Co ions have multiple spin and oxidation states. In this investigation, thermopower and electrical conductivity of NaCo₂O₄ as a function of substitution of Co by Fe ions were measured. Fe substitution for Co causes resistivity to increase, whereas the Seebeck coefficient remained nearly invariant, especially above 330 K. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Properties of Indium-Doped ZnO Films Prepared in an Oxygen-Rich Plasma

Indium-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:In) films were prepared in an Ar:O₂ plasma by reactive magnetron sputtering. The x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns presented the crystal structures of ZnO:In films, while transmission spectra and photoluminescence (PL) spectra showed the changed band gap and the visible emission from defects, as compared to the PL spectra of undoped ZnO films. It was concluded that the increase of substrate temperature enhanced the crystal quality of ZnO:In films; the incorporation of In made the c-axis constant of the samples larger than that of undoped ZnO films; the blue emission was due to the transition from an unknown donor level by indium doping to the valance band; and the orange-green emission originated from acceptor defects (O_Zn) formed in the O-rich plasma. Meanwhile, the current- voltage characteristics and persistent photoconductivity phenomenon also could be explained by the increased acceptor defects (O_Zn) that formed when the substrate temperature was increased.     

Millimeter-wave Detectors Based on Antenna-coupled Low-barrier Schottky Diodes

The principles of construction of millimeter wave detectors based on low-barrier Schottky diodes and planar antennas are discussed. The modified planar slot antenna with low beam spillover at the resonant frequency of 94 GHz has been developed. Experiments have been carried out to investigate detecting characteristics of the diodes with differential contact resistances \( R_{j} = 1 \div 1000\;{\text{k}}\Omega \) at zero bias. Experimental data are well correspond to calculations in a simple model of detector. At \( R_{j} = 20 \div 100\;{\text{k}}\,\OmegaΩ \) the maximum of rf-to-dc voltage sensitivity - more than 10000 V/W - is obtained. At lower values of \( R_{j} = 2 \div 6\;{\text{k}}\,\Omega Ω \) a better noise equivalent power (NEP), around 10^?12 W Hz^?1/2, is predicted.     

Multiple LDPC-Encoder Layered Space-Time-Frequency Architectures for OFDM MIMO Multiplexing

This paper is focused on the study of layered space-time-frequency (LSTF) architectures with channel coding for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing systems for high speed wireless communications over a frequency-selective fading channel. In order to achieve the available spatial, temporal and frequency diversities, and also make the system implementation feasible for high speed OFDM MIMO multiplexing, a novel LSTF architecture with multiple channel encoders is proposed with each independently coded layer being threaded in the three-dimensional space-time-frequency transmission resource array. Non-iterative receiver is adopted which consists of list sphere detector and irregular low-density parity-check codes as the constituent codes. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed multiple-encoder LSTF architecture is very close to that of the conventional single-encoder LSTF where coding is applied across the whole information stream. However, due to the use of multiple parallel encoders/decoders with a shorter codeword length, the proposed LSTF architecture has much lower hardware processing speed and complexity than the conventional LSTF.     

Recognition of the Communication Signals Using Particle Swarm Optimization and Support Vector Machine Based on the Multi-Resolution Wavelet Analysis

Automatic recognition of the communication signals plays an important role for various applications. This paper presents a novel intelligent system for recognition of digital communication signals. This system includes three main modules: feature extraction module, classifier module and optimization module. In the feature extraction module, multi-resolution wavelet analysis is proposed for extraction the suitable features. In the classifier module, a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) based classifier is proposed as the multi-class classifier. For optimization module, a particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed to improve the generalization performance of the recognizer. In this module, it is optimized the SVM classifier design by searching for the best value of the parameters that tune its discriminant function, and upstream by looking for the best subset of features that feed the classifier. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid intelligent system has high performance even at very low signal to noise ratios (SNRs).