An analytic and accurate model for the threshold voltage of short channel MOSFETs in VLSI

Based on the two-dimensional Poisson equation, the surface potential distribution along the surface channel of a MOSFET has been analytically derived by assuming negligible source and drain junction depths and its minimum potential is then used to determine the threshold voltage. The existence of a minimum surface potential point along the channel of a MOSFET under an applied drain bias is consistent with the numerical results of the two-dimensional analysis. The effects of finite source and drain junction depths have been elegantly included by modifying the depletion capacitance under the gate and the resulted threshold voltage model has been compared to the results of the two-dimensional numerical analysis. It has been shown that excellent agreement between these results has been obtained for wide ranges of substrate doping, gate oxide thickness, channel length (< 1 μm), substrate bias, and drain voltage. Moreover, comparisons between the developed model and the existing experimental data have been made and good agreement has been obtained. The major advantages of the developed model are that no iterations and no adjustable fitting parameters are required. Therefore, this simple and accurate threshold voltage model will become a useful design tool for ultra short channel MOSFETs in future VLSI implementation.     

An orthogonal neural network for function approximation

This paper presents a new single-layer neural network which is based on orthogonal functions. This neural network is developed to avoid the problems of traditional feedforward neural networks such as the determination of initial weights and the numbers of layers and processing elements. The desired output accuracy determines the required number of processing elements. Because weights are unique, the training of the neural network converges rapidly. An experiment in approximating typical continuous and discrete functions is given. The results show that the neural network has excellent performance in convergence time and approximation error.     

The effects of ion implantation and pulsed electron beam anneal on Ge films grown epitaxially on ◃100▹ GaAs

Ge films deposited by vacuum deposition at 425?C are generally p-type. This paper discusses the use of pulsed-electron beam annealing and ion implantation to modify the carrier concentration of such films. Electron beam annealing has been used to reduce the carrier concentration by more than a factor of 30 and n-type films have been obtained by phosphorus implantation and subsequent thermal annealing. TEM, RBS and Hall measurements have been used to characterize the films. The electrical properties of the as-grown films are believed to be defect dominated.     

Surface characterization and platelet adhesion studies on polyethylene surface with hirudin immobilization

Hirudin, a protein composed of 65 or 66 amino acid, is a newly risen anticoagulant agent and has been considered as the most potent thrombin inhibitor. Hirudin can block the active site of thrombin by means of its carboxylic acid reaction with the active regime of thrombin, and becomes a tightly bound complex, and thus controls the formation of thrombus. Hirudin was covalently immobilized onto the water-soluble carbodiimide preactivated and chromic acid oxidized PE surface. Surface chemistry analysis indicated that a certain amount of carboxylic acid groups was generated on the polyethylene surface after oxidation with chromic acid solution. The amount of carboxylic acid functional group increased with the oxidation time. In addition, polyethylene surface was etched by chromic acid solution, and a rougher surface was created. The morphology of oxidized polyethylene surface was similar to each other among the samples with oxidation time from 1 to 8 min. ESCA results indicated the number of hirudin molecules immobilized was constant at the reaction time studied. In vitro platelet adhesion assay indicated the number of adhered platelets on the oxidized polyethylene surface increased significantly after oxidation. In contrast, surface with hirudin immobilization showed a reduction in adhered platelet density than the chromic acid oxidized counterpart due to the decrease of platelet-activating capability by the hirudin–thrombin complex and the differences in the adsorbed protein composition. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers     

Characterization of a 4-methylbenzoate-degrading methanogenic consortium as determined by small-subunit rDNA sequence analysis

A methanogenic consortium that degrades 4-methylbenzoate (MBA) as the sole carbon and energy source was successfully enriched in an upflow anaerobic sludge bed bioreactor and studied. Electron microscopic observation showed that long rods with a distinct collar feature resembling Desulfomonile tiedjei rods were the predominant population, and that these rods formed a close spatial orientation with Methanobrevibacter-like bacteria. In addition, thin filaments and bamboo-shaped filaments that highly resembled the acetoclastic Methanosaeta were also frequently observed. A 16S rDNA clone library was constructed for the domain Bacteria, and 20 sequence types or operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were found out of 139 clones screened. Phylogenetic analysis classified these 20 nearly full-length OTUs into the delta (50.3% of total clones) and gamma (4.3%) subdivisions of the division Proteobacteria, the green non-sulfur bacteria subdivision I (7.2%), Cytophagales (7.2%), Planctomycetes (5.7%), gram-positive low G + C group (8.6%), candidate divisions OP8, OP10 and OP11 (9.3%), and a novel candidate division MBA1 (7.2%) that had an interdivisional sequence similarity less than 75%. However, only 3 OTUs had a sequence similarity higher than 90% to known isolates or environmental 16S rDNA clones, suggesting that the microbial community was diversified and largely unidentified. In particular, those 8 OTUs found in the delta-Proteobacteria were either clustered into novel groups or showed a low sequence similarity to closely related bacteria. It is highly possible that the delta-Proteobacteria were the long rods with a distinct collar feature observed microscopically, and together with the methanogens were mainly responsible for the syntrophic degradation of MBA. The unique and novel microbial populations identified explained the requirement of a long start-up period of up to 426 d for the MBA-degrading consortium.     

Tiered Algorithm for Distributed Process Quiescence and Termination Detection

The Tiered Algorithm is presented for time-efficient and message-efficient detection of process termination. It employs a global invariant of equality between process production and consumption at each level of process nesting to detect termination, regardless of execution interleaving order and network transit time. Correctness is validated for arbitrary process launching hierarchies, including launch-in-transit hazards, where processes are created dynamically based on runtime conditions for remote execution. The performance of the Tiered Algorithm is compared to three existing schemes with comparable capabilities, namely, the Chandrasekaran and Venkatesan (CV), Lai, Tseng, and Dong (LTD), and Credit termination detection algorithms. For synchronization of X tasks terminating in E epochs of idle processing, the tiered algorithm is shown to incur O(E) message count complexity and O(T lg T) message bit complexity while incurring detection latency corresponding to only integer addition and comparison. The synchronization performance in terms of message overhead, detection operations, and storage requirements are evaluated and compared across numerous task creation and termination hierarchies.     

Iterative low-complexity multi-user detection for asynchronous multi-sequence signalling based bit-interleaved coded modulation code division multiple access systems

An uplink direct sequence spread spectrum communications systems employing a multi-sequence model over a quasi-static frequency-selective fading channel is considered. In analogy with bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) technique, a group of bits at the output of a bit-wise interleaver is mapped uniquely to a complex signalling vector belonging to an orthogonal plane sequence modulation signal space, which is constructed over a set of expanded signature sequences. This transmission system provides not only bandwidth efficiency offered by additional signal planes but also time diversity resulting from the BICM technique. It is observed that at high system traffic load error performance could degrade substantially due to user cross-correlations, multi-access asynchronism as well as channel frequency selectivity. The authors employ a 'turbo principle' receiver, consisting of a soft interference cancellation scheme, soft demappers and maximum a posteriori decoders, to avert this capacity loss by exploiting the serially concatenating structure at the transmitter. After simple mathematical manipulation, a soft space-time linear minimum mean-square error multi-user detector could even be explored on the basis of per signal plane per user. Both analytical performance-bound and computer simulation of the proposed framework in terms of bit-error rate (BER) are revealed. Further, performance comparisons with convolutionally coded and conventional bandwidth-efficient coded direct sequence code division multiple access systems under the same system conditions are illustrated. The authors have also investigated the impact of labelling maps on the BER performance.     

A Fiber Splicing-Plane-Inspection Technique Using Lens–Fiber Interference for the Cascaded Fiber Fabrication

In this paper, a novel inspection technique for the cascaded fiber fabrication is proposed to improve the coupling performance of such fibers. Instead of using a direct-monitoring method, an indirect technique with the help of the ray tracing and the lens-fiber interference is used. By calculating the optical-path length of the light rays passing through the fiber, the interference fringes and light intensity can be counted. Then, the splicing plane of the cascaded fiber can be determined by observing the difference between the two fiber sections. Simulations and experiments have been performed to find the splicing plane. Finally, the accuracy of fabrication can be improved from 10 to about 1 mum; thus, the coupling loss due to the fabrication process can be reduced.     

Wide-band balun using composite right/left-handed transmission line

A wide-band balun is developed using a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) at 2 GHz. It is composed of a Wilkinson power divider and two phase-adjusting transmission lines, namely the CRLH TL and the conventional TL. The input reflection coefficient is better than -10 dB from 1 to 4 GHz. Over the frequency range of 1.24-3.58 GHz, an amplitude imbalance of less than 0.7 dB and a phase error of less than plusmn10deg have been experimentally demonstrated.