Reverse‐Conducting IGBT Using MEMS Technology on the Wafer Back Side

In this paper, we present a 600‐V reverse conducting insulated gate bipolar transistor (RC‐IGBT) for soft and hard switching applications, such as general purpose inverters. The newly developed RC‐IGBT uses the deep reactive‐ion etching trench technology without the thin wafer process technology. Therefore, a freewheeling diode (FWD) is monolithically integrated in an IGBT chip. The proposed RC‐IGBT operates as an IGBT in forward conducting mode and as an FWD in reverse conducting mode. Also, to avoid the destructive failure of the gate oxide under the surge current and abnormal conditions, a protective Zener diode is successfully integrated in the gate electrode without compromising the operation performance of the IGBT.     

Cyanate Ester-Based Encapsulation Material for High-Temperature Applications

Cyanate ester resin-based composite materials have been proposed as potential encapsulants for high-temperature applications. The objective of this study is to develop a cyanate ester-based encapsulant, which can also serve as a flip-chip underfill as well as for traditional encapsulation. Two different materials, quartz and alumina fillers, have been studied. The impact of shapes and sizes of the fillers on the overall thermomechanical properties has been investigated. The adhesion strengths of the materials to the ceramic substrate, Kovar lid, and silicon die have also been characterized. The modulus of the resin and the shape of the fillers play a pivotal role in minimizing thermal stress, generated by coefficient of thermal expansion mismatches. Smaller filler particles were found to have better adhesion to the cyanate ester resin. The high-temperature performance of the cyanate ester-based encapsulants was evaluated by thermal aging at 300°C for up to 500 h.     

Spatial and Temporal Resolution of Conjugate Conduction-Convection Thermal Resistance

A transient, 3-D solution to the heat conduction equation with a small square heat source on an adiabatic surface and Newtonian convection on the opposite side was obtained using Green's functions. The geometry conservatively models conduction spreading resistance encountered by small, concentrated heat sources such as light-emitting diodes and integrated circuits in general, mounted to larger substrates such as the base of a heat sink experiencing Newtonian convection. The solution is presented for a range of nondimensional parameters. Superposition techniques can also be used to extend the applicability of the current solution to the temperature prediction of arbitrary heat flux patterns in certain cases. This technique only holds for applications where the heat transfer coefficient is not a function of temperature, such as thermal management strategies designed to rely on forced convection with air.     

Effects of prestrain,rate of prestrain,and temperature on the stress-relaxation behavior of eutectic Sn-3.5Ag solder joints

Stress-relaxation studies on eutectic Sn-Ag solder (Sn-3.5Ag in wt.%) joints were carried out at various temperatures after imposing different amounts and rates of simple shear strain. Stress-relaxation parameters were evaluated by subjecting geometrically realistic solder joints with a nominal joint thickness of ∼100 μm and a 1 mm × 1 mm solder-joint area. The peak shear stress during preloading and residual shear stress resulting from stress relaxation were higher at the low-temperature extremes than those at high-temperature extremes. Also, those values increased with increasing simple shear strain and the rate of simple shear strain imposed prior to the stress-relaxation events. The relaxation stress is insensitive to simple shear strain at 150°C, but at lower temperatures, a faster rate of simple shear strain causes a higher relaxed-stress value. The resulting deformation structures observed from the solder-joint side surfaces were also strongly affected by these parameters. At high temperature, grain-boundary sliding effects were commonly observed. At low temperature, intense shear bands dominated, and no grain-boundary sliding effects were observed.     

Metal gate-HfO/sub 2/ MOS structures on GaAs substrate with and without Si interlayer

In this letter, we studied the effects of post-deposition anneal (PDA) time and Si interface control layer (ICL) on the electrical characteristics of the MOS capacitor with high-/spl kappa/ (HfO/sub 2/) material on GaAs. Thin equivalent oxide thickness (EOT<3 nm) with excellent capacitance-voltage (C-V) characteristics has been obtained. The thickness of the Si ICL and PDA time were correlated with C-V characteristics. It was found that high temperature Si ICL deposition and longer PDA time at 600/spl deg/C improved the C-V shape, leakage current, and especially frequency dispersion (<5%).     

Hybrid ring coupler for W-band MMIC applications using MEMS technology

The hybrid ring coupler was designed and fabricated on a GaAs substrate using surface micromachining techniques, which adopted dielectric-supported air-gapped microstrip line (DAML) structure. The fabrication process of DAML is compatible with the standard monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) techniques, and the hybrid ring coupler can be simply integrated into a plane-structural MMIC. The fabricated hybrid ring coupler shows wideband characteristics of the coupling loss of 3.57 /spl plusmn/ 0.22dB and the transmission loss of 3.80 /spl plusmn/ 0.08dB across the measured frequency range of 85 to 105GHz. The isolation characteristics and output phase differences are -34dB and 180/spl plusmn/1/spl deg/, at 94GHz, respectively.     

Fabrication of the flexible pentacene thin-film transistors on 304 and 430 stainless steel (SS) substrate

Flexible organic thin-film transistors (OTFT) were fabricated on 304 and 430 stainless steel (SS) substrate with aluminum oxide as a gate insulator and pentacene as an organic semiconductor. Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process was used to study the effect of the SS roughens on the dielectric properties of the gate insulator and OTFT characteristics. The surface roughness was decreased from 33.8 nm for 304 SS and 19.5 nm for 430 SS down to ～2.5 nm. The leakage current of the metal–insulator–metal (MIM) structure (Au/Al₂O₃/SS) was reduced with polishing. Mobility and on/off ratio of pentacene TFT with bare SS showed a wide range of values between 0.005 and 0.36 cm²/Vs and between 10³ and 10⁵ depending on the location in the substrate. Pentacene TFTs on polished SS showed an improved performance with a mobility of 0.24–0.42 cm²/Vs regardless of the location in the substrate and on/off ratio of ～10⁵. With self assembled monolayer formation of octadecyltrichlorosilane (OTS) on insulator surface, mobility and on/off ratio of pentacene TFT on polished SS was improved up to 0.85cm²/Vs and ～10⁶. I–V characteristics of pentacene TFT with OTS treated Al₂O₃/304 SS was also obtained in the bent state with a bending diameter (D) of 24, 45 or 70 mm and it was confirmed that the device performed well both in the linear regime and the saturation regime.     

Multiuser adaptive transmission technique for time-varying frequency-selective fading channels

This paper proposes an efficient multiuser adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme that considers inevitable feedback delay by employing short-term and long-term channel state information (CSI) in time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. By taking the statistic of the true signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a given predicted SNR value into account, the required transmit power to meet the target packet-error-rate (PER) can be obtained and used for user selection, power allocation, and modulation and coding set (MCS) selection. In addition, a simple and useful approximation method of obtaining the required transmit power is proposed. The performance of the proposed scheme is shown to be much better than that of conventional schemes without considering the feedback delay or the prediction error. The proposed scheme can also reduce the feedback resource while maintaining the system throughput by allocating different feedback resources to different users according to their prediction error variances.     

Efficient Utilization of Available Channels in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks

In case of dynamic spectrum access networks, how to efficiently utilize the dynamically available bandwidth is very important to enhance the performance of the networks. In this paper, we propose an Error Adaptive MAC protocol which adaptively changes its transmission mode according to the channel status. Using the cognitive radio technology, additional channels are assumed to be randomly available for data transmission. When the channel error rate is relatively high, those additional channels are utilized for error recovery; otherwise, the extra channels can be used to increase the throughput if the wireless medium is stable and reliable. We formulate an analytical model to study the dynamics of our adaptive MAC protocol, and using simulation, show our proposed method can significantly enhance the throughput of dynamic spectrum access networks.     

Some block- and trellis-coded modulations for the Rayleigh fadingchannel

The error performance of a modulation code over a channel depends on several distance parameters and the path multiplicity of the code. For the AWGN channel, the error performance of a modulation code depends mainly on its minimum squared Euclidean distance and path multiplicity. For the Rayleigh fading channel, however, the error performance of a modulation code depends strongly on its minimum symbol distance, minimum product distance, and path multiplicity. It depends on the minimum squared Euclidean distance in a lesser degree. This paper is concerned with the construction of block and trellis MPSK modulation codes for the Rayleigh fading channel. In each construction, the distance parameters are chosen to achieve good error performance with reduced decoding complexity