Enhanced storage/operation stability of small molecule organic photovoltaics using graphene oxide interfacial layer

Graphene and graphene oxide (GO) have been applied in flexible organic electronic devices with enhanced efficiency of polymeric photovoltaic (OPV) devices. In this work, we demonstrate that storage/operation stability of OPV can be substantially enhanced by spin-coating a GO buffer layer on ITO without any further treatment. With a 2 nm GO buffer layer, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of a standard copper phthalocyanine (CuPc)/fullerene (C₆₀) based OPV device shows about 30% enhancement from 1.5% to 1.9%. More importantly, while the PCE of the standard device drop to 1/1000 of its original value after 60-days of operation-storage cycles; those of GO-buffered device maintained 84% of initial PCE even after 132-days. Atomic force microscopy studies show that CuPc forms larger crystallites on the GO-buffered ITO substrate leading to better optical absorption and thus photon utilization. Stability enhancement is attributed to the diffusion barrier of the GO layer which slow down diffusion of oxygen species from ITO to the active layers.     

Dihydroazulene Photoswitch Operating in Sequential Tunneling Regime: Synthesis and Single‐Molecule Junction Studies

Molecular switches play a central role for the development of molecular electronics. In this work it is demonstrated that the reproducibility and robustness of a single‐molecule dihydroazulene (DHA)/vinylheptafulvene (VHF) switch can be remarkably enhanced if the switching kernel is weakly coupled to electrodes so that the electron transport goes by sequential tunneling. To assure weak coupling, the DHA switching kernel is modified by incorporating p‐MeSC₆H₄ end‐groups. Molecules are prepared by Suzuki cross‐couplings on suitable halogenated derivatives of DHA. The synthesis presents an expansion of our previously reported bromination–elimination–cross‐coupling protocol for functionalization of the DHA core. For all new derivatives the kinetics of DHA/VHF transition has been thoroughly studied in solution. The kinetics reveals the effect of sulfur end‐groups on the thermal ring‐closure of VHF. One derivative, incorporating a p‐MeSC₆H₄ anchoring group in one end, has been placed in a silver nanogap. Conductance measurements justify that transport through both DHA (high resistivity) and VHF (low resistivity) forms goes by sequential tunneling. The switching is fairly reversible and reenterable; after more than 20 “ON‐OFF” switchings, both DHA and VHF forms are still recognizable, albeit noticeably different from the original states.     

Images of a First‐Order Spin‐Reorientation Phase Transition in a Metallic Kagome Ferromagnet

First‐order phase transitions, where one phase replaces another by virtue of a simple crossing of free energies, are best known between solids, liquids, and vapors, but they also occur in a wide range of other contexts, including even elemental magnets. The key challenges are to establish whether a phase transition is indeed first order, and then to determine how the new phase emerges because this will determine thermodynamic and electronic properties. Here it is shown that both challenges are met for the spin reorientation transition in the topological metallic ferromagnet Fe₃Sn₂. The magnetometry and variable temperature magnetic force microscopy experiments reveal that, analogous to the liquid–gas transition in the temperature–pressure plane, this transition is centered on a first‐order line terminating in a critical end point in the field‐temperature plane. The nucleation and growth associated with the transition is directly imaged, indicating that the new phase emerges at the most convoluted magnetic domain walls for the high temperature phase and then moves to self‐organize at the domain centers of the high temperature phase. The dense domain patterns and phase coexistence imply a complex inhomogenous electronic structure, which can yield anomalous contributions to the electrical conductivity.     

Asymptotic Analysis of Spatially Correlated MIMO Multiple-Access Channels With Arbitrary Signaling Inputs for Joint and Separate Decoding

While the capacity of a single-user, point-to-point, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel has been well known, the achievable capacity of a MIMO channel in the presence of other co-channel users is much less understood. One such important scenario is the multiple-access (MA) channel where communication occurs from many uncoordinated mobile users to a common base station receiver (i.e., multipoint-to-point). Unlike previous studies whose emphases were on the idealized spatially uncorrelated channels with Gaussian signaling inputs from users, this paper derives a general analytical expression for the asymptotic (in the sense of large-system limit) sum-rate of a MIMO-MA system where the transmitters and the receiver can have different spatial correlations, and the users' inputs are not necessarily Gaussian. In addition to the sum-rate formula that assumes optimal joint decoding at the base station, we also derive the asymptotic sum-rate of a more practical system which performs separate decoding (multiuser detection followed by a bank of temporal error-correction decoders). Our analytic formulae are important in that they reveal the sum-rate one's system can achieve given the spatial correlation structures at the transmitters and receiver, and the input signal distributions. For special cases that users are homogeneous or users have Gaussian inputs, our results degenerate to previously published results. Furthermore, through computer simulations, we see that the proposed asymptotic solution gives good estimates for the ergodic sum-rate of the systems even with only a few antenna elements at each transmitter and receiver     

Energy-efficient Hardware Accelerators for the SA-DCT and Its Inverse

The explosive growth of the mobile multimedia industry has accentuated the need for efficient VLSI implementations of the associated computationally demanding signal processing algorithms. In particular, the short battery life caused by excessive power consumption of mobile devices has become the biggest obstacle facing truly mobile multimedia. We propose novel hardware accelerator architectures for two of the most computationally demanding algorithms of the MPEG-4 video compression standard––the forward and inverse shape adaptive discrete cosine transforms (SA-DCT/IDCT). These accelerators have been designed using general low-energy design philosophies at the algorithmic/architectural abstraction levels. The themes of these philosophies are avoiding waste and trading area/performance for power and energy gains. Each core has been synthesised targeting TSMC 0.09 μm TCBN90LP technology, and the experimental results presented in this paper show that the proposed cores improve upon the prior art.

Improved reconstruction for MR spectroscopic imaging

Sensitivity limitations of in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) require that the extent of spatial-frequency (k-space) sampling be limited, thereby reducing spatial resolution and increasing the effects of Gibbs ringing that is associated with the use of Fourier transform reconstruction. Additional problems occur in the spectral dimension, where quantitation of individual spectral components is made more difficult by the typically low signal-to-noise ratios, variable lineshapes, and baseline distortions, particularly in areas of significant magnetic field inhomogeneity. Given the potential of in vivo MRSI measurements for a number of clinical and biomedical research applications, there is considerable interest in improving the quality of the metabolite image reconstructions. In this report, a reconstruction method is described that makes use of parametric modeling and MRI-derived tissue distribution functions to enhance the MRSI spatial reconstruction. Additional preprocessing steps are also proposed to avoid difficulties associated with image regions containing spectra of inadequate quality, which are commonly present in the in vivo MRSI data     

A 1-V 86-mW-RX 53-mW-TX Single-Chip CMOS Transceiver for WLAN IEEE 802.11a

A 1-V WLAN IEEE 802.11a CMOS transceiver integrates all building blocks on a single chip including a transformer-feedback VCO and a stacked divider for the frequency synthesizer and 8-bit IQ ADCs and 8-bit IQ DACs. Fabricated in a 0.18-mum CMOS process and operated at a single 1-V supply, the receiver and the transmitter consume 85.7 mW and 53.2 mW, including the frequency synthesizer, respectively. The total chip area with pads is 12.5 mm².     

Broad-band dual-polarized single microstrip patch antenna with highisolation and low cross polarization

This paper presents a new design of a broad-band dual-polarized single microstrip patch antenna with highly decoupled input ports and low cross-polarization (XP) radiation. A prototype of the proposed antenna with center frequency at 1800 MHz is presented. Both the dual linear polarizations have 10-dB return-loss impedance bandwidths greater than 14% and high decoupling between the two input ports (S₂₁ less than -40 dB across the entire bandwidths) is obtained. Moreover, the XP radiation in the principal planes of the dual linear polarizations is seen to be less than -20 dB     

手机的未来：控制器

Andrew Seybold是研究无线技术发展趋势的权威专家,他的观点深深影响了电信以及计算机领域的发展正如你我所知,现在的手机已经不仅仅是手机了。它同时还是照相机、MP3播放器、视频播放器以及网络接入     

Investigation of hot carrier degradation in asymmetric nDeMOS transistors

Hot carrier degradation in asymmetric nDeMOS transistors is investigated in this paper. It is found that the worst case hot carrier stress condition in asymmetric nDeMOS transistors is at I_g,max, and not at I_b,max and hot-electron injection (HE, i.e. V_gs = V_ds). Further, the damage regions in transistors upon various hot carrier stress modes are located by using variable amplitude charge pumping technique. It is found that the interface traps generation in the gate/n-type graded drain (NGRD) overlap and spacer/NGRD regions is the dominant mechanism of hot carrier degradation in transistors upon I_g,max stress mode. Moreover, both the interface trap generation and the electron trapping are two important factors to induce the electrical parameters shifts of asymmetric nDeMOS transistors under I_b,max and HE stress.