On a reliable data communication broadcast system

This paper describes the design and implementation of a 3 KHz band HF data broadcast communication system, using a quantized frequency modulation, adaptive lattice equalizer together with forward error correcting code (FEC) to obtain a high link reliability and low error rate. A frequency diversity approach is also used in the selection of the timely best carrier frequency, and a microcomputer is implemented into the system for automatic best carrier acquisition, data transmission and clock synchronization, with minimum operator's attention. Extensive field experiments were conducted and experimental results indicate that the system can achieve, for daytime operation, a link reliability of 87–98%, with a probability of error between 10^?4 to 10^?5, depending upon data rate (50, 75bps) and FECs used. For night time operation, the link reliability reduces to from 65–93% with a probability of error down in the order of 10^?3.     

Design of microstrip hyperbolic line to match a complex impedance to a standard coaxial transmission line

Based on the solution of the Riccati equation, a hyperbolically tapered microstrip transmission line for matching a complex load to a standard coaxial cable is designed. An iterative procedure is used to yield the phase constant leading to an accurate design. A numerical example is considered. The result shows that a tremendous reduction in the size of matching components can be achieved if hyperbolic instead of uniform transmission lines are used. This is highly advantageous in the miniaturization of solid state circuits.     

First principles study of structural,electronic and optical properties of AgSbS2

In this work, we study the structural, electronic and optical properties of AgSbS₂, using full-potential linearized augmented plane wave and the pseudopotential plane wave scheme in the frame of generalized gradient approximation. Features such as the lattice constant, bulk modulus and its pressure derivative are reported. Our results suggest a phase transition from AF-IIb phase to rocksalt (B1) phase under high pressure. The calculated band structure and density of states show that the material under load has an indirect energy band gap X→(LГ) for AF-IIb phase (semiconductor) and a negative band gap W→(ГX) for B1 phase (semimetal). The optical properties are analyzed and the origin of some peaks in the spectra is discussed. Besides, the dielectric function, refractive index and extinction coefficient for radiation up to 14 eV have also been reported and discussed.     

Achieving time-of-flight mobilities for amorphous organic semiconductors in a thin film transistor configuration

We observe bulk-like hole transport in amorphous organic semiconductors in a thin film transistor (TFT) configuration. Five different organic hole transporters (HTs) commonly used in organic light-emitting diodes are investigated. When these HTs are deposited on SiO₂ gate dielectric layer, the TFT mobilities are 1–2 orders of magnitude smaller than those obtained from bulk films (3–8 μm) using time-of-flight (TOF) technique. The reduction of hole mobilities can be attributed to the interactions between the organic HTs and the polar SiO bonds on the gate dielectric layer. Detailed temperature dependence studies, employing the Gaussian disorder model, indicate that the SiO₂ gate dielectric contributes between 60 and 90 meV of energetic disorder in the charge hopping manifold. Besides SiO₂ gate dielectric, similar effects can also be observed for other polar insulators including polymeric PMMA and BCB, or HMDS-modified SiO₂. However, when a common non-polar polymer, polystyrene (PS), is employed as the dielectric layer, the dipolar energetic disorder becomes negligible. Holes effectively experience bulk-like transport on the PS gate dielectric surface. TFT mobilities extracted from all five organic HTs are in excellent agreements with TOF mobilities. The present study should have broad applications in the transport characterization of amorphous organic semiconductors.     

Structural and Optical Properties of ZnO Nanotips Grown on GaN Using Metalorganic Chemical Vapor Deposition

ZnO nanotips are grown on epitaxial GaN/c-sapphire templates by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies indicate that the epitaxial relationship between ZnO nanotips and the GaN layer is (0002)ZnO||(0002)GaN and (101̄0)ZnO||(101̄0)GaN. Temperature-dependent photoluminescence (PL) spectra have been measured. Sharp free exciton and donor-bound exciton peaks are observed at 4.4 K with photon energies of 3.380 eV, 3.369 eV, and 3.364 eV, confirming high optical quality of ZnO nanotips. Free exciton emission dominates at temperatures above 50 K. The thermal dissociation of these bound excitons forms free excitons and neutral donors. The thermal activation energies of the bound excitons at 3.369 eV and 3.364 eV are 11 meV and 16 meV, respectively. Temperature-dependent free A exciton peak emission is fitted to the Varshni’s equation to study the variation of energy bandgap versus temperature.     

Synthesis of sulfur-doped ZnO nanowires by electrochemical deposition

Sulfur-doped zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires have been successfully synthesized by an electric field-assisted electrochemical deposition in porous anodized aluminum oxide template at room temperature. X-ray diffraction and the selected area electron diffraction results show that the as-synthesized nanowires are single crystalline and have a highly preferential orientation. Transmission electron microscopy observations indicate that the nanowires are uniform with an average diameter of 70 nm and length up to several tens of micrometers. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy further reveals the presence of S in the ZnO nanowires. Room-temperature photoluminescence is observed in the doped ZnO nanowires, which exhibits a violet emission and blue emissions besides the typical photoluminescence spectrum of a single crystal ZnO.     

Mitigating the gateway bottleneck via transparent cooperative caching in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been proposed to provide cheap, easily deployable and robust Internet access. The dominant Internet-access traffic from clients causes a congestion bottleneck around the gateway, which can significantly limit the throughput of the WMN clients in accessing the Internet. In this paper, we present MeshCache, a transparent caching system for WMNs that exploits the locality in client Internet-access traffic to mitigate the bottleneck effect at the gateway, thereby improving client-perceived performance. MeshCache leverages the fact that a WMN typically spans a small geographic area and hence mesh routers are easily over-provisioned with CPU, memory, and disk storage, and extends the individual wireless mesh routers in a WMN with built-in content caching functionality. It then performs cooperative caching among the wireless mesh routers.We explore two architecture designs for MeshCache: (1) caching at every client access mesh router upon file download, and (2) caching at each mesh router along the route the Internet-access traffic travels, which requires breaking a single end-to-end transport connection into multiple single-hop transport connections along the route. We also leverage the abundant research results from cooperative web caching in the Internet in designing cache selection protocols for efficiently locating caches containing data objects for these two architectures. We further compare these two MeshCache designs with caching at the gateway router only.Through extensive simulations and evaluations using a prototype implementation on a testbed, we find that MeshCache can significantly improve the performance of client nodes in WMNs. In particular, our experiments with a Squid-based MeshCache implementation deployed on the MAP mesh network testbed with 15 routers show that compared to caching at the gateway only, the MeshCache architecture with hop-by-hop caching reduces the load at the gateway by 38%, improves the average client throughput by 170%, and increases the number of transfers that achieve a throughput greater than 1 Mbps by a factor of 3.     

Mechanism of O2-anneal induced Vfb shifts of Ru gated stacks

A systematic study of the flat-band voltage (V_fb) shift of Ru gated metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors subjected to thermal treatment in O₂ has been performed. The dependence of the V_fb shift on the thickness of Ru, anneal temperature and time is studied. The V_fb shift is ascribed to the shift of metal gates’ work function (WF), and is not significantly dependent on the type of dielectric (HfO₂ or SiO₂). From time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) measurement, it was found that after thermal treatment in ¹⁸O₂, ¹⁸O penetrated through Ru and was incorporated in the Ru/dielectric interface region. We believe that the formation of the thin interfacial RuO_x layer is responsible for the V_fb shift.     

Resistance Compression Networks for Radio-Frequency Power Conversion

A limitation of many high-frequency resonant inverter topologies is their high sensitivity to loading conditions. This paper introduces a new class of matching networks that greatly reduces the load sensitivity of resonant inverters and radio frequency (RF) power amplifiers. These networks, which we term resistance compression networks, serve to substantially decrease the variation in effective resistance seen by a tuned RF inverter as loading conditions change. We explore the operation, performance characteristics, and design of these networks, and present experimental results demonstrating their performance. Their combination with rectifiers to form RF-to-dc converters having narrow-range resistive input characteristics is also treated. The application of resistance compression in resonant power conversion is demonstrated in a dc-dc power converter operating at 100MHz     

Propagation Delay of an RC-Chain With a Ramp Input

In this brief, two simple semi-analytical models which allow the estimation of the propagation delay of an RC-chain with a linear input are presented. The closed-form models can be used to evaluate the propagation delay of wires in modern VLSI and ULSI processes. The two approximations, a continuous function and a piecewise function, exhibit a maximum error lower than 15% at the end of the chain. The models have been validated extensively through circuit simulations. In particular, 1000 different RC-chains have been considered and simulated demonstrating the accuracy of the proposed models with respect to the most widely used Elmore delay metric