Novel T-rail electrodes for substrate removed low-voltage high-speed GaAs/AlGaAs electrooptic modulators

A novel traveling-wave electrode utilizing capacitively loaded T-rail elements was developed for low-voltage high-speed substrate-removed GaAs/AlGaAs electrooptic modulators. Electrodes with varying dimensions were fabricated and characterized. Electrode phase velocity, characteristic impedance, loss coefficient, and capacitive loading were extracted from the measured s-parameters up to 40 GHz. Electrode was also simulated using a finite-element solver. The measured and calculated electrode capacitance values were found to be in excellent agreement, showing that the electrode can be precisely designed. Approaches were outlined to provide a group velocity-matched very high-speed modulator electrode suitable for a low drive-voltage substrate-removed GaAs/AlGaAs electro-optic modulator     

High performance BCB-bridged AlGaAs/InGaAs power HFETs

A novel low-k benzocyclobutene (BCB) bridged and passivated layer for AlGaAs/InGaAs doped-channel power field effect transistors (FETs) with high reliability and linearity has been developed and characterized. In this study, we applied a low-k BCB-bridged interlayer to replace the conventional air-bridged process and the SiN/sub x/ passivation technology of the 1 mm-wide power device fabrication. This novel and easy technique demonstrates a low power gain degradation under a high input power swing, and exhibits an improved adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) than those of the air-bridged one, due to its lower gate leakage current. The power gain degradation ratio of BCB-bridged devices under a high input power operation (P/sub in/ = 5 /spl sim/ 10 dBm) is 0.51 dB/dBm, and this value is 0.65 dB/dBm of the conventional air-bridged device. Furthermore, this novel technology has been qualified by using the 85-85 industrial specification (temperature = 85 C, humidity = 85%) for 500 h. These results demonstrate a robust doped-channel HFET power device with a BCB passivation and bridged technology of future power device applications.     

Photoactive Electro-Controlled Visual Perception Memory for Emulating Synaptic Metaplasticity and Hebbian Learning

In bionic technology, it has become an innovative process imitating the functionality and structuralism of human biological systems to exploit advanced artificial intelligent machines. Bionics plays a significant role in environmental protection, especially for its low energy loss. By fusing the concept of receptor-like sensing component and synapse-like memory, the photoactive electro-controlled optical sensory memory (PE-SM) is proposed and realized in a single device, which endows a simple methodology of reducing power consumption by photoactive electro-control. The PE-SM is the system built with the stacked atomically thick materials, in which rhenium diselenide serves as a robust photosensor, hexagonal boron nitride serves as a tunneling dielectric, and graphene serves as a charge-storage layer. With the features of the PE-SM, it performs synaptic metaplasticities under optical spikes. In addition, a simulated spiking neural network composed of 24 × 24 PE-SMs is further presented in an unsupervised machine learning environment, performing image recognition via the Hebbian rule. The PE-SM not only improves the neuromorphic computing efficiency but also simplifies the circuit-size structure. Eventually, the concept of photoactive electro-control can extend to other photosensitive 2D materials and provide a new approach of constructing either visual perception memory or photonic synaptic devices.     

Object Detection in RGB-D Images via Anchor Box with Multi-Reduced Region Proposal Network and Multi-Pooling

Journal of Signal Processing Systems - With the latest development of automation technology, object detection technology has received more and more research attention. Automated object detection...     

The microwave power performance comparisons of Al/sub x/Ga/sub 1-x/As/In/sub 0.15/Ga/sub 0.85/As (x=0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0) doped-channel HFETs

The properties of doped-channel field-effect transistors (DCFET) have been thoroughly investigated on Al/sub x/Ga/sub 1-x/As/InGaAs (x= 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1) heterostructures with various Al mole fractions. In this study, we observed that by introducing a 200-/spl Aring/-thick Al/sub 0.5/Ga/sub 0.5/As (x=0.5) Schottky layer can enhance the device power performance, as compared with the conventional x=0.3 AlGaAs composition system. However, a degradation of the device power performance was observed for further increasing the Al mole fractions owing to their high sheet resistance and surface states. Therefore, Al/sub 0.5/Ga/sub 0.5/As Schottky layer design provides a good opportunity to develop a high power device for power amplifier applications.     

Cladding Layer Impedance Reduction to Improve Microwave Propagation Properties in p-i-n Waveguides

The cladding layer effect on microwave propagation properties of semiconductor p-i-n waveguides is investigated in this letter. Through the optical excitation in quantum wells of p-i-n waveguides, high-speed photocurrent is used to examine the microwave propagation. Two devices of p-i-n waveguides with different cladding layers are fabricated and measured, showing that a higher speed is found in the waveguide of wider cladding width. Verified by the microwave propagation properties, the higher speed is mainly attributed to lower microwave propagation loss due to the lower impedance in the wider cladding layer, suggesting this kind of structure can be applied to high-speed waveguide-based devices     

Cooperative Communications in Resource-Constrained Wireless Networks

Cooperative communications have been proposed to exploit the spatial diversity gains inherent in multiuser wireless systems without the need of multiple antennas at each node. This is achieved by having the users relay each others messages and thus forming multiple transmission paths to the destination. In resource constrained networks, such as wireless sensor networks, the advantages of cooperation can be further exploited by optimally allocating the energy and bandwidth resources among users based on the available channel state information (CSI) at each node. In the first part of this article, we provide a tutorial survey on various power allocation strategies for cooperative networks based on different cooperation strategies, optimizing criteria, and CSI assumptions. In the second part, we identify the similarities between cooperative networks and several sensor network applications that utilize collaboration among distributed sensors to achieve the system goal. These applications include decentralized detection/estimation and data gathering. The techniques developed in cooperative communications can be used to solve many sensor network problems     

Capacitance computation for CPW discontinuities with finitemetallization thickness by hybrid finite-element method

A variational equation is derived for the capacitances of coplanar waveguide (CPW) structures with finite metallization thickness. The equation is expressed in terms of the static potential in the slot region and is solved by applying the hybrid finite-element method (FEM). In the case of small metallization thickness, it is reduced to a perturbation formula for the incremental capacitances. Numerical results for the equivalent capacitances of various discontinuities with finite metallization thickness are presented and compared with measured data. The reasonable agreement between the measured data and the theoretical results validates the present approach. Being simple and computationally efficient, the method is suitable for dealing with extensive CPW discontinuity problems where the metallization thickness is not negligible     

Learning-based ventricle detection from cardiac MR and CT images

The objective of this work is to investigate the issue of automatically detecting regions of interest (ROI's) in medical images. It is assumed that the regions to be detected can be roughly segmented by a threshold based on a likelihood measure of the ROI, First, an analysis of the global histogram is used to compute a preliminary threshold that is likely near the optimal one. The histogram analysis is motivated by the analytical result of a bell image intensity model proposed in this work. Then, the preliminary threshold is used to segment the input image, resulting in an attention map, which contains an attention region that approximates the ROI as well as many spurious ones. Due to the nonoptimality of the preliminary threshold, it can happen that the attention region contains a part of, or more regions than, the ROI. Learning takes place in two stages: (1) learning for automatic selection of the preliminary threshold value and (2) learning for automatically selecting the ROI from the attention map while dynamically tuning the threshold according to the learned-likelihood function. Experiments have been conducted to approximately locate the endocardium boundaries of the left and right ventricles from gradient-echo magnetic resonance (MR) images. Cardiac computed tomography (CT) images have also been used for testing. The boundary of the segmented region provided by this algorithm is not very accurate and is meant to be used for further fine tuning based on other application-specific measures     

Conception of Stretchable Resistive Memory Devices Based on Nanostructure‐Controlled Carbohydrate‐block‐Polyisoprene Block Copolymers

It is discovered that the memory‐type behaviors of novel carbohydrate‐block ‐polyisoprene (MH‐b ‐PI) block copolymers‐based devices, including write‐once‐read‐many‐times, Flash, and dynamic‐random‐access‐memory, can be easily controlled by the self‐assembly nanostructures (vertical cylinder, horizontal cylinder, and order‐packed sphere), in which the MH and PI blocks, respectively, provide the charge‐trapping and stretchable function. With increasing the flexible PI block length, the stretchability of the designed copolymers can be significantly improved up to 100% without forming cracks. Thus, intrinsically stretchable resistive memory devices (polydimethylsiloxane(PDMS)/carbon nanotubes(CNTs)/MH‐b ‐PI thin film/Al) using the MH‐b ‐PI thin film as an active layer is successfully fabricated and that using the MH‐b ‐PI_12.6k under 100% strain exhibits an excellent ON/OFF current ratio of over 10⁶ (reading at ?1 V) with stable V _set around ?2 V. Furthermore, the endurance characteristics can be maintained over 500 cycles upon 40% strain. This work establishes and represents a novel avenue for the design of green carbohydrate‐derived and stretchable memory materials.