Improving Radio Frequency Transmission Properties of Graphene via Carrier Concentration Control toward High Frequency Transmission Line Applications

Graphene has been gradually studied as a high‐frequency transmission line material owing to high carrier mobility with frequency independence up to a few THz. However, the graphene‐based transmission lines have poor conductivity due to their low carrier concentration. Here, it is observed that the radio frequency (RF) transmission performance could be severely hampered by the defect‐induced scattering, even though the carrier concentration is increased. As a possible solution, the deposition of the amorphous carbon on the graphene is studied in the high‐frequency region up to 110 GHz. The DC resistance is reduced by as much as 60%, and the RF transmission property is also enhanced by 3 dB. Also, the amorphous carbon covered graphene shows stable performance under a harsh environment. These results prove that the carrier concentration control is an effective and a facile method to improve the transmission performance of graphene. It opens up the possibilities of using graphene as interconnects in the ultrahigh‐frequency region.     

Sub‐5 nm Dendrimer Directed Self‐Assembly with Large‐Area Uniform Alignment by Graphoepitaxy

Directed self‐assembly (DSA) using soft materials is an important method for producing periodic nanostructures because it is a simple, cost‐effective process for fabricating high‐resolution patterns. Most of the previously reported DSA methods exploit the self‐assembly of block copolymers, which generates a wide range of nanostructures. In this study, cylinders obtained from supramolecular dendrimer films with a high resolution (<5 nm) exhibit planar ordering over a macroscopic area via guiding topographical templates with a high aspect ratio (>10) and high spatial resolution (≈20 nm) of guiding line patterns. Theoretical and experimental studies reveal that this property is related to geometrical anchoring on the meniscus region and physical surface anchoring on the sidewall. Furthermore, this DSA of dendrimer cylinders is demonstrated by the non‐regular geometry of the patterned template. The macroscopic planar alignment of the dendrimer nanostructure reveals an extremely small feature size (≈4.7 nm) on the wafer scale (>16 cm²). This study is expected to open avenues for the production of a large family of supramolecular dendrimers with different phases and feature dimensions oriented by the DSA approach.     

Coexistence of OFDM‐Based IMT‐Advanced and FM Broadcasting Systems

Coexistence analysis is extremely important in examining the possibility for spectrum sharing between orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing (OFDM)‐based international mobile telecommunications (IMT)‐Advanced and other wireless services. In this letter, a new closed form method is derived based on power spectral density analysis in order to analyze the coexistence of OFDM‐based IMT‐Advanced systems and broadcasting frequency modulation (FM) systems. The proposed method evaluates more exact interference power of IMT‐Advanced systems in FM broadcasting systems than the advanced minimum coupling loss (A‐MCL) method. Numerical results show that the interference power is 1.3 dB and 3 dB less than that obtained using the A‐MCL method at cochannel and adjacent channel, respectively. This reduces the minimum separation distance between the two systems, which eventually saves spectrum resources.     

A device design methodology for sub-100-nm SOC applications using bulk and SOI MOSFETs

CMOS for the mixed-mode applications has gained much interest recently. While the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors provides two different scaling guidelines for the analog and digital circuit operation using the bulk MOSFET, there are no well-defined scaling guidelines for improving the analog performance of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs. This paper presents a systematic and quantitative comparison between the analog characteristics of the bulk and SOI technology. The intrinsic gain, f/sub T/ and g/sub m//I/sub ds/ ratio are considered as a metric for this comparison. It is shown that, even for the operating frequencies in the range of gigahertz (where the ac kink effect is suppressed), analog performance of SOI devices is inferior to that of the bulk devices due to the capacitive drain-to-body coupling. Based on our study, we show that hat the gate-workfunction engineering (close to mid-gap workfunction) is essential in fully depleted SOI (FDSOI) devices for improving analog performance. The analog performance of partially depleted SOI (PDSOI) devices can be improved by using body-tied structures. An increased gate control in double-gate MOSFETs can provide very high output resistance for short-channel devices.     

Adaptive mode decision for H.264 encoder

An adaptive mode decision algorithm is presented, with rate-distortion optimisation that reduces the complexity of the H.264 encoder without loss of image quality and compression ratio. The proposed algorithm uses the property of an all-zero coefficients block that is produced by quantisation and coefficient thresholding to effectively skip unnecessary modes. Experimental results show that the speed of the adaptive mode decision algorithm is two times faster than the full-mode decision algorithm of the JM72 reference encoder, without any coding loss.     

Error Concealment Based on Semantic Prioritization with Hardware‐Based Face Tracking

With video compression standards such as MPEG‐4, a transmission error happens in a video‐packet basis, rather than in a macroblock basis. In this context, we propose a semantic error prioritization method that determines the size of a video packet based on the importance of its contents. A video packet length is made to be short for an important area such as a facial area in order to reduce the possibility of error accumulation. To facilitate the semantic error prioritization, an efficient hardware algorithm for face tracking is proposed. The increase of hardware complexity is minimal because a motion estimation engine is efficiently re‐used for face tracking. Experimental results demonstrate that the facial area is well protected with the proposed scheme.     

Calculation and measurement of resonant-mode blueshifts inoxide-apertured VCSELs

As the aperture size of oxide-apertured vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) shrinks, the lasing wavelength blueshifts. We have calculated this effect using both a scalar effective index model and a full-vector weighted index model. Results were compared against experimental data for two different VCSEL designs emitting near 780 and 850 nm. We find that the full-vector weighted index calculation matches the data remarkably well, while the scalar effective index calculation underestimates the blueshift     

Performance of GaAs-AlGaAs V-grooved inner stripe quantum-well wirelasers with different current blocking configurations

GaAs-AlGaAs V-grooved inner stripe (VIS) quantum-well wire (QWW) lasers grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition with different current blocking configurations, n-blocking on p-substrate (VIPS), p-n-p-n blocking on n-substrate (VI(PN)_nS) and p-blocking on n-substrate (VINS) have been fabricated and characterized. The VIPS QWW lasers show the most stable characteristics with effective current confinement: one of the lasers shows fundamental transverse mode, lasing up to 5 mW/facet, typical threshold current of 39.9 mA at 818.5 mm, an external differential quantum efficiency of 24%/facet, and characteristic temperature of 92 K. The current tuning rate was almost linear at 0.031 mm/mA, and the temperature tuning rate was measured to be 0.14 nm/°C. Comparison of the light output versus current characteristics of the lasers with different current blocking configurations is presented here