Fabrication of Al matrix composite reinforced with submicrometer-sized Al<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript> particles formed by combustion reaction between HEMM Al and V<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>5</Subscript> composite particles during sintering

To fabricate an Al-V matrix composite reinforced with submicron-sized Al₂O₃ and Al_xV_y (Al₃V, Al₁₀V) phases, high energy mechanical milling (HEMM) and sintering were employed. By increasing the milling time, the size of mechanically milled powder was significantly reduced. In this study, the average powder size of 59 μm for Al, and 178 μm for V₂O₅ decreased with the formation of a new product, Al-Al₂O₃-Al_xV_y, with a size range from 1.3 μm to 2.6 μm formed by the in-situ combustion reaction during sintering of HEM milled Al and V₂O₅ composite powders. The in-situ reaction between Al and V₂O₅ during the HEMM and sintering transformed the Al₂O₃ and Al_xV_y (Al₃V, Al₁₀V) phases. Most of the reduced V reacted with excess the Al to form Al_xV_y (Al₃V, Al₁₀V) with very little V dissolved into Al matrix. By increasing the milling time and weight percentage of V₂O₅, the hardness of the Al-Al₂O₃-Al_xV_y composite sintered at 1173 K increased. The composite fabricated with the HEMM Al-20wt.%V₂O₅ composite powder and sintering at 1173 K for 2 h had the highest hardness.     

All‐Solution‐Processed Indium‐Free Transparent Composite Electrodes based on Ag Nanowire and Metal Oxide for Thin‐Film Solar Cells

Fully solution‐processed Al‐doped ZnO/silver nanowire (AgNW)/Al‐doped ZnO/ZnO multi‐stacked composite electrodes are introduced as a transparent, conductive window layer for thin‐film solar cells. Unlike conventional sol–gel synthetic pathways, a newly developed combustion reaction‐based sol–gel chemical approach allows dense and uniform composite electrodes at temperatures as low as 200 °C. The resulting composite layer exhibits high transmittance (93.4% at 550 nm) and low sheet resistance (11.3 Ω sq^‐1), which are far superior to those of other solution‐processed transparent electrodes and are comparable to their sputtered counterparts. Conductive atomic force microscopy reveals that the multi‐stacked metal‐oxide layers embedded with the AgNWs enhance the photocarrier collection efficiency by broadening the lateral conduction range. This as‐developed composite electrode is successfully applied in Cu(In_1‐x,Ga_x)S₂ (CIGS) thin‐film solar cells and exhibits a power conversion efficiency of 11.03%. The fully solution‐processed indium‐free composite films demonstrate not only good performance as transparent electrodes but also the potential for applications in various optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices as a cost‐effective and sustainable alternative electrode.     

Wide‐Band Fine‐Resolution DCO with an Active Inductor and Three‐Step Coarse Tuning Loop

This paper presents a wide‐band fine‐resolution digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) with an active inductor using an automatic three‐step coarse and gain tuning loop. To control the frequency of the DCO, the transconductance of the active inductor is tuned digitally. To cover the wide tuning range, a three‐step coarse tuning scheme is used. In addition, the DCO gain needs to be calibrated digitally to compensate for gain variations. The DCO tuning range is 58% at 2.4 GHz, and the power consumption is 6.6 mW from a 1.2 V supply voltage. An effective frequency resolution is 0.14 kHz. The phase noise of the DCO output at 2.4 GHz is –120.67 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset.     

Vertex-based inter-frame boundary encoding scheme

The boundary is approximated by a polygon which can be encoded with the smallest number of bits for maximum distortion. The temporal redundancy between two successive frames is efficiently removed with the proposed scheme, resulting in a lower bit rate than the conventional algorithms     

A 1 Gbit synchronous dynamic random access memory with anindependent subarray-controlled scheme and a hierarchical decodingscheme

A prototype 1 Gbit synchronous DRAM with independent subarray-controlled isolation and hierarchical decoding schemes is demonstrated to alleviate the difficulties encountered in high-density devices with regard to failure analysis and performance optimization. The scheme to isolate memory arrays from “hard” defects and to overcome the dc leakages of “soft” defects with external sources allows monitoring of the leakage current for the defect analysis and testing of the device without being limited by the capabilities of on-chip voltage sources. A hierarchical decoding scheme with a dynamic CMOS series logic predecoder achieves improvements in circuit speed, power, and complexity. As a result, evaluation of the prototype devices can be facilitated, and the optimized circuit schemes achieve enhanced circuit performance. A fully working 1 Gbit synchronous DRAM with a chip size of 570 mm² was fabricated using a 0.16 μm CMOS process and tested for excellent functionality up to 143 MHz     

A WDM-PON Employing Fabry–PÉrot Laser Diodes Without a Seed Light Injection

We propose and demonstrate a wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical network by employing double-contact Fabry-Perot laser diodes (F-P LDs) without a seed light injection. To avoid the high mode partition noise at low frequency, we use a binary phase-shift keying as a modulation format at a low relative intensity noise window. An error-free transmission is achieved by compensating a lasing envelope shift due to temperature variation with the double-contact F-P LD.     

New Syndrome Check Error Estimation and Its Concatenated Coding

A low-complexity and high performance SCEE (Syndrome Check Error Estimation) decoding method for convolutional codes and its concatenated SCEE/RS (Reed–Solomon) coding scheme are proposed. First, we describe the operation of the decoding steps in the proposed algorithm. Then deterministic values on the decoding operation are derived when some combination of predecoder-reencoder is used. Computer simulation results show that the computational complexity of the proposed SCEE decoder is significantly reduced compared to that of conventional Viterbi decoder without degradation of the P_e performance. Also, simulation results of BER performance of the concatenated SCEE/Hard Decision Viterbi (HD-Viterbi) and SCEE/RS (Reed–Solomon) codes are presented.