Colloidal processing of polymer ceramic nanocomposite integral capacitors

Polymer ceramic composites form a suitable material system for low temperature fabrication of embedded capacitors appropriate for the MCM-L technology. Improved electrical properties such as permittivity can be achieved by efficient filling of polymers with high dielectric constant ceramic powders such as lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate (PMN-PT) and barium titanate (BT). Photodefinable epoxies as the matrix polymer allow fine feature definition of the capacitor elements by conventional lithography techniques. The optimum weight percent of dispersant is tuned by monitoring the viscosity of the suspension. The dispersion mechanism (steric and electrostatic contribution) in a slightly polar solvent such as propylene glycol methyl ether acetate (PGMEA) is investigated from electrophoretic measurements. A high positive zeta potential is observed in the suspension, which suggests a strong contribution of electrostatic stabilization. By optimizing the particle packing using a bimodal distribution and modified processing methodology, a dielectric constant greater than 135 was achieved in PMN-PT/epoxy system. Suspensions are made with the lowest PGMEA content to ensure the efficiency of the dispersion and efficient particle packing in the dried film. Improved colloidal processing of nanoparticle-filled epoxy is a promising method to obtain ultra-thin capacitor films (<2/spl mu/m) with high capacitance density and improved yield. Capacitance of 35 nF/cm/sup 2/ was achieved with the thinnest films (2.5-3.0 /spl mu/m).     

Contention-conscious transaction ordering in multiprocessor DSP systems

This paper explores the problem of efficiently ordering interprocessor communication (IPC) operations in statically scheduled multiprocessors for iterative dataflow graphs. In most digital signal processing (DSP) applications, the throughput of the system is significantly affected by communication costs. By explicitly modeling these costs within an effective graph-theoretic analysis framework, we show that ordered transaction schedules can significantly outperform self-timed schedules even when synchronization costs are low. However, we also show that when communication latencies are nonnegligible, finding an optimal transaction order given a static schedule is an NP-complete problem, and that this intractability holds both under iterative and noniterative execution. We develop new heuristics for finding efficient transaction orders, and perform an extensive experimental comparison to gauge the performance of these heuristics.     

Enhanced Photoelectrochemistry in CdS/Au Nanoparticle Bilayers

Three different configurations of Au‐nanoparticle/CdS‐nanoparticle arrays are organized on Au/quartz electrodes for enhanced photocurrent generation. In one configuration, Au‐nanoparticles are covalently linked to the electrode and the CdS‐nanoparticles are covalently linked to the bare Au‐nanoparticle assembly. The resulting photocurrent, φ = 7.5 %, is ca. 9‐fold higher than the photocurrent originating from a CdS‐nanoparticle layer that lacks the Au‐nanoparticles, φ = 0.8 %. The enhanced photocurrent in the Au/CdS nanoparticle array is attributed to effective charge separation of the electron–hole pair by the injection of conduction‐band electrons from the CdS‐ to the Au‐nanoparticles. Two other configurations involving electrostatically stabilized bipyridinium‐crosslinked Au/CdS or CdS/Au nanoparticle arrays were assembled on the Au/quartz crystal. The photocurrent quantum yields in the two systems are φ = 10 % and φ = 5 %, respectively. The photocurrents in control systems that include electrostatically bridged Au/CdS or CdS/Au nanoparticles by oligocationic units that lack electron‐acceptor units are substantially lower than the values observed in the analogous bipyridinium‐bridged systems. The enhanced photocurrents in the bipyridinium‐crosslinked systems is attributed to the stepwise electron transfer of conduction‐band electrons to the Au‐nanoparticles by the bipyridinium relay bridge, a process that stabilizes the electron–hole pair against recombination and leads to effective charge separation.     

Hf-doped and NH/sub 3/-nitrided high-K gate dielectric thin film with least drain current degradation and flatband voltage shift

A novel technique to form high-K dielectric of HfSiON by doping base oxide with Hf and nitridation with NH/sub 3/, sequentially, is proposed. The HfSiON gate dielectric demonstrates excellent device performances such as only 10% degradation of saturation drain current and almost 45 times of magnitude reduction in gate leakage compared with conventional SiO/sub 2/ gate at the approximately same equivalent oxide thickness. Additionally, negligible flatband voltage shift is achieved with this technique. Time-dependent dielectric breakdown tests indicate that the lifetime of HfSiON is longer than 10 years at V/sub dd/=2 V.     

Improvement of AlGaInP light emitting diode by sulfide passivation

The brightness of AlGaInP light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been raised by a factor of 1.12 at 20 mA by sulfide passivation. Meanwhile, the sulfide also can decrease leakage current of AlGaInP LEDs at -2 V to nearly one thousandth of that in the as-fabricated device. The possible causes for the brightness increase of AlGaInP LEDs after sulfide treatment including surface roughness, reduction of Fresnel loss, and effective injection of carriers were demonstrated.     

A universal matrix solver for integral-equation-based problems

A new method has been developed for compressing the matrices that occur in most integral-equation-based computer programs. This method is easy to interface with existing computer programs, and allows them to run significantly faster and with significantly less memory. This method applies not only to electromagnetic and acoustic computation, but also to most programs involving a Green's function or any integral equation with a kernel having some smoothness properties. Our numerical computations, running on a high-end personal computer, have achieved compression ratios of fifty times, and compressed inversion of the matrices fifty times faster than by previous methods. For larger problems, solved on high-performance computers, these ratios would improve to about one thousand to one for larger moment method problems.     

Thermal conductivity of doped PbTe-based solid solutions with off-center impurities

The coefficients of thermopower and electrical and thermal conductivity in the PbTe_0.8Se_0.1 S _0.1 solid solution with electron concentration (4.6–54) × 10¹⁸ cm^?3 are studied in the range of 85–300 K (and in some cases up to 700 K). The temperature dependences of electrical and thermal conductivity indicate that the low-temperature electron and phonon scattering initiated by the off-center impurity of sulfur exists. The temperature dependences of the electronic and lattice components of thermal conductivity are calculated in the approximation of a parabolic spectrum and electron scattering by acoustic phonons and neutral substitutional impurities. The lattice thermal conductivity is found to have a feature in the form of a shallow minimum in the range of 85–250 K. A similar feature, while not so clearly pronounced, is found to exist also in Pb_1?x Sn_xTe_1?x Se_x alloys (x≥0.15) with an off-center tin impurity. An analysis of the possible origins of this effect suggests that, at low temperatures, the Lorentz numbers L of the materials under study are smaller than the L₀ numbers employed which correspond to the above scattering mechanisms. The cause of the decrease in L is related to electron scattering at two-level systems, a mechanism whose effect grows with increasing electron energy. An analysis of experimental data obtained at high temperatures, as well as on undoped samples with the lowest possible carrier concentrations, yields the values of L for samples with different electron densities. The minimum value L/L₀ = 0.75 is obtained for a lightly doped sample at ～130 K.     

Bandpass filters with reconfigurable transmission zeros using varactor-tuned tapped stubs

In this letter, bandpass filters with one or two tunable transmission zeros are proposed. The reconfigurable transmission zeros are implemented through varactors in combination with tapped quarter-wavelength stubs. Based on mixed mode simulations including EM simulation and circuit simulation, the proposed filters were designed and fabricated on low-cost FR4 board. The measurement results verified the design concepts.     

Performance of decorrelating receivers in multipath Rician fading channels

This letter focuses on the performance analysis of the decorrelating receiver in multipath Rician faded CDMA channels. M-ary QAM scheme is employed to improve the spectral efficiency. Approximate expressions are first derived for the two performance indexes: the average symbol error rate (SER) and the average bit error rate (BER) when the decorrelating-first receiver perfectly knows the channel information of the user of interest. To achieve desirable closed-form expressions of the SER and the BER, we exploit results in large system analysis and make assumptions of a high signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) and/or a small Rician K-factor. To measure the receiver performance in the practical scenario, we further derive expressions to approximate the average SER and BER of the decorrelating-first scheme with channel uncertainty. Simulation results demonstrate that the analytical results can also be employed to evaluate the performance of the combining-first receiver.