The effects of ion implantation and pulsed electron beam anneal on Ge films grown epitaxially on ◃100▹ GaAs

Ge films deposited by vacuum deposition at 425?C are generally p-type. This paper discusses the use of pulsed-electron beam annealing and ion implantation to modify the carrier concentration of such films. Electron beam annealing has been used to reduce the carrier concentration by more than a factor of 30 and n-type films have been obtained by phosphorus implantation and subsequent thermal annealing. TEM, RBS and Hall measurements have been used to characterize the films. The electrical properties of the as-grown films are believed to be defect dominated.     

Surface characterization and platelet adhesion studies on polyethylene surface with hirudin immobilization

Hirudin, a protein composed of 65 or 66 amino acid, is a newly risen anticoagulant agent and has been considered as the most potent thrombin inhibitor. Hirudin can block the active site of thrombin by means of its carboxylic acid reaction with the active regime of thrombin, and becomes a tightly bound complex, and thus controls the formation of thrombus. Hirudin was covalently immobilized onto the water-soluble carbodiimide preactivated and chromic acid oxidized PE surface. Surface chemistry analysis indicated that a certain amount of carboxylic acid groups was generated on the polyethylene surface after oxidation with chromic acid solution. The amount of carboxylic acid functional group increased with the oxidation time. In addition, polyethylene surface was etched by chromic acid solution, and a rougher surface was created. The morphology of oxidized polyethylene surface was similar to each other among the samples with oxidation time from 1 to 8 min. ESCA results indicated the number of hirudin molecules immobilized was constant at the reaction time studied. In vitro platelet adhesion assay indicated the number of adhered platelets on the oxidized polyethylene surface increased significantly after oxidation. In contrast, surface with hirudin immobilization showed a reduction in adhered platelet density than the chromic acid oxidized counterpart due to the decrease of platelet-activating capability by the hirudin–thrombin complex and the differences in the adsorbed protein composition. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers     

Characterization of a 4-methylbenzoate-degrading methanogenic consortium as determined by small-subunit rDNA sequence analysis

A methanogenic consortium that degrades 4-methylbenzoate (MBA) as the sole carbon and energy source was successfully enriched in an upflow anaerobic sludge bed bioreactor and studied. Electron microscopic observation showed that long rods with a distinct collar feature resembling Desulfomonile tiedjei rods were the predominant population, and that these rods formed a close spatial orientation with Methanobrevibacter-like bacteria. In addition, thin filaments and bamboo-shaped filaments that highly resembled the acetoclastic Methanosaeta were also frequently observed. A 16S rDNA clone library was constructed for the domain Bacteria, and 20 sequence types or operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were found out of 139 clones screened. Phylogenetic analysis classified these 20 nearly full-length OTUs into the delta (50.3% of total clones) and gamma (4.3%) subdivisions of the division Proteobacteria, the green non-sulfur bacteria subdivision I (7.2%), Cytophagales (7.2%), Planctomycetes (5.7%), gram-positive low G + C group (8.6%), candidate divisions OP8, OP10 and OP11 (9.3%), and a novel candidate division MBA1 (7.2%) that had an interdivisional sequence similarity less than 75%. However, only 3 OTUs had a sequence similarity higher than 90% to known isolates or environmental 16S rDNA clones, suggesting that the microbial community was diversified and largely unidentified. In particular, those 8 OTUs found in the delta-Proteobacteria were either clustered into novel groups or showed a low sequence similarity to closely related bacteria. It is highly possible that the delta-Proteobacteria were the long rods with a distinct collar feature observed microscopically, and together with the methanogens were mainly responsible for the syntrophic degradation of MBA. The unique and novel microbial populations identified explained the requirement of a long start-up period of up to 426 d for the MBA-degrading consortium.     

Tiered Algorithm for Distributed Process Quiescence and Termination Detection

The Tiered Algorithm is presented for time-efficient and message-efficient detection of process termination. It employs a global invariant of equality between process production and consumption at each level of process nesting to detect termination, regardless of execution interleaving order and network transit time. Correctness is validated for arbitrary process launching hierarchies, including launch-in-transit hazards, where processes are created dynamically based on runtime conditions for remote execution. The performance of the Tiered Algorithm is compared to three existing schemes with comparable capabilities, namely, the Chandrasekaran and Venkatesan (CV), Lai, Tseng, and Dong (LTD), and Credit termination detection algorithms. For synchronization of X tasks terminating in E epochs of idle processing, the tiered algorithm is shown to incur O(E) message count complexity and O(T lg T) message bit complexity while incurring detection latency corresponding to only integer addition and comparison. The synchronization performance in terms of message overhead, detection operations, and storage requirements are evaluated and compared across numerous task creation and termination hierarchies.     

Iterative low-complexity multi-user detection for asynchronous multi-sequence signalling based bit-interleaved coded modulation code division multiple access systems

An uplink direct sequence spread spectrum communications systems employing a multi-sequence model over a quasi-static frequency-selective fading channel is considered. In analogy with bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) technique, a group of bits at the output of a bit-wise interleaver is mapped uniquely to a complex signalling vector belonging to an orthogonal plane sequence modulation signal space, which is constructed over a set of expanded signature sequences. This transmission system provides not only bandwidth efficiency offered by additional signal planes but also time diversity resulting from the BICM technique. It is observed that at high system traffic load error performance could degrade substantially due to user cross-correlations, multi-access asynchronism as well as channel frequency selectivity. The authors employ a 'turbo principle' receiver, consisting of a soft interference cancellation scheme, soft demappers and maximum a posteriori decoders, to avert this capacity loss by exploiting the serially concatenating structure at the transmitter. After simple mathematical manipulation, a soft space-time linear minimum mean-square error multi-user detector could even be explored on the basis of per signal plane per user. Both analytical performance-bound and computer simulation of the proposed framework in terms of bit-error rate (BER) are revealed. Further, performance comparisons with convolutionally coded and conventional bandwidth-efficient coded direct sequence code division multiple access systems under the same system conditions are illustrated. The authors have also investigated the impact of labelling maps on the BER performance.     

A Fiber Splicing-Plane-Inspection Technique Using Lens–Fiber Interference for the Cascaded Fiber Fabrication

In this paper, a novel inspection technique for the cascaded fiber fabrication is proposed to improve the coupling performance of such fibers. Instead of using a direct-monitoring method, an indirect technique with the help of the ray tracing and the lens-fiber interference is used. By calculating the optical-path length of the light rays passing through the fiber, the interference fringes and light intensity can be counted. Then, the splicing plane of the cascaded fiber can be determined by observing the difference between the two fiber sections. Simulations and experiments have been performed to find the splicing plane. Finally, the accuracy of fabrication can be improved from 10 to about 1 mum; thus, the coupling loss due to the fabrication process can be reduced.     

Wide-band balun using composite right/left-handed transmission line

A wide-band balun is developed using a composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) at 2 GHz. It is composed of a Wilkinson power divider and two phase-adjusting transmission lines, namely the CRLH TL and the conventional TL. The input reflection coefficient is better than -10 dB from 1 to 4 GHz. Over the frequency range of 1.24-3.58 GHz, an amplitude imbalance of less than 0.7 dB and a phase error of less than plusmn10deg have been experimentally demonstrated.     

Stress Power Dependent Self-Heating Degradation of Metal-Induced Laterally Crystallized n-Type Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors

Using a fluorinated high-k/metal gate stack combined with a stress relieved preoxide (SRPO) pretreatment before high-k deposition, we show significant device reliability and performance improvements. This is a critical result since threshold voltage instability may be a fundamental problem, and performance degradation for high-fc is a concern. The novel fluorinated Ta_infinC_y/HfZrO_infin/SRPO gate stack device exceeds the positive-bias-temperature-instability and negative-bias-temperature-instability targets with sufficient margin and has electron mobility at 1 MV/cm comparable to the industrial high-quality polySi/SiON device on bulk silicon.     

A novel dynamic Multiple Ring-based Local Restoration for point-to-multipoint multicast traffic in WDM mesh networks

Optical networks with DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplex) can provide multiple data channels to supply high speed, high capacity to perform bandwidth-intensive multicast transmission service. Light-tree is a popular technique applied to support point-to-multipoint multicast services. Any failure during a multicast session would cause severe service loss or disruptions, especially when the faults occur near the source node. A novel ring-based local fault recovery mechanism, Multiple Ring-based Local Restoration (MRLR), for point-to-multipoint multicast traffic based on the minimum spanning tree (MST) in WDM mesh networks is proposed in this article. The MRLR mechanism dismembers the multicast tree into several disjoint segment-blocks (sub-trees) and reserves preplanned spare capacity to set up multiple protection rings in each segment-block for providing rapid local recovery. The MRLR scheme outperforms other methodologies in terms of the blocking probability, recovery time, and average hop count of protection path per session for different network topologies.