Electrical characterization of homoepitaxial diamond p–n junction

Electrical properties of homoepitaxial diamond p–n⁺ junction of boron (B)-doped p-type layer and phosphorus-doped n-type layer on Ib (111) diamond single crystal have been characterized. Current–voltage characteristics show a clear rectifying property with rectification ratio of over 10⁵ at ± 10 V. From capacitance–voltage characteristics, it is found that a spatial distribution of space-charge density N_i of the p–n⁺ junction is not uniform and N_i at a middle region of the space-charge layer formed at zero bias voltage is higher than that of other region of the space-charge layer. This peculiar characteristic can be explained by superposition of two effects; one is the deep dopant effect due to B atoms in the p-type layer, which makes to reduce N_i at around the edge of the space-charge layer formed at zero bias voltage. The other is the compensation of B acceptors by impurity atoms diffusing during the p–n⁺ interface and incorporating during the growth of p-type layer, which makes to reduce N_i at the vicinity of the p–n⁺ interface.     

Silicon nitride thin-film deposition by LPCVD with in situ HF vaporcleaning and its application to stacked DRAM capacitor fabrication

Silicon nitride film deposited by LPCVD with newly developed in situ HF vapor cleaning has been studied and applied to fabricate dielectric films for stacked DRAM capacitors. Using this method, an oxide-free surface of underlaid poly-Si can be obtained. Silicon nitride film deposited on this surface has been verified by FTIR measurement to have the stoichiometrically proper composition of Si₃N₄ . However, the film was found to be selectively deposited on poly-Si electrodes. This selective deposition degrades the reliability of the stacked capacitor, because the silicon nitride can not completely cover the periphery of poly-Si electrodes on SiO₂. We propose a simple process that avoids the problem making it possible to apply silicon nitride film to stacked-capacitor fabrication. Stacked capacitors fabricated by this process exhibit very low leakage current and high electrical reliability even for ultra-thin silicon nitride films less than 5 nm thick     

Enhancement of adenovirus-mediated gene transfer to human bone marrow cells

Adenovirus infection of CD34+ hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells is dependent on the multiplicity of infection (MOI), time of incubation, the volume in which the co-incubation occurs and the presence or absence of growth factors. Studies revealed that a brief co-incubation (1-8 hours), resulted in low levels of transgene expression, suggesting that adenovirus infection of CD34+ cells occurs slowly, and optimal transduction requires a 24 hour exposure to adenovirus. Infection by Ad/beta-gal or Ad/p53 at a MOI of 500:1 provided a high transduction efficiency but inhibited hematopoietic function. However, treatment at a MOI of 50-100 resulted in efficient transduction (10.7-15.7% positive) without detectable toxicity. Secondary proof of adenovirus transgene expression was demonstrated by detection of mRNA for p53 in Ad/p53 infected stem cells. We conclude that a 24 hour exposure to recombinant adenovirus encoding p53 or beta-gal, at a MOI of 50-100 is optimal for in vitro gene transfer to BM cells and has no significant effect on hematopoietic function. Adenovirus-mediated transduction of BM cells can also be modulated by growth factors (IL-3, GM-CSF and G-CSF) with improved gene delivery and maintenance of hematopoietic function. In summary, adenovirus vectors can be used to transiently transduce stem cells, and conditions have been defined to maximize expression and limit inhibitory effects on CD34+ cells. These data support continued investigation of this vector for local cytokine delivery and purging of stem cell products.     

Crystallization process and magnetic properties of Fe100−x,B x (10 ≦ × ≦ 35) amorphous alloys and supersaturated state of boron inα-Fe

Amorphous specimens of Fe_100–x B _x were prepared in the range 10 × 35 at % B by a single-roller method. The crystallization process and the boron concentration dependence of the Curie temperature were examined by differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, Mössbauer spectroscopy and magnetic measurements. Two-step crystallization was observed in specimens with× < 17: amorphous amorphous + boron-supersaturated b c c phase (-Fe(B)) t-Fe₃B +-Fe. A single-Fe(B) phase was not observed. The transition temperature from t-Fe₃B to stable (-Fe + t-Fe₂B) sensitively depends on the boron content in the alloys. The crystallization temperature (T _x) of the amorphous alloys was almost unchanged for 17 × 31, but increased remarkably at high boron concentrations of× 33, where the decomposition products consisted of t-Fe₂B and o-FeB. The Curie temperature (T _c) of the amorphous phase was as low as 480 K at× = 10, increased with increasing boron content up to 820 K and then decreased in the high boron concentration alloys of× > 28. A single-Fe(B) phase was not detected in the as-quenched specimens of× = 8 and 10. The phase coexisted with the o-Fe₃B and amorphous phases. The lattice parameter of the phase was 0.2861₀ nm which was smaller than that of pure iron by 2/1000, indicating the substitutional occupation of boron atoms in the b c c lattice.     

Effect of cation structure on the electrochemical and thermal properties of ion conductive polymers obtained from polymerizable ionic liquids

Several onium cations having vinyl group formed ionic liquids after coupling with bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide. These monomers were polymerized, and the relation between onium cation structure and properties of thus polymerized ionic liquids was investigated. The polymerized ionic liquid having ethylimiadzolium cation unit showed the highest ionic conductivity of around 10⁻⁴ S cm⁻¹ at 30 °C among the obtained polymers reflecting the lowest glass transition temperature of −59 °C. These polymers were thermally stable and their decomposition temperatures were about 350 °C. The ionic conductivity of the polymerized ionic liquids decreased by both the addition of lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide and the polymerization in the presence of cross-linker. However, the polymerized ionic liquid having 1-methylpiperidinium cation structure showed good lithium ion transference number of 0.43 at room temperature.     

An Advanced Oscillation Mixing Method for Improving the Cooling Uniformity in Quenching

In quenching, the cooling uniformity is most important to diminish distortion occurring on work pieces. As a trial to accomplish uniform cooling, therefore, there exist various mixing methods of a quenchant and the quenchant circulation with an external pump has so far been the well accepted mixing method. However, this study proposes an advanced oscillation mixing method that can improve more the cooling uniformity in quenching. The proposed method includes a stirrer in oscillating motion, so that the simultaneous oscillating and mixing movements of the stirrer are considered to provide efecfively the uniform cooling characteristics for the quenchant. In comparison with the case of the circulation pump mixing, the investigation using the oscillation mixing method has demonstrated the following two experimental facts:(1) the short vapor blanket stage caused by the quick breakage of the oil vapor blanket and (2) the reduced variation of the quenching distortion.     

A Recommendation System Keeping Both Precision and Recall by Extraction of Uninteresting Information

A recommendation system which recommends interesting information to the target user must guarantee high precision and recall. However, there is trade-off between precision and recall. In this paper, we propose a web page recommendation method balancing both of them by take advantage of uninteresting information. The proposed method extracts the interest and uninterest indicators from not only historical interesting web pages but also uninteresting ones in a target genre. The historical interesting and uninteresting information is derived based on the browsing time and bookmarking. The proposed method can keep precision and recall by excluding the uninteresting information from the recommended ones based on the interest and uninterest indicators. The experimental result proved that the proposed method can improve the precision and recall than an existing method.     

High-performance cone beam reconstruction using CUDA compatible GPUs

Compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is a software development platform that allows us to run C-like programs on the nVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU). This paper presents an acceleration method for cone beam reconstruction using CUDA compatible GPUs. The proposed method accelerates the Feldkamp, Davis, and Kress (FDK) algorithm using three techniques: (1) off-chip memory access reduction for saving the memory bandwidth; (2) loop unrolling for hiding the memory latency; and (3) multithreading for exploiting multiple GPUs. We describe how these techniques can be incorporated into the reconstruction code. We also show an analytical model to understand the reconstruction performance on multi-GPU environments. Experimental results show that the proposed method runs at 83% of the theoretical memory bandwidth, achieving a throughput of 64.3 projections per second (pps) for reconstruction of 512³-voxel volume from 360 512²-pixel projections. This performance is 41% higher than the previous CUDA-based method and is 24 times faster than a CPU-based method optimized by vector intrinsics. Some detailed analyses are also presented to understand how effectively the acceleration techniques increase the reconstruction performance of a naive method. We also demonstrate out-of-core reconstruction for large-scale datasets, up to 1024³-voxel volume.     

Te concentration dependent photoemission and inverse-photoemission study of FeSe1?xTex

We have characterized the electronic structure of FeSe_1−xTe_x for various x values using soft x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (SXPES), high-resolution photoemission spectroscopy (HRPES) and inverse photoemission spectroscopy (IPES). The SXPES valence band spectral shape shows that the 2 eV feature in FeSe, which was ascribed to the lower Hubbard band in previous theoretical studies, becomes less prominent with increasing x. HRPES exhibits systematic x dependence of the structure near the Fermi level (E_F): its splitting near E_F and filling of the pseudogap in FeSe. IPES shows two features, near E_F and approximately 6 eV above E_F; the former may be related to the Fe 3d states hybridized with chalcogenide p states, while the latter may consist of plane-wave-like and Se d components. In the incident electron energy dependence of IPES, the density of states near E_F for FeSe and FeTe has the Fano lineshape characteristic of resonant behavior. These compounds exhibit different resonance profiles, which may reflect the differences in their electronic structures. By combining the PES and IPES data the on-site Coulomb energy was estimated at 3.5 eV for FeSe.