An integrator is quite a suitable active element for high-speed filters. The effect of its excess phase shifts, however, is severe in the case of high-Q filter realization. The deterioration due to the excess phase shifts cannot be avoided when only integrators are used as frequency-dependent elements like in leapfrog realization. This paper describes a design of second-order high-speed and high-Q filters with low sensitivity to excess phase shifts of integrators by adding a passive RC circuit. The proposed method can drastically reduce the effect due to the undesirable pole of an integrator, which is the cause of the excess phase shifts, compared to conventional filters using only integrators. As an example, a fourth-order bandpass filter with 5-MHz center frequency and Q=25 is implemented by the proposed method on a monolithic chip. The results obtained here show quite good agreement with the theoretical values. This demonstrates effectiveness of the proposed method and feasibility of high-speed and high-Q filters on a monolithic chip.

The effects of low temperature etching for sub-half micron multi-layer resist are investigated. The low temperature etching with pure O2 gas provides higher anisotropic profiles than with an additional gas such as Cl2, N2. This is caused by the difference in the formative process of the side wall protection. With pure O2 gas at 80, highly anisotropic profiles for 0.35 µm patterns can be performed while the maximum tolerable width loss is below 0.03 µm.

This paper describes a simulation platform for use in the quantitative assessment of different respiratory motion correction techniques in Coronary MR angiography (CMRA). The simulator incorporates acquisition of motion parameters from heart motion tracking and applies it to a deformable heart model. To simulate respiratory motion, a high-resolution 3-D coronary heart reference image is deformed using the estimated linear transformation from a series of volunteer coronal scout scans. The deformed and motion-affected 3-D coronary images are used to generate segmented k-space data to represent MR data acquisition affected by respiratory motion. The acquired k-space data are then corrected using different respiratory motion correction methods and converted back to image data. The resulting images are quantitatively compared with each other using image-quality measures. Simulation experiment results are validated by acquiring CMRA scans using the correction methods used in the simulation.