Liquid crystal director distributions between strong and weak polar anchoring surfaces in hybrid aligned cells are numerically analyzed. When the anchoring is a critical one, homogeneously or homeotropicly liquid crystal alignment can be obtained. Such cells have no threshold voltage and a driving voltage can be reduced less than 0.5 volt.

To improve metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET) performance, flat interface between gate insulator and silicon should be realized. In this paper, flattening process of Si surface below 1000 utilizing Ar/4.9%H2 annealing and its effect on ultrathin HfON gate insulator formation were investigated. The Si(100) substrates were annealed using conventional rapid thermal annealing (RTA) system in Ar or Ar/4.9%H2 ambient for 1 h. The surface roughness of Ar/4.9%H2-annealed Si was small compared to that of Ar-annealed Si because the surface oxidation was suppressed. The obtained root mean square (RMS) roughness was 0.08 nm (as-cleaned: 0.20 nm) in case of Ar/4.9%H2-annealed at 1000 measured by tapping mode atomic force microscopy (AFM). The HfON surface was also able to be flattened by reduction of Si surface roughness. The electrical properties of HfON gate insulator were improved by the reduction of Si surface roughness. We obtained equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of 0.79 nm (as-cleaned: 1.04 nm) and leakage current density of 3.510-3 A/cm2 (as-cleaned: 6.110 -1 A/cm2) by reducing the Si surface roughness.

A novel fabrication approach for electrochemical sensing of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) using neutral red (NR) functinalized carbon nanotube/plasma-polymerized film composite electrode is reported. The configuration of sensing electrode was NR-functionalized CNTs sandwiched between two acetonitrile PPFs on sputtered gold thin film. The NR as an electron transfer mediator shuttles the electron from the CNT to gold electrode. Due to the synergistic effect between NR and CNT, the resulting electrode showed the lower detection potential and the larger sensitivity (current) than that of NR or CNT alone. The sensor revealed a sensitivity of 29 µA mM-1 cm-2 at +0.15 V vs. Ag/AgCl, linear dynamic range of 0.08–4.2 mM, a detection limit of 18 µM at S/N=3, and a response time of 7 s.

We fabricated metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices with Pt/Ta2O5 gate stacks and investigated their electrical and structural properties. As increasing RF magnetron sputter-deposition time of Ta2O5 film, the values of equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) and flat band voltage (VFB) increase whilst the density of interfacial trap (Dit) gradually decreases. The effective metal work function (Φm,eff) of Pt metal gate, extracted from the relations of EOT versus VFB are calculated to be ∼5.29 eV, implying that Fermi-level pinning in Ta2O5 gate dielectric is insignificant.

In this paper, a LSI design for video encoder and decoder for H.263+ video compression is presented. LSI operates under clock frequency of 27 MHz to compress QCIF (176144 pixels) at the frame rate of 30 frame per second. The core size is 4.6 4.6 mm2 in a 0.35 µm process. The architecture is based on bus connected heterogeneous dedicated modules, named as System-MSPA architecture. It employs the fast and small-chip-area dedicated modules in lower level and controls them by employing the slow and flexible programmable device and an external DRAM. Design results in success to achieve real time encoder in quite compact size without losing flexibility and expand ability. Real time emulation and easy test capability with external PC is also implemented.

A homeotropic liquid crystal display utilizing a liquid crystal with positive dielectric anisotropy, 13. 3" XGA TFT-LCD, has been fabricated. The rubbing-free device, appears black in the absence of electric field. When an electric field generated by interdigital electrodes is applied, a bend deformation of molecular director to the direction of the field occurs and thus the cell transmits light, showing brightness uniformity in all directions owing to the dual domainlike director configuration. With an addition of negative-birefringent film, this device shows excellent viewing angle characteristics.