Degradation of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) reliability such as the relative transconductance reduction by plasma exposure is evaluated. The linear region peak transconductance (gm) decreases with antenna ratio (exposed antenna area/gate area) due to the plasma-induced Si-SiO2 interface state generation. The Si-SiO2 interface-related gm reduction which is defined as (gm0gm)/gm, where gm0 is the initial value of gm, decreases as the gate oxide thickness decreases. It is also found that the decreasing amount of gm depends on the conduction current from the plasma. The correlation between the (gm0gm)/gm and the plasma-induced reduction of charge-to-breakdown of the gate oxide with a constant current stress (ΔQBD) is observed, and the result shows that the gm reduction of nMOSFET during the plasma process is severe to the plasma-induced damage compared with the gate oxide breakdown.

Micro-tribology is a key technology in micro-machine. Atomic-scale wear and friction fluctuations degrade the performance of micro-machines. New wear-resistant, low friction materials should be useful in reducing micro- and macro-tribological wear and friction fluctuations. Our investigation of the frictional characteristics of polished CVD diamond films by FFM (friction force microscope), AFM (atomic force microscope) and conventional reciprocating tribometer and trial micro processing of diamond produced three main results. First, the friction coefficient of diamond film increases rapidly with decreasing load in the micro-load region. This is partially due to the surface tension of adsorbed water on the surface under high humidity. In the macro-load region also, the friction coefficient increases with decreasing load, but, in this case it is due to elastic deformation. The second result is that diamond film has excellent wear resistance in the micro-load region compared with silicon and diamond-like carbon (DLC) film. Finally, a micro-diamond gear and diamond shaft were fabricated by laser machining and thermo-chemical etching, and then assembled.

This paper describes the method of applying the integral form of Maxwell's equations to the transmission-line network used in the spatial network method for the modeling of curved conductor surfaces. The techniques of dealing with the transmission-line network near cylindrical conductor surface are explained in detail. To compare exact solutions with computed values, a cylindrical cavity resonator is analysed. The resonant frequencies and unloaded Q's for the computed three modes are obtained with the error of about 1%. Moreover, applying this treatment to the waveguide with magnetron anodeshape cross section, a cutoff-constant is computed successfully. It is found that the treatment proposed in this paper can be used as the method for modeling of curved conductor surface in the spatial network method. It is also considered that this treatment can be extend to TLM method.

Long-wavelength 1.3 µm GaInAsP/InP vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have been demonstrated in an array configuration. With the strong current confinement by a buried heterostructure and the efficient optical feedback by a dielectric cavity, five VCSEL elements in a 24 array operated at room temperature with 5 mW total power output and wavelength error within 5%. The stacked planar optics including the VCSEL array is a promising optical transmitter in ultra large scale parallel optical communication systems.

The efficiency of a guided-probe fault location process is affected by the number of the probed lines. This number depends on the size of the target area and the method by which a line is selected for probing. This paper presents a method for reducing the size of the target area in a sequential circuit by introducing the concepts of Type- and Type- faults. This paper also presents a method of selecting lines for probing in a more efficient way. The efficiency of the proposed methods is demonstrated by experimental results.

This paper proposes a large capacity high-speed file memory system implemented with wafer scale RAM which adopts a novel defect-tolerant technique. Based on set-associative mapping, the defective memory blocks on the wafer are repaired by switching with the spare memory blocks. In order to repair the clustered defective blocks, these are permuted logically with other blocks by adding some constant value to the input block addresses. The defective blocks remaining even after applying the above two methods are repaired by using error control codes which correct soft errors induced by alpha particles in an on-line operation as well as hard errors induced by the remaining defective blocks. By using the proposed technique, this paper demonstrates a large capacity high-speed WSI file memory system implemented with high fabrication yield and low redundancy rate.

The wave forms of electric and magnetic fields radiated by short gap discharges are measured to analyze electrostatic discharge (ESD) events in the near-field zone with the monopole antennas, the loop antenna and the 5.5GHz bandwidth waveform digitizer. The antenna outputs are corrected by the measured characteristics of the antennas. The relations between the measured electric field and the discharge currents are discussed.

The analysis of the shielding properties of chiral materials slabs is here presented, first deriving the spectral representation of the shielded fields, then getting the asymptotic expression of the transmission matrix in the higher frequencies. The time response of the shielded field for the NEMP incidence is finally deduced in a closed form.

A conventional anode coupled plasma etching process has been developed to etch 300 µm-deep cavities and 600 µm-through holes with nearly vertical sidewalls into single crystal silicon. An optimized SF6/O2 gas mixture results in a nearly vertical etching profile. A silicon wafer was fabricated with a large number of cavities and through holes with less than 1 percent uniformity. It was also experimentally confirmed that this process can be used to etch vertical cavities and through holes in single-crystal silicon with any orientation. This process has the advantage of unlimited etching depth and etching patterns. Advantages in mechanical strength are obtained because a micro-curve is formed at the bottom edge of the cavities. This etching process developed on a conventional plasma etching system was utilized to fabricate a torsional vibrator that consists of single-crystal silicon and Pyrex glass.

A method is described for approximately estimating the surface specific-absorption-rate (SAR) in an anatomically realistic model of the human head for microwave exposure using the external magnetic near-field. The finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) technique is used to compute the electromagnetic fields in the head model for 750-MHz and 1.5-GHz far-field exposures with the 1991 ANSI specified safety level. The spatial pattern tracking between the one-gram averaged surface-SAR and external magnetic near-field is demonstrated on the horizontal cross sectional perimeter of the head model. The regression coefficients between them are also obtained on the fifty-five horizontal cross sectional perimeters, which could give an approximate value of the surface-SAR in an acutual head, if the external magnetic near-field would be measured. This is validated by the theoretical results in a semi-infinite homogeneous flat model for normal incidence microwave exposure.

The analysis of the shielding properties of a planar wire-mesh shield embedded in a general isotropic--chirality is included--or anisotropic stratified media is here presented. A suitable model of the grating has been introduced in order to consider the occuring phenomena, in fact through a spectral technique the electromagnetic problem is translated into the equivalent circuit network model that allows to express the time response of the shielded field for the NEMP incidence in a closed form.

Broadband antennas such as biconical antennas and log-periodic dipole antennas are generally used in automatic EMC measurements. However, these broadband antennas have not been used for accurate measurement because accurate specifications for them are lacking. Therefore, more accurate analysis is urgently required by the CISPR (International Special Committee on Radio Interference), to establish the specifications for broadband antennas for EMC measurements. In this paper, the AF of biconical antennas is calculated by using Moment Methods. The frequency characteristics and antenna height dependency of AF are presented. AF is also measured and compared to the data obtained by the calculations. Good agreement between the calculations and measurements is achieved, indicating the usefulness of our computation method. In addition, the effect of antenna separation distance and transmitting antenna height on AF is investigated. The calculated AF deviation from the reference value is nearly 0dB except for certain antenna arrangements. In these antenna arrangements, the field becomes null at the receiving antenna and widely varies in magnitude and phase around the null points. Therefore, the antenna is immersed in a non-uniform field, while the AF is defined on the assumption of a uniform field. Consequently, the erroneous AF will be derived from measurements around these null points and it will be greatly different from that obtained at other antenna heights. Thus, it is better to avoid these conditions during actual measurements. The effect of the ground plane on AF is also evaluated. AF is shown to be seriously affected by the ground plane especially at frequencies around 90MHz. It should be noted that AF deviation has crests corresponding to the null field at 300MHz. The obtained data will be useful in establishing specifications of biconical antennas for EMC measurements.

A black membrane is a biological-membrane analogue, i.e. a phospholipid bilayer membrane, artificially formed on an orifice immersed in water. It is used to investigate the properties of the membrane itself and channels embedded therein. In this paper, microfabrication techniques are applied to fabricate the orifice, and a glass substrate is isotropically etched to define the orifice geometry. The periphery of the orifice was patterned with aminosilane to anchor the membrane. The remainder part was coated with fluorosilane to make the surface hydrophobic and to prevent adsorption of channel-forming molecules. We demonstrated experimentally that a stable and reproducible membrane is easily obtainable using the orifice.

The antenna factor measurement of the dipole antennas for electromagnetic interference (EMI) measurements is studied theoretically and experimentally. The 3-antenna method is applied to near-field. Near-field transmission characteristics between the transmitting and receiving dipole antennas is obtained by using the electromotive force (EMF) method, where sinusoidal current distributions are assumed. It is shown that the antenna factors can be measured from transmission values between two antennas and near-field correction factors at any height of each antenna.

This paper presents a new microprocessing method that uses a Cl2 fast atom beam (FAB) with stainless steel (SUS304) patterned masks. This new method uses the patterned mask instead of lithographically processed patterned photoresist materials employed in the conventional FAB microprocessing method. We examined the performance of this method by etching GaAs workpieces under various conditions: (1) by setting the distance between the mask surface and flat workpiece surface, L, from 0 µm to 500 µm; (2) by setting the angle between the FAB axis and the flat workpiece surface, θ; to either 30or 50. (3) by etching a workpiece surface that had a 15-µm step and two different surface textures, smooty and undulated; and (4) by doing overlapped etching using a square-patterned mask first and then a circular-patterned mask. The experiments show that the accuracy of reproducing the mask pattern on the etched surface increases with decreasing L. Moreover, the etching rate is almost the same (L100 µm) and decreases slightly at longer distance (L100 µm). The experiments also show that the side walls of the surface are parallel to the FAB axis, even for θ0, indicating that anisotropic etching can be achieved. The experiments for the stepped surface with different surface textures show the surface texture is not affected by the FAB etching. The overlapped etching experiments show that FAB etching is capable of producing overlapped structures. These results demonstrate that this new FAB method can be used in the microproduction of multi-faced, overlapped, three-dimensional microstructures.

Exploiting the full potential of a multiprocessor system requires a good job scheduling algorithm. In this paper we analyze three dynamic job scheduling algorithms in multiprocessor systems. These algorithms are based on static job scheduling algorithms, LPT (longest processing time first), SJF (shortest job first), and LPR (largest processor requirement first), each of which exhibits good performance in terms of asymptotic upper bound on the makespan of the schedule generated by it. We analyze their performance in the dynamic case experimentally, where we have a stochastic stream of jobs with arbitrary processing time and processor requirement. We compare their performance with the FCFS algorithm and its simple extension. Except for LPT, the algorithms are found to perform significantly better than FCFS, while among themselves SJF performs the best, followed by K-LPR, a variation of LPR. We also consider the fairness aspect of these algorithms and propose a general technique to impose fairness on these algorithms. Finally, we analyze the impact of imposing fairness on the performance of these algorithms.

Feasibility of 20 Gbit/s single channel transoceanic soliton transmission systems with a simple EDFA repeaters configuration has been studied. Both a simple and versatile soliton pulse generator and a polarization insensitive optical demultiplexer, which can provide a almost square shape optical gate with duration of full bit time period, have been proposed and demonstrated by using sinusoidally modulated electroabsorption modulators. The optical time-division multiplexing/demultiplexing scheme using the optical demultiplexer results in drastic improvement of bit error rate characteristics. We have experimentally confirmed that the use of alternating-amplitude solitons is an efficient way to mitigate not only soliton-soliton interaction but also Gordon-Haus timing jitter constraints in multi-ten Gbit/s soliton transmission. Timing jitter reduction using relatively wide band optical filter bas been investigated in 20 Gbit/s loop experiments and single-carrier, single-polarization 20 Gbit/s soliton data transmission over 11500 km with bit error rate of below 10-9 has been experimentally demonstrated, using the modulator-based soliton source, the optical demultiplexer, the alternation-amplitude solitons, and wide-band optical filters. Obtained 230 Tbit/skm transmission capacity shows the feasibility of 20 Gbit/s single channel soliton transoceanic systems using fully practical technologies.

We describe an application of InGaAs/AlGaAs VCSELs to multiple wavelength light source for optical interconnection. A flip-chip bonding technique is used to integrate the VCSELs lasing at different wavelengths. The integrated VCSELs of different wavelengths are individually grown and processed, so that one can optimize the device characteristics and the wavelength separation or distribution for multiple wavelength interconnection systems. A 9-wavelength VCSEL array with a wavelength separation of 5 nm has been successfully fabricated.

Most current management systems employ graphic-user-interface displays to visualize the networks being managed. Some networks are so large that it is difficult to display all network elements in a single window alone, and therefore, the hierarchical multi-window style presentation is commonly used. This form of presentation has disadvantages, however, including the fact that window manipulations are complex. Our approach (bifocal network visualization) is able to display both the context and any detail of a network within a single window, and overcomes the disadvantages of hierarchical multi-window presentation. We implemented this bifocal network visualization on a workstation using a frame buffer memory called DUALQUEST that is able to generate images in real-time and is simple to operate. This paper describes bifocal network visualization and its implementation. Furthermore, we present an experiment to compare our interface with conventional hierarchical multi-window presentation.

Trouble management is a key function in solving the problems and maintaining the high communications capability of a network when communication service network users encounter problems in the quality of services [1]. This paper proposes technologies and architecture for an intelligent management system to achieve advanced service/network trouble management. The system generates operation scenarios to find a cause to solve a reported trouble, executes them, and modifies them according to operation circumstance changes. In the scenario execution process, fault propagation simulation is used to isolate a fault in necessary cases. The evaluation of the system applied to the ISDN services shows that the proposed system can achieve high-speed, precise trouble management by the integrated cooperative work of a human (operator) and a machine (operation system).