We designed and fabricated 4H-SiC PIN avalanche photodiodes (APD) for UV detection. The thickness of an intrinsic layer in a PIN structure was optimized in order to achieve the highest quantum efficiency at the wavelength of interest. The optimized 4H-SiC PIN APDs exhibited a maximum external quantum efficiency of >80% at the wavelength of 280 nm and a gain greater than 40000. Both electrical and optical characteristics of the fabricated APDs were in agreement with those predicted from simulation.

We report successful bottom-up synthesis of small diameter silicon nanowires (SiNWs) on SiO2 and Si3N4 surfaces. SiNWs with diameter comparable to the diameter of the Au nano-particles (10-20 nm) were grown on these surfaces, as well as on Si substrates which are commonly used for the nanowire growth. The growth temperature for obtaining a high density of SiNWs on SiO2 and Si3N4 substrates is higher (460-470) than that of the case of normal Si substrates (440). The growth on patterned substrates demonstrates that SiNWs can be selectively grown. Furthermore, the guided growth over metal structures is also shown to be possible. Selective growth of SiNWs on pre-patterned surfaces opens up the possibility of self-aligning SiNWs for the integration of complex device structures.

A band-pass bilateral filter is an improved variant of a bilateral filter that does not have low-pass characteristics but has band-pass characteristics. Unfortunately, its computation time is relatively large since all pixels are subjected to Gaussian calculation. To solve this problem, we pay attention to a nonlinear filter called ε-filter and propose an advanced ε-filter labeled band-pass ε-filter. As ε-filter has low-pass characteristics due to spatial filtering, it does not enhance the image contrast. On the other hand, band-pass ε-filter does not have low-pass characteristics but has band-pass characteristics to enhance the image contrast around edges unlike ε-filter. The filter works not only as a noise reduction filter but also as an edge detection filter depending on the filter setting. Due to its simple design, the calculation cost is relatively small compared to the band-pass bilateral filter. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, we report the results of some comparison experiments on the filter characteristics and computational cost.

The electrical properties of poly-Si thin film transistors (TFTs) using rapid thermal annealing with various gate oxide thicknesses were studied in this work. It was found that Poly-Si TFT electrical characteristics with the thinnest gate oxide thickness after RTA treatment exhibits the largest performance improvement compared to TFT with thick oxide as a result of the increased incorporated amounts of the nitrogen and oxygen. Thus, the combined effects can maintain the advantages and avoid the disadvantages of scaled-down oxide, which is suitable for small-to-medium display mass production.

Network resiliency has become crucial as the failure of a group of networks happens more frequently, being caused by either natural disasters or malicious attacks. In order to enhance the resiliency of the Internet, we show that changing the evolving strategy is more important than increasing the number of links by multihoming, which connects a single network with two or more links. From the simulation with Internet topologies, it is shown that the resiliency of the Internet can be enhanced by replacing the current evolving strategy only in part.

We report Ultraviolet (UV)-induced visible light luminescence in artificial-lattice thin films of ion-doped silica glass (silica superstructure thin films). The film was composed of periodic nanometer layers of germanium-doped silica (Ge:SiO2), titanium-doped silica (Ti:SiO2), and tin-doped silica (Sn:SiO2). The thickness of each layer was between 10 and 30 nm. Despite the small thickness of the film (few microns), a relatively bright luminescence of white light was observed, along with cathode-ray luminescence in the superstructure film. In addition, irradiation of the superstructure film with UV light led to light amplification by stimulated emission at 405 nm. The experimental results suggest the potential application of silica superstructure thin films as optical amplifiers.

A flexible noise de-embedding method for on-wafer microwave measurements of silicon MOSFETs is presented in this study. We use the open, short, and thru dummy structures to subtract the parasitic effects from the probe pads and interconnects of a fixtured MOS transistor. The thru standard are used to extract the interconnect parameters for subtracting the interconnect parasitics in gate, drain, and source terminals of the MOSFET. The parasitics of the dangling leg in the source terminal are also modeled and taken into account in the noise de-embedding procedure. The MOS transistors and de-embedding dummy structures were fabricated in a standard CMOS process and characterized up to 20 GHz. Compared with the conventional de-embedding methods, the proposed technique is accurate and area-efficient.

The novel SCR-based (silicon controlled rectifier) device for ESD power clamp is presented in this paper. The proposed device has a high holding voltage and a high triggering current characteristic. These characteristics enable latch-up immune normal operation as well as superior full chip ESD protection. The device has a small area in requirement robustness in comparison to ggNMOS (gate grounded NMOS). The proposed ESD protection device is designed in 0.25 µm and 0.5 µm CMOS Technology. In the experimental result, the proposed ESD clamp has a double trigger characteristic, a high holding voltage of 4 V and a high trigger current of above 350 mA. The robustness has measured to HBM 8 kV (HBM: Human Body Model) and MM 400 V (MM: Machine Model). The proposed device has a high level It2 of 52 mA/ µm approximately.

ε-filter is a nonlinear filter for reducing noise and is applicable not only to speech signals but also to image signals. The filter design is simple and it can effectively reduce noise with an adequate filter parameter. This paper presents a method for estimating the optimal filter parameter of ε-filter based on signal-noise decorrelation and shows that it yields the optimal filter parameter concerning a wide range of noise levels. The proposed method is applicable where the noise to be removed is uncorrelated with signal, and it does not require any other knowledge such as noise variance and training data.

A data analysis technology of atomic force microscopy for atomically flat silicon surfaces has been developed. Atomically flat silicon surfaces composed of atomic terraces and steps are obtained on (100) orientation 200 mm diameter wafers by annealing in pure argon ambience at 1,200 for 30 minutes. Atomically flat silicon surfaces are lead to improve the MOS inversion layer mobility and current drivability of MOSFETs and to decrease the fluctuations in electrical characteristics of MOSFETs. It is important to realize the technology that evaluates the flatness and the uniformity of atomically flat silicon surfaces. The off direction angle is calculated by using two straight edge lines selected from measurement data. And the off angle is calculated from average atomic terrace width under assumption that height difference between neighboring terraces is equal to the step height, 0.135 nm, of (100) silicon surface. The analyzing of flatness of each terrace can be realized by converting the measurement data using the off direction angle and the off angle. And, the average roughness of each terrace is about 0.017-0.023 nm. Therefore, the roughness and the uniformity of each terrace can be evaluated by this proposed technique.

In prior work, contact welding phenomena were observed in automotive relays during break of motor inrush current. The switching performance of the type of relay investigated could be correlated with the parameters: over-travel, coil suppression, and the break current. In the present work the author further explores the impact of both the contact material (silver tin oxide versus fine grain silver) and the contact surface topography (brand new and pre-aged contacts). He further assesses the robustness of the system "relay" with those parameters using the Taguchi methods for robust design. Furthermore, the robustness of two alternative automotive relay types will be discussed.

Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3-D ICs), i.e., stacked dies, can alleviate the interconnect problem coming with the decreasing feature size and increasing integration density, and promise a solution to heterogenous integration. The vertical connection, which is generally implemented by the through-the-silicon via, is a key technology for 3-D ICs. In this paper, given 3-D circuit placement or floorplan results with white space reserved between blocks for inter-layer interconnections, we proposed methods for assigning inter-layer signal via locations. Introducing a grid structure on the chip, the inter-layer via assignment of two-layer chips can be optimally solved by a convex-cost max-flow formulation with signal via congestion optimized. As for 3-D ICs with three or more layers, the inter-layer signal via assignment is modeled as an integral min-cost multi-commodity flow problem, which is solved by a heuristic method based on the lagrangian relaxation. Relaxing the capacity constraints in the grids, we transfer the min-cost multi-commodity flow problem to a sequence of lagrangian sub-problems, which are solved by finding a sequence of shortest paths. The complexity of solving a lagrangian sub-problem is O(nntng2), where nnt is the number of nets and ng is the number of grids on one chip layer. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the method.

Silicon photonic devices based on silicon photonic wire waveguides are especially attractive devices, since they can be ultra-compact and low-power consumption. In this paper, we demonstrated various devices fabricated on silicon photonic wire waveguides. They included optical directional couplers, reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers, 12, 14, 18 and 44 optical switches, ring resonators. The characteristics of these devices show that silicon photonic wire waveguides offer promising platforms in constructing compact and power-saving photonic devices and systems.

We have proposed a tunable laser with silica-waveguide ring resonators. In this tunable laser, a semiconductor optical amplifier was passively aligned and mounted onto a silica-waveguide substrate. The ring resonators can be tuned by controlling their temperatures using the thermo optic heaters formed on them, and there are no mechanically moving parts. Thus, they are sufficiently stable and reliable for practical use. Our tunable laser exhibits a high fiber-output power of more than 15 dBm and a wide tunable range of 60 nm (L-band, 50 GHz spacing, 147 channels). Moreover, a tunable laser with a much wider tunable range of 96 nm using 100-GHz-FSR ring resonators is also reported.

A silicon lateral photodiode is fabricated by standard 0.18 µm CMOS process, and the optical detection property is characterized. The photodiode has interdigital electrode structure with the electrode width of 0.22 µm and the electrode spacing of 0.6 µm. At 830 nm wavelength, the responsivity is 0.12 A/W at low bias voltage, and is increased to 0.6 A/W due to avalanche amplification. The bandwidth is also enhanced from 12 MHz at low bias voltage to 100 MHz at the bias voltage close to the breakdown voltage.

This paper proposes an improved dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for dual Quality of Service (QoS) classes to maximize the utilization rate of the Resilient Packet Ring (RPR). To achieve dynamic bandwidth allocation for the two QoS classes in the RPR, each node measures the high priority traffic flow and assigns the appropriate bandwidth; the remaining bandwidth is used for low priority traffic. It passes a control frame containing the measured bandwidth of the high priority traffic to the other nodes. Based on the advertised high priority traffic bandwidth, any node that is congested transmits, to the other nodes, a fairness message to fairly allocate the remaining low priority bandwidth. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm enhances the utilization rate and reduces the delay of high priority frames.

Video transmission over mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) can be serverly degraded due to the effect of fading and handoff. In this paper, we propose a channel adaptive error resilience scheme for video transmission over mobile WiMAX. When the channel condition begins to trigger handoff, the current frame is stored in the long-term memory for the forward error correction, and the following frames are encoded by using double motion vectors (MVs) in the sense of multi-hypothesis motion compensation. Even if a whole frame is lost, we can reconstruct the following frames using the stored frame in the long-term memory. However, the error propagation still remains in this forward error resilience method. To refresh the erroneous frames to the decoder, the encoder utilizes the channel adaptive refreshing (CAR). In the CAR, the channel rate is first predicted using channel parameter, a carrier to interference and noise ratio (CINR), and the encoder adaptively determines the number of blocks to be encoded in the intra mode based on the feedback information. Performance evaluations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In deep-submicron technologies, process variations can significantly affect the performance and yield of VLSI chips. As a countermeasure to the variations, post-silicon tuning has been proposed. Deskew, where the clock timing of flip-flops (FFs) is tuned by inserted programmable delay elements (PDEs) into the clock tree, is classified into this method. We propose a novel deskew method that decides the delay values of the elements by measuring a small amount of FFs' clock timing and presuming the rest of FFs' clock timings based on a statistical model. In addition, our proposed method can determine the discrete PDE delay value because the rewriting constraint satisfies the condition of total unimodularity.

The H.264/AVC standard provides several new error-resilient features to enable the reliable transmission of compressed video signals over lossy packet networks. Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) is one of the most interesting resilient features within the H.264/AVC standard. Unlike former standards, in which slices were constructed out of consecutive raster scan macroblocks, FMO suggests new slices composed of spatially distributed Macroblocks (MBs), and organized in a mixed-up fashion. H.264/AVC specifies seven types of FMO. The standard defines also an explicit FMO type (Type 6), which allows explicitly assignment of each MB within the frame to any available slice groups. Therefore new FMO types can be used and integrated into H264/AVC without violating the standard. In this paper we propose a new Explicit Chessboard-Wipe (ECW) Flexible Macroblocks Ordering (FMO) technique, which outperforms all other FMO types. The new ECW ordering results in effective error scattering which maximizes the number of correctly received macroblocks located around corrupted macroblocks, leading to better error concealment. Performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed Explicit FMO approach outperforms all the FMO types. Both subjective and objective visual quality comparative study has been also carried out in order to validate the proposed approach.

Characteristics of conductive elastomer that is composed of silicone rubber and dispersed carbon black particles show conductive and elastic properties in one simple material. This material has been widely applied to make-break contacts of panel switches and connectors of liquid crystal panels. However, since surface state of the contact is very soft, it is difficult to remove contaminant films of contaminated opposite side contact surface and to obtain low contact resistance owing to break the film. This is an important problem to be solved not only for the application of make-break switching contact but also static connector contacts. This study has been conducted to examine some complex structures of the elastomer which indicate removal characteristics for contaminant films and low contact resistance. As specimens, six different types of elastomer contacts composed of different type of dispersed materials as carbon and metal fibers, metal mesh, and plated surfaces were used. The contacts of opposite side were Au and Sn plated contact surface on a printed circuit board (PCB) which is usually used in the static connector and make-break contacts. In order to contaminate contact surfaces of PCB, the surfaces were subjected to exposure in an SO2 gas environment. The elastomeric contacts contained hard materials showed lower contact resistance than only dispersed carbon particles in the elastomer matrix for both contaminated PCB contact surfaces.