In this research, the effect of Ar/N2-plasma sputtering gas pressure on the LaBxNy tunnel and block layer was investigated for pentacene-based floating-gate memory with an amorphous rubrene (α-rubrene) passivation layer. The influence of α-rubrene passivation layer for memory characteristic was examined. The pentacene-based metal/insulator/metal/insulator/semiconductor (MIMIS) diode and organic field-effect transistor (OFET) were fabricated utilizing N-doped LaB6 metal layer and LaBxNy insulator with α-rubrene passivation layer at annealing temperature of 200°C. In the case of MIMIS diode, the leakage current density and the equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) were decreased from 1.2×10-2 A/cm2 to 1.1×10-7 A/cm2 and 3.5 nm to 3.1 nm, respectively, by decreasing the sputtering gas pressure from 0.47 Pa to 0.19 Pa. In the case of floating-gate type OFET with α-rubrene passivation layer, the larger memory window of 0.68 V was obtained with saturation mobility of 2.2×10-2 cm2/(V·s) and subthreshold swing of 199 mV/dec compared to the device without α-rubrene passivation layer.

The authors have been investigating the deterioration process of Au-plated slip-ring and Ag-Pd brush system with lubricant to realize stable and long lifetime. Through the past tests, it can be made clear that lubricant is very important for long lifetime, and a simple model of the deterioration process was proposed. However, it is still an issue how the lubricant is deteriorated and also what the relation between lubricant deterioration and contact voltage behavior is. In this paper, the contact voltage waveforms were regularly recorded during the test, and analyzed to obtain the time change of peak voltage and standard deviation during one rotation. Based on these results, it is discussed what happens at the interface between ring and brush with the lubricant. And the following results are made clear. The fluctuation of voltage waveforms, especially peaks of pulse-like fluctuation more easily occurs for minus rings than for plus rings. Further, peak values of the pulse-like fluctuation rapidly decreases and disappear at lower rotation speed as mentioned in the previous works. In addition, each peaks of the pulse-like fluctuation is identified at each position of the ring periphery. From these results, it can be assumed that lubricant film exists between brush and ring surface and electric conduction is realized by tunnel effect. In other words, it can be made clear that the fluctuation would be caused by the lubricant layer, not only by the ring surface. Finally, an electric conduction model is proposed and the above results can be explained by this model.

At the present time, as downsizing of connectors causes thin gold plated layer and low contact load, serious problem of degradation of contact resistance property is induced. For these contacts, corrosion of the contacts surface under environment and high temperature as soldering and reflow process should be existed. Oxidation of base metal atoms which are diffused from under layer and additives occurs. Contact resistance increases for both surface contamination and low contact load. In order to resolve these problems and wear of surface, application of contact lubricants is useful and effective. However, degradation of the lubricants under such reflow process as high temperature possibly occurs. Therefore, in this study, from view point of change of lubricant quality as viscosity, weight loss, polymerization, oxidation and molecular orientation were clarified. For increase in contact resistance, orientation of lubricant molecular acts as important factor was found. The other factors of the lubricant hardly does not effect on contact resistance.

This paper describes a logarithmic compression ADC using a subranging TDC and the transient response of a comparator. We utilized the settling time of the comparator for a logarithmic compression instead of a logarithmic amplifier. The settling time of the comparator is inversely proportional to the logarithm of an input voltage. In the proposed ADC, an input voltage is converted into a pulse whose width represents the settling time of the comparator. Subsequently, the TDC converts the pulse width into a binary code. The supply voltage of the proposed ADC can be reduced more than a conventional logarithmic ADC because an analog to digital conversion takes place in the time domain. We confirmed through a 0.18-µm CMOS circuit simulation that the proposed ADC achieves a resolution of 11 bits, a sampling rate of 20 MS/s, a dynamic range of 59 dB and a power consumption of 9.8 mW at 1.5 V operation.

Contact lubricants have been used in electric contacts such as connectors. Contact failures for down size of connector contacts with low contact force and cost down of gold plated are a serious problem to be solved. One solution is the application of lubricants to the contacts. Particularly these contacts are exposed to elevated temperature under reflow treatment in assembling processes. It is an important subject should be clarified that the deterioration phenomenon of increases in contact resistance properties under the reflow. This degradation should be induced by two causes. Namely, one is a surface contamination due to oxidation of diffused small amount of additives through gold plated layer. The other is decomposition of the coated lubricants. In this study, first of all, degradation of contact resistance properties were measured, and change of images of STM for exposure time of high temperature were observed. To clarify more in detail this degradation of the contact resistance, for both clean gold plated surface and heated clean surface were examined by using XPS and AES analysis. As results, contact resistance properties of clean surface were found to degrade for exposure at the elevated temperature. This degradation was found due to oxidation of base metal nickel and cobalt additive to gold plated surface. However, influence of the contact lubrication on the degradation of contact resistance was not recognized. The change of composition of an olefin lubricant was discussed by using STM images. Moreover, growth of oxide film on the clean surface was found as cubic law by using an ellipsometry.

The electrical lubricants have been accepted to reduce friction of contacts and to prevent degradation of contact resistance. However, as the lubricant has an electrical insulation property it seems that application to contact surface is unsuitable for contact resistance. These mechanisms in contact interfaces have not fully understood. In this paper, relationships between contact resistance and contact load were examined with both clean and lubricated surfaces. Orientation of the lubricant molecules was observed by high magnification images of STM and AFM. There was no difference in contact resistance characteristics for both clean and lubricated surfaces in spite of lubricants thickness. The molecules were orientated perpendicular to the surface. This fact turns over an established theory of adsorption of non-polar lubricant to surface.

The conical area evolutionary algorithm (CAEA) has a very high run-time efficiency for bi-objective optimization, but it can not tackle problems with more than two objectives. In this letter, a conical hypervolume evolutionary algorithm (CHEA) is proposed to extend the CAEA to a higher dimensional objective space. CHEA partitions objective spaces into a series of conical subregions and retains only one elitist individual for every subregion within a compact elitist archive. Additionally, each offspring needs to be compared only with the elitist individual in the same subregion in terms of the local hypervolume scalar indicator. Experimental results on 5-objective test problems have revealed that CHEA can obtain the satisfactory overall performance on both run-time efficiency and solution quality.

The authors have been investigating degradation process of Au plated slip ring and Ag-Pd-Cu brush system. In almost all cases the lifetime of the sliding system ends, when Au plating layer is worn out, the ring surface is oxidized to be black in color and contact resistance becomes very high. Further, the lifetime is very short without lubricant. So, the lubricant is very effective to make the lifetime longer. However, even with lubricant the lifetime is varied from about 1000 hours to almost 7000 hours in the past experiments. It is an important issue how the lubricant works on the lifetime of the system. In this paper the effect of lubricant on the degradation process of contact resistance is focused on. In the past tests the lubricant is supplied only once before the test. In this test the lubricant is regularly supplied almost every 900 operation hours. Consequently, the operation more than 8000 hours is realized, which is the longest among tests so far. In addition the contact voltage drop increase gradually until 2600 hours and after that it stays almost constant around 70 mV. According to the Element Analysis after the test the Ni base plating layer is totally exposed in many tracks. It means that the Au plating layer is gradually worn out probably at the stage of increasing voltage drop. In the previous tests the lifetime ended even when the Ni plating layer remained. So, the reason of long operation in this test is guessed to be that the lubricant not only decreases wear of ring and brush, but also suppresses oxidation of the Ni layer.

The logic mapping problem and the problem of finding a largest sub-crossbar with no defects in a nano-crossbar with nonprogrammable-crosspoint defects and disconnected-wire defects are known to be NP-hard. This paper shows that for nano-crossbars with only disconnected-wire defects, the former remains NP-hard, while the latter can be solved in polynomial time.

A new fast-lock, low-power digital delay-locked loop (DLL) is presented. A subranging searching algorithm is employed to effectively make the loop locked within only four clock cycles. A half-delay circuit is utilized to cut down power consumption. The prototype DLL in a standard 0.13-µm CMOS process operates in the range from 50 MHz to 400 MHz with four clock cycle lock time and consumes 2.379 mW with 1-V supply at 400 MHz clock rate. The measured RMS jitter and peak-to-peak jitter at 400 MHz are 1.586 ps and 16.67 ps, respectively. It occupies an active area of 0.038 mm2.

A 150 MS/s 10-bit MOS-inverter-based subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) dedicated to a high-speed low-power application is presented in this paper. A new time constant reduction technique is proposed in the multi-stage preamplifier design which aims to further increase the speed of the coarse ADC. A synchronized switch is introduced to minimize the sample-time mismatch in the interleaved architecture of fine ADCs. An internal pipelined scheme incorporating the double sampling and interleaving techniques in fine ADCs allows the ADC sample input signal to run on a consecutive clock, thus maximizing the throughput. The prototype ADC achieves 52 dB SNDR for a 10 MHz input frequency at 150 MS/s. Without calibration, the measured differential nonlinearity (DNL) is 0.5 LSB, while the integral nonlinearity (INL) is 0.9 LSB. The CMOS ADC is fabricated in a 0.35 µm CMOS technology, with an active area of 2.7 mm2, consuming only 178 mW from a single 3 V supply. Comparing technology normalized figure-of-merits, it achieves better power-speed efficiency than other similar types of ADCs.

The possibility of using three kinds of new type composite materials as material for high speed sliding contacts was investigated. The results of this investigation were compared with the results of the low speed tests that were reported earlier. As a result of the above, it was discovered that for high speed rotation in the range from 0.014 m/s to 2 m/s, the order of merit did not significantly change. Based on this, it was concluded that if solid lubricant is effectively supplied to the sliding surface, the influence by frictional heat generated by high speed is slight. Of the three kinds of composite material, it was clarified that composite material (CMML-1) had the lowest contact resistance and Composite Material (CMML-3) had the lowest maximum frictional coefficient of friction. 'CM' and 'ML' are initialisms for 'Composite Material' and 'Material of Lubrication' respectively. The number that is attached to the material name is a numeric value that was set by this laboratory.

The author prepared new composition of Cu-Sn based composite materials containing lamellar solid lubricants, and measured their performance with focus on contact resistance and the coefficient of friction using a low-speed tribo-meter. Among three kinds of composite materials, the composite material containing 26wt.% of total solid lubricants was lower in both of contact resistance and the coefficient of friction and showed stable characteristics compared with those containing 25wt.% and 35wt.% respectively. The author analyzed the characteristics of these materials using several techniques including BSE image, element analysis through EPMA, and mapping analysis, and examined why the composite material containing 26wt.% of total solid lubricants showed higher performance.

The luminance of about 10,000 cd/m2 at an applied voltage of 9.2 V and the external emission efficiency 5.5 cd/A at an injection current density of 50 mA/cm2 have been obtained from an organic light emitting diode (OLED) using starburst molecule doped with 5,6,11,12-tetraphenylnaphthacene fabricated by wet-processing. We demonstrate that the OLEDs fabricated by wet-processing can be applied to fields of short range optical communication as the electro-optical conversion device for transmitting the signals of moving picture.

Development of new sliding contact, usable under sever conditions such as high-temperature, extremely low-temperature or high vacuum, has recently become an urgent necessity. This research mainly examined the contact resistance and coefficient of friction of 3 kinds of self-lubricant composite materials with electrical conductivity and mechanical stiffness. The result showed that a composite material (CMML-1) containing the least quantity of solid lubricants [WS2, Gr.(Graphite)] among them was low in both contact resistance and coefficient of friction and less in fluctuation. By EPMA analysis, contribution of Sn to electrical conductivity was suggested.

We had previously proposed a fuzzy logic-based buffer management scheme (BMS) called fuzzy early detection (FED), which was designed to improve transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over the unspecified bit rate (UBR) service of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. Since a weakness in FED was discovered later, we present a refined version of it named FED+ here. Maintaining the design architecture and the algorithm of FED, FED+ further adopts a specific per virtual connection accounting algorithm to achieve its design goals. The effects of TCP implementation, TCP maximum segment size, switch buffer size and network propagation delay on FED+ performance are studied through simulation. Its performance is then compared with those of pure early packet discard (EPD), P-random early detection (P-RED) and FED. Our evaluations show that FED+ is superior to the others if the issues of efficiency, fairness, robustness, buffer requirement and the ease of tuning control parameters of a BMS are considered collectively.

In recent years, sliding electric contacts came to be often used under very severe conditions such as high temperature, extremely low temperature, high vacuum, etc. Conventionally, solid lubricants having excellent properties in lubricating performance are generally used compositely with a metal of high electric conductivity, because of their high electrical resistivity. In the present study, we proved that more excellent sliding electrical contacts can be produced with a design made by controlling the distribution on contact surface of a solid lubricant having excellent lubricating performance and of a metal with high electric conductivity through expansion of Greenwood's theory.

This work describes an 8b 200 MHz time-interleaved subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) based on a single-poly digital CMOS process. Two fine ADCs for lower digital bits of the proposed ADC employ a time-sharing double- channel architecture to increase the sampling speed and a new reference voltage switching scheme to reduce the settling time of the reference voltages and the chip area. The proposed intermeshed resistor string, which generates reference voltages for fine ADCs, improves the linearity and the settling time of the reference voltages simultaneously. The proposed sample-and-hold amplifier employs an input dynamic common mode feedback circuit for high dynamic performance, based on conventional common-drain amplifiers and passive differential circuits.

This paper proposes two modes of the congestion control scheme to improve its behavior during the start-up period of networks in current TCP over ATM-UBR implementation. The proposed two modes are a single packet loss mode and a multiple packet losses mode. The proposed algorithm is to minimize the number of cell losses in the ATM switch during specially the start-up period. During the start-up period, multiple packet losses often happens because a TCP sender starts with default parameters. It often ends up sending too many packets and too fast, leading to multiple losses is packet burstiness which occurs right after fast recovery ends. We analyze the transition behavior during fast recovery algorithm and estimate the number of new packets sent when multiple packet losses detected. We present a simple simulation model and numerical results to investigate its performance of the proposed algorithms.

This paper describes an 8b 52 MHz CMOS subranging analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for digital subscriber loop applications. The proposed ADC based on an improved time-interleaved architecture removes the holding time which is typically observed in the conventional double-channel subranging ADC's to increase the throughput rate by 50%. The ADC employs the interpolation technique in the back-end subranging ADC's for residue signal processing to minimize the active die area and the power consumption. A layout technique is adopted to reduce the plasma-induced comparator offsets and the die area of the ADC. The fabricated and measured prototype ADC in a 0.8 µm CMOS process shows nonlinearities less than 0.4 LSB and the signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio of 43 dB for a 1 MHz input at a 52 MHz sampling rate with 230 mW.