Introducing diffusion bonding of laminated thin metal plates to the fabrication of slotted waveguide arrays enlightens the high potential and the feasibility of multi-layer antennas with high-performance. It is a promising process with low cost even for a double-layer antenna, because the number of etching patterns for thin metal plates is only five. In this paper, a double-layer antenna for broadband characteristics is designed in 39 GHz band as demonstration. A 20 20-element antenna is composed of 2 2 sub-arrays by installing a partially-corporate feed circuit in the bottom layer underneath radiating waveguides in the top layer. The five-element sub-arrays in both the feeding and radiating parts are designed first. A new structure for the last slot coupler with shortened termination is also proposed to avoid an extra slot-free region when assembling the neighbor sub-arrays. As the simulation results by HFSS, the maximum gain of 34.55 dBi with the antenna efficiency of 85.5% is estimated at 38.5 GHz. The test antenna is fabricated by the diffusion bonding of thin copper plates. As the measurement results, a very high aperture efficiency of 83.2% with the directivity of 34.5 dBi is realized at the center frequency of 38.75 GHz, where the antenna gain of 34.4 dBi with the high antenna efficiency of 81.4% is achieved. The bandwidth of 5.0% defined as 1 dB down from the maximum gain is achieved.

Effects of atomic hydrogen annealing (AHA) on the film properties and the electrical characteristics of pentacene organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are investigated. The surface energy of SiO2 surface and grain size of pentacene film were decreased with increasing AHA treatment time. For the treatment time of 300 s, pentacene film showed the (00l) and (011') orientation and high carrier mobility in spite of small crystal grain.

Hydrogenated polymorphous Silicon allows to fabricate TFTs with very interesting characteristics including better threshold voltage stability than a-Si TFTs, lower leakage current than µc-Si:H TFTs and excellent uniformity. Investigation of threshold voltage shift mechanisms of pm-Si:H TFTs has shown a specific semiconductor material degradation with different activation energies compared to a-Si:H TFTs. TEM analysis has evidenced for the first time a significant structural difference between pm-Si:H and a-Si:H materials, in the TFT device configuration. Pm-Si:H appears to be very suitable for low cost and high performance AM-OLED fabrication.

We proposed a new motion vector (MV) smoothing using fuzzy weighting and vector median filtering for frame rate up-conversion. A fuzzy reasoning system adjusts the weighting values based on the local characteristics of MV field including block difference and block boundary distortion. The fuzzy weighting removes the affect of outliers and irregular MVs from the MV smoothing process. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently correct wrong MVs and thus improve visual quality of the interpolated frames better than conventional methods.

To achieve conductive and wear-durable carbon thin films by metal doping, we deposited Au-, Pt-, and Pd-doped carbon thin films by RF sputtering, and evaluated the dopant concentrations, resistivity, and scratch hardness. Among the doped films, the Pt-doped film with low Pt concentration was most suitable from a practical perspective.

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.

Indium-sulfide-oxide thin films have been successfully deposited on indium-tin-oxide-coated glass from an aqueous solution containing Na2S2O3 and In2(SO4)3 by electrochemical deposition using a periodic 2-step-pulse voltage. The films have been annealed in nitrogen atmosphere for an hour at different temperatures; namely, 100, 200, 300 and 400. Then, the as-deposited and annealed films were characterized structurally, morphologically and optically. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) study was performed in order to understand the chemical states of the oxygen involved in the film composition. The photosensitivity was observed by means of photoelectrochemical measurements, which confirmed that the as-deposited and annealed films showed n-type conduction. Moreover, a heterostructure solar cell that has indium sulfide as a buffer layer and tin sulfide as an absorber was fabricated and characterized.

We have fabricated the transparent bottom gate and top gate TFTs using new oxide material of Al-Zn-Sn-O (AZTO) as an active layer. The AZTO active layer was deposited by RF magnetron sputtering at room temperature. Our novel TFT showed good TFT performance without post-annealing. The field effect mobility and the sub-threshold swing were improved by the post-annealing, and the mobility increased with SnO2 content. The AZTO TFT (about 4 mol% AlOx, 66 mol% ZnO, and 30 mol% SnO2) exhibited a mobility of 10.3 cm2/Vs, a turn-on voltage of 0.4 V, a sub-threshold swing of 0.6 V/dec, and an on/off ratio of 109. Though the bottom gate AZTO TFT showed good electrical performance, the bias stability was relatively poor. The bias stability was significantly improved in the top gate AZTO TFT. We have successfully fabricated the transparent AMOLED panel using the back-plane composed with top gate AZTO TFT array.

We developed a new method for characterizing molecular distribution in very thin liquid crystal layer (5-40 nm) evaporated onto rubbed polyimide film used by grazing-incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXD). The diffraction peaks corresponding to intermolecular correlation perpendicular to longitudinal axis of liquid crystal molecule and the clear anisotropic distribution of liquid crystal molecules in a thin layer were successfully observed. We found that in the vicinity of the alignment film, the intermolecular spacing correlation perpendicular to longitudinal axis of the 5CB molecule was expanded by the alignment film, and that the ordering of the 5CB was not so high. As the distance from the alignment film the spacing came close to the intrinsic intermolecular spacing.

This letter proposes a new hybrid EM wave absorber with the crossed-wedge shape, which can be applied to 3 m semi anechoic chambers. In this study, we designed a new hybrid EM wave absorber with the crossed-wedge shape, which consisted of the inorganic and organic thin corrugated dielectric lossy sheet containing organic conductive fibers. Then the 3 m semi anechoic chamber is constructed in the size of 9.0 m6.0 m5.7 m (LWH) using these absorbers, and also the normalized site attenuation (NSA) is measured according to ANSI C63.4 in the frequency range of 30 MHz to 1 GHz. As a result, the measured NSA is obtained within 3 dB of the theoretical one.

Delivering video streaming service over the Internet encounters some challenges. Two of them are heterogeneity of networks capacity and variability of video data rate. The capacity of network segments are constrained. Meanwhile, the rate of video data to be transmitted is highly variable in order to get near-constant images quality. Therefore, to send variable bit rate (VBR) video data over capacity-constrained network, its bit rate should be adjusted. In this paper a system to adjust the transmission bit rate of VBR MPEG video data called Transcoding-after-Smoothing (TaS), which is a combination of bit rate transcoding and bit rate smoothing algorithm, is proposed. The system smoothes out transmission rate of video data while at the same time also performs transcoding on some video frames when necessary in order to keep the transmission bit rate below a certain threshold value. Two kinds of TaS methods are proposed. One method does not have transcoding preference, while the other method uses frame type preference where an intra-coded frame is the last one that will be transcoded. These methods are implemented in our video server where a VBR video data is accessed by a client. Our experiment results show that the first TaS method yields significant reduction in the number of transcoded frames compared with the second TaS method and conventional frame-level transcoding. However, the second method performs better in minimizing the quality distortion.

The insoluble Prussian-blue (PB) pigment becomes possible to disperse in aqueous solution by covering their surfaces with ferrocyanide anions. The thin film fabricated with these water-dispersible PB nanoparticles shows evident electrochromic color changes between +0.8 V to -0.4 V on an ITO substrate. The mass change of the thin film during an electrochemical reaction is measured by means of electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance (EQCM). According to the EQCM analysis, the filling rate of water-dispersible PB nanoparticles in the film is 37.7% as compared with an assumed perfect crystal PB film.

The share of leakage in cache power consumption increases with technology scaling. Choosing a higher threshold voltage (Vth) and/or gate-oxide thickness (Tox) for cache transistors improves leakage, but impacts cell delay. We show that due to uncorrelated random within-die delay variation, only some (not all) of cells actually violate the cache delay after the above change. We propose to add a spare cache way to replace delay-violating cache-lines separately in each cache-set. By SPICE and gate-level simulations in a commercial 90 nm process, we show that choosing higher Vth, Tox and adding one spare way to a 4-way 16 KB cache reduces leakage power by 42%, which depending on the share of leakage in total cache power, gives up to 22.59% and 41.37% reduction of total energy respectively in L1 instruction- and L2 unified-cache with a negligible delay penalty, but without sacrificing cache capacity or timing-yield.

A new paradigm in the design of optical coatings connected with an outstanding computational efficiency of modern design techniques is discussed. Several other topics including pre-production error analysis, monitoring of coating production, and computational manufacturing of optical coatings are considered.

Ga-doped ZnO thin films were prepared by RF magnetron sputtering. The effects of adding H2 to pure Ar sputtering gas were investigated. In the case of pure Ar at 2 Pa, the resistivity is 7.4510-3 Ωcm, whereas for Ar+1%H2 at 0.3 Pa, it markedly decreases to 2.5210-4 Ωcm. In this case, the carrier density and Hall mobility are 1.121021 cm-3 and 23.4 cm2/Vs, respectively. This conductive film also exhibits a transmittance of 90% within the visible-wavelength range. The addition of H2 and the decrease in the pressure results in the fabrication of a significantly more transparent and conductive film.

Rugate thin film optical filters are useful for designing arbitrary-shaped spectra, such as multistep or triangular spectra. A technique for synthesizing the refractive index distribution of rugate filters was used to suppress unwanted ripples on the spectrum. The refractive index of an amorphous hydrogenated silicon oxide (a-SiOx:H) rugate thin film was minutely controlled with a resolution of 0.001 using radio-frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering. The fabricated rugate filters had multistep bands over a wavelength range of 1260-1670 nm or good linearity over 1290-1650 nm.

The properties of the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) are mainly decided by the surface-conduction electron emitters (SCE), which are normally made from the expensive metal Pd. In this study, we propose to use metal Zn instead of Pd as the emitter material. Both the device electrode and ZnO thin film are deposited by a sputter, and the electron emitters (SCE) are formed by the electro-forming process. The electron emission characteristic is obtained and the luminescence is observed.

Two types of thin-film phototransistors (TFPTs), p/i/n TFPT and n/i/n TFPT, are characterized from the viewpoint of operation condition and device behavior. It is found that the detected current can be both independent of the applied voltage (Vapply) and linearly dependent on the photo-illuminance in the saturation region of the p/i/n TFPT. This characteristic is because even if Vapply increases, the depletion layer remains in the whole intrinsic region, and the electric field changes only near the p-type/intrinsic interface and intrinsic/n-type interface but remains in the most intrinsic region. This characteristic is preferable for some kinds of photosensor applications. Finally, an application example of the p/i/n TFPT, artificial retina, is introduced.

Tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) thin films were prepared on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foil by bias sputtering. In the absence of a substrate bias, films having a high resistivity of 210-2 Ωcm were formed. On the other hand, by the application of an rf substrate bias, films having a low resistivity of 2.610-4 Ωcm were formed. The energy of ions that bombarded the substrate during bias sputtering was estimated by a simulation of the ion acceleration. The optimum ion-energy required for the reduction of resistivity was found to be approximately 50 eV.

Programming the multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) requires partitioning the sequential reference programs onto multiple processors running in parallel. However, designers still need to partition the code manually due to the lack of automated partition techniques. To settle this issue, this paper proposes a partition exploration algorithm based on the search space smoothing techniques, and implements the proposed method using a commercial extensible processor (Xtensa LX2 processor from Tensilica Inc.). We have verified the feasibility of the algorithm by implementing the MPEG2 benchmark on the Xtensa-based two-processor system. The final experimental results indicate a performance improvement of at least 1.6 compared to the single-processor system.