TRANSIENT SCANNING ELECTRON BEAM ANNEALING METHODS USED TO STUDY DIFFUSION AND DEFECTS IN IMPLANTED SILICON.

Rapid thermal annealing of arsenic and boron difluoride implants, such as those used for source/drain regions in CMOS, has been carried out using a scanning electron beam annealer, as part of a study of transient diffusion effects. Three types of e-beam anneal have been performed, with peak temperatures in the range 900 -1200 degree C; the normal isothermal e-beam anneals, together with sub-second fast anneals and 'dual-pulse' anneals, in which the sample undergoes an isothermal pre-anneal followed by rapid heating to the required anneal temperature is less than 0. 5s. The diffusion occuring during these anneal cycles has been modelled using SPS-1D, an implant and diffusion modelling program developed by one of the authors. This has been modified to incorporate simulated temperature vs. time cycles for the anneals. Results are presented applying the usual equilibrium clustering model, a transient point-defect enhancement to the diffusivity proposed recently by Fair and a new dynamic clustering model for arsenic. Good agreement with SIMS measurements is obtained using the dynamic clustering model, without recourse to a transient defect model.

Impacts of concurrency, iteration, design review, and problem complexity on design project lead time and error generation

A case study of an aircraft engine manufacturer is used to analyze the effects of management levers on the lead time and design errors generated in an iteration-intensive concurrent engineering process. The levers considered are amount of design-space exploration iteration, degree of process concurrency, and timing of design reviews. Simulation is used to show how the ideal combination of these levers can vary with changes in design problem complexity, which can increase, for instance, when novel technology is incorporated in a design. Results confirm that it is important to consider multiple iteration-influencing factors and their interdependencies to understand concurrent processes, because the factors can interact with confounding effects. The article also demonstrates a new approach to derive a system dynamics model from a process task network. The new approach could be applied to analyze other concurrent engineering scenarios. © The Author(s) 2012.

SIMPLE REMESHING SCHEME FOR THE FINITE ELEMENT BASED SIMULATION OF DOPANT DIFFUSION IN SILICON.

Process simulation programs are valuable in generating accurate impurity profiles. Apart from accuracy the programs should also be efficient so as not to consume vast computer memory. This is especially true for devices and circuits of VLSI complexity. In this paper a remeshing scheme to make the finite element based solution of the non-linear diffusion equation more efficient is proposed. A remeshing scheme based on comparing the concentration values of adjacent node was then implemented and found to remove the problems of oscillation.

An error free passive UHF RFID system using a new form of wireless signal distribution

A wide area and error free ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) interrogation system based on the use of multiple antennas used in cooperation to provide high quality ubiquitous coverage, is presented. The system uses an intelligent distributed antenna system (DAS) whereby two or more spatially separated transmit and receive antenna pairs are used to allow greatly improved multiple tag identification performance over wide areas. The system is shown to increase the read accuracy of 115 passive UHF RFID tags to 100% from <60% over a 10m × 8m open plan office area. The returned signal strength of the tag backscatter signals is also increased by an average of 10dB and 17dB over an area of 10m 8m and 10m × 4m respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that the DAS RFID system has improved immunity to tag orientation. Finally, the new system is also shown to increase the tag read speed/rate of a population of tags compared with a conventional RFID system. © 2012 IEEE.

An Error Free Passive UHF RFID System using a New Form of Wireless Signal Distribution

A wide area and error free ultra high frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) interrogation system based on the use of multiple antennas used in cooperation to provide high quality ubiquitous coverage, is presented. The system uses an intelligent distributed antenna system (DAS) whereby two or more spatially separated transmit and receive antenna pairs are used to allow greatly improved multiple tag identification performance over wide areas. The system is shown to increase the read accuracy of 115 passive UHF RFID tags to 100% from <60% over a 10m x 8m open plan office area. The returned signal strength of the tag backscatter signals is also increased by an average of 10dB and 17dB over an area of 10m x 8m and 10m x 4m respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that the DAS RFID system has improved immunity to tag orientation. Finally, the new system is also shown to increase the tag read speed/rate of a population of tags compared with a conventional RFID system.

Evaluation and modeling of lanthanum diffusion in TiN/La 2O 3/HfSiON/SiO 2/Si high-k stacks

In this study, TiN/La 2O 3/HfSiON/SiO 2/Si gate stacks with thick high-k (HK) and thick pedestal oxide were used. Samples were annealed at different temperatures and times in order to characterize in detail the interaction mechanisms between La and the gate stack layers. Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) measurements performed on these samples show a time diffusion saturation of La in the high-k insulator, indicating an La front immobilization due to LaSiO formation at the high-k/interfacial layer. Based on the SIMS data, a technology computer aided design (TCAD) diffusion model including La time diffusion saturation effect was developed. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

N-best error simulation for training spoken dialogue systems

A recent trend in spoken dialogue research is the use of reinforcement learning to train dialogue systems in a simulated environment. Past researchers have shown that the types of errors that are simulated can have a significant effect on simulated dialogue performance. Since modern systems typically receive an N-best list of possible user utterances, it is important to be able to simulate a full N-best list of hypotheses. This paper presents a new method for simulating such errors based on logistic regression, as well as a new method for simulating the structure of N-best lists of semantics and their probabilities, based on the Dirichlet distribution. Off-line evaluations show that the new Dirichlet model results in a much closer match to the receiver operating characteristics (ROC) of the live data. Experiments also show that the logistic model gives confusions that are closer to the type of confusions observed in live situations. The hope is that these new error models will be able to improve the resulting performance of trained dialogue systems. © 2012 IEEE.

Creep and oxygen diffusion in magnetite

The creep rate of polycrystalline Fe3O4 has been measured as a fonction of stress and oxygen partial pressure in the temperature range 480-1100°C. A regime of power law creep is found at high stress, with a stress exponent of ≈- 3.1 and an activation energy of 264 kJ/mol. A regime of diffusional flow is found at lower stresses and is interpreted as Nabarro-Herring creep. The data for the two regimes are combined to deduce an oxygen diffusion coefficient of ≈-10-5 exp(-264 kJ/mol/RT) m2s-1, with oxygen vacancies suggested as the mobile species. © 1990.

Complementary Phone Error training

This paper introduces a novel method for the training of a complementary acoustic model with respect to set of given acoustic models. The method is based upon an extension of the Minimum Phone Error (MPE) criterion and aims at producing a model that makes complementary phone errors to those already trained. The technique is therefore called Complementary Phone Error (CPE) training. The method is evaluated using an Arabic large vocabulary continuous speech recognition task. Reductions in word error rate (WER) after combination with a CPE-trained system were obtained with up to 0.7% absolute for a system trained on 172 hours of acoustic data and up to 0.2% absolute for the final system trained on nearly 2000 hours of Arabic data.

Axial discontinuity factors for the nodal diffusion analysis of high conversion BWR cores

High conversion LWRs concepts typically rely on a heterogeneous core configuration, where fissile zones are interspersed with fertile blanket zones in order to achieve a high conversion ratio. Modeling such a heterogeneous structure of these cores represents a significant challenge to the conventional reactor analysis methods. It was recently suggested to overcome such difficulties, in particular, for the case of axially heterogeneous reduced moderation BWRs, by introducing an additional set of discontinuity factors in axial direction at the interfaces between fissile and fertile fuel assembly zones. However, none of the existing nodal diffusion core simulators have the capability of accounting for discontinuity of homogeneous nodal fluxes in axial direction since the fuel composition of conventional LWRs is much more axially uniform. In this work, we modified the nodal diffusion code DYN3D by introducing such a capability. The new version of the code was tested on a series of reduced moderation BWR cases with Th-U233 and U-Pu-MA fuel. The library of few-group homogenized cross sections and the data required for the calculation of discontinuity factors were generated using the Monte Carlo transport code Serpent. The results obtained with the modified version of DYN3D were compared with the reference Monte Carlo solutions and were found to be in good agreement. The current analysis demonstrates that high conversion LWRs can in principle be modeled using existing nodal diffusion core simulators. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.