Experimental realization of a new transistor

The authors report on the fabrication and characteristics of a unipolar, three-terminal, resonant-tunneling transistor. The operating principle of this new transistor is based on the fact that the quantum mechanical resonant-tunneling probability of hot electrons between the emitter and the collector is switched almost completely on and off, when either the base or the collector bias is swept. The emitter injects hot electrons to the second lowest subband of a thin (100 Å in this work) GaAs quantum well. Subsequently, the hot electrons will either resonantly tunnel to the collector, or relax to the lowest subband and contribute to the base current. As a result of resonant transmission, at 77 K the current-voltage characteristics of the transistor display negative differential resistance with extremely large (4691) peak-to-valley ratio. Furthermore, when biased near resonance, a maximum DC current gain of ~1.2 and a maximum AC current gain of ~11.9 were observed. The first use of a new `tunneling-in and tunneling-out' scheme in contacting a thin quantum well is also demonstrated     

Phase equilibria in InAsSbP quaternary alloys grown by liquid phase epitaxy

The quaternary alloy InAs_1−x−ySb_xP_y, lattice-matched to InAs, is a promising material for the production of infrared light sources for the detection of gases in the 2–4 μm region of the spectrum. In this work, thermodynamic phase equilibrium calculations have been carried out to determine the compositions required for liquid phase epitaxial growth and the extent of the miscibility gap in the solid material. For high band gap materials, the desired growth temperature is found to be intermediate between a low temperature required to grow P-rich solids and higher temperatures required to avoidspinodal decomposition. Conventional LPE growth at an intermediate temperature of 583°C is found to produce good material with high luminescence efficiency and excellent optical characteristics. Problems with phosphorus loss from the melt are also discussed and lower growth temperatures are found to considerably reduce this problem. Growth in the metastable region between the binodal and spinodal lines has been achieved with the production of phosphorus-rich solids with concentrations up to y = 0.445.     

A comparison of various measured and calculated shieldingeffectiveness data for a wire cage

Considers the shielding effectiveness (SE) of a wire cage structure (2 m cube). The SE is predicted using various analytical approximations and measured using a number of different methods. Both near-field and far-field coupling through the mesh are considered. The results show that calculated and measured SE data can cover a large range of values depending on the configuration used. Upper and lower SE bounds for the near and far-field cases are discussed     

Effect of ion energy on hydrogen diffusion in n- and p-GaAs

The ion energy during electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma hydrogenation is found to have a strong effect on both the effective diffusivity and solubility of hydrogen in n⁺ and p⁺ GaAs. For fixed plasma exposure conditions (30 min, 250°C) the diffusion depths for -150 V acceleration voltage are ~50 and ~100% larger, respectively, in p⁺- and n⁺-GaAs compared to 0 V acceleration voltage. The smaller incorporation depths at lower ion energy coincide with much larger peak hydrogen concentrations and higher apparent thermal stability of passivated dopants     

Optimisation of enhancement layer DCT coefficients in MPEG-2 SNRscalable video

The authors describe an optimisation algorithm which can be applied to two-layer SNR scalable MPEG-2 video coding, such that bandwidth efficiency is achieved which is comparable to single-layer coding. Our optimised two-layer coder is shown to generate as little as 1% fewer bits than a single-layer coder compared to up to 15% more bits generated by the non-optimised SNR scalable coder     

The probability of generating a soluble subgroup of a finite group

It is proved that for finite groups G, the probability thattwo randomly chosen elements of G generate a soluble subgrouptends to zero as the index of the largest soluble normal subgroupof G tends to infinity.     

A wavelet-based procedure for process fault detection

To detect faults in a time-dependent process, we apply a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to several independently replicated data sets generated by that process. The DWT can capture irregular data patterns such as sharp "jumps" better than the Fourier transform and standard statistical procedures without adding much computational complexity. Our wavelet coefficient selection method effectively balances model parsimony against data reconstruction error. The few selected wavelet coefficients serve as the "reduced-size" data set to facilitate an efficient decision-making method in situations with potentially large-volume data sets. We develop a general procedure to detect process faults based on differences between the reduced-size data sets obtained from the nominal (in-control) process and from a new instance of the target process that must be tested for an out-of-control condition. The distribution of the test statistic is constructed first using normal distribution theory and then with a new resampling procedure called "reversed jackknifing" that does not require any restrictive distributional assumptions. A Monte Carlo study demonstrates the effectiveness of these procedures. Our methods successfully detect process faults for quadrupole mass spectrometry samples collected from a rapid thermal chemical vapor deposition process