Introduction According to present theory, the nuclear processes in the sun give off vast quantities of neutrinos-Experiments confirm the production of these particles, but fail to detect the quantity predicted by theory. The most recent experiments have found a maximum of two thirds the expected number of neutrinos. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is being constructed to accurately determine t...

Development of High-k Gates for Advances CMOS Devices High dielectric constant (high-k) materials, such as hafnium oxide (HfO2), zirconium oxide (ZrO2), alumina (Al2O3), and their silicates, have drawn a great deal of attention in recent years for potential use as gate dielectrics in advanced CMOS processes [1]. With high dielectric constants, gate dieletrics can be made thicker than SiO2 while...

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Degradation of CMOS NAND logic circuits resulting from dielectric degradation of a single pMOSFET using constant voltage stress has been examined by means of a switch matrix technique. As a result, the NAND gate rise time increases by greater than 65%, which may lead to timing errors in high frequency digital circuits. In addition, the NAND gate DC switching point voltage shifts by nearly 11% w...

Article history: Available online xxxx a b s t r a c t Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has become an important reliability concern for nano-scaled complementary metal oxide (CMOS) devices. This paper presents the effect of NBTI for a 45 nm advanced-process high-k dielectric with metal gate PMOS transistor. The device had incorporated advanced-process flow steps such as stress engin...

Dielectric surfaces exposed to partial discharges (PD) undergo aging, which is reflected by changes in the discharge pulse form. An approach is described in which fuzzy logic and neural networks are used in conjunction with the wavelet transform to identify the parameters in the PD pulse form for the purpose of classifying the aging phenomena due to partial discharge degradation.

a r t i c l e i n f o Low-voltage electrowetting requires a thin dielectric capacitor and field strengths approaching 1 MV/cm. Unlike traditional metal/dielectric/metal capacitors, the conducting electrowetted liquid can electrically propagate through the smallest dielectric defects or pores, even for the best barrier polymers such as Parylenes, leading to catastrophic failure such as electroly...