Alternatives to silicon dioxide and silicon nitride, the traditional dielectric and passivation materials in semiconductor devices, have been the subject of intense research for the past two decades. Alloy compounds whose properties can be tuned via compositional adjustments are of particular interest. These include materials such as silicon oxynitride....

Semiconductors have revolutionized the world of electronics and are found in practically every electronic device currently used. One of the aspects of semiconductor materials that make them so useful is that the behavior of a semiconductor can be easily manipulated through doping. However, with current methods of developing the dopant (SiH3)3P hydride,...

The application of silicon photonic technologies to optical telecommunications requires the development of near-infrared detectors monolithically integrated to the Si platform. Most present approaches require the bonding of the semiconductor detector material to the silicon circuitry, which can be time consuming and expensive. While approaches to...

The state of the art of two-color focal plane arrays (FPAs) are two or three terminal photo detector pixels integrated with electronic readout circuits (ROICs). However, a multicolor (> 2) photodetector pixel requires many more terminals, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to integrate multicolor pixel arrays to ROICs due to the increase...

The exponential growth of the Internet over the last few decades provides testament to the extreme success of the internet protocol (IP), the primary protocol responsible for delivering data packets between hosts across the heavily trafficked internet. Notwithstanding this success, IP address space is rapidly running out. Consequently, the more...

Tunable RF filters have significant utility in software-defined radio applications. Often, these applications require wideband frequency coverage that may differ greatly from frequency coverage used in civilian telecommunication systems. Most commonly, tuning response is a product of changes made to capacitors and inductors in the resonators of...

Currently, Si wafers and related wafer processing accounts for seventy-five percent of the cost of producing conventional solar panels. With a potential concentration ratio of 500 – 1000 and double the efficiency over conventional single junction cells, the use of concentrator multi-junction solar cell technologies will dramatically reduce the fraction...

Random Access Memories (RAM) are read/write memory devices that can read data from or write data to any of its memory addresses. Static random access memories (SRAM) store data in flip-flops, which retain data as long as the SRAM is powered up. SRAMs are one of the VLSI circuit types most amenable to leakage power mitigation techniques. Most of...

Microprocessors depend on high integrity instructions and data to function properly. Various factors can corrupt this information, with high-energy sub-atomic particles and other types of electromagnetic radiation effects being among the more difficult of these factors against which to guard. Because a single erroneous bit of information can lead...

MEMS microphones have become very popular in commercialized products in recent years, and one of the greatest demands currently is for directionality. This requires that multiple microphones be matched with great precision, but there is generally some degree of mismatch even when the microphones are manufactured very carefully. Existing techniques...