Standard cell layout with regular contact placement

The practicability and methodology of applying regularly placed contacts on layout design of standard cells are studied. The regular placement enables more effective use of resolution enhancement technologies, which in turn allows for a reduction of critical dimensions. Although placing contacts on a grid adds restrictions during cell layout, overall circuit area can be made smaller by a careful selection of the grid pitch, allowing slight contact offset, applying double exposure, and shrinking the minimum size and pitch. The contact level of 250 nm standard cells was shrunk by 10%, resulting in an area change ranging from -20% to +25% with an average decrease of 5% for the 84 cells studied. The areas of two circuits, a finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter and an add-compare-select (ACS) unit in the Viterbi decoder, decrease by 4% and 2%, respectively.published_or_final_versio

Performance optimization for gridded-layout standard cells

The grid placement of contacts and gates enables more effective use of resolution enhancement techniques, which in turn allow a reduction of critical dimensions. Although the regular placement adds restrictions during cell layout, the overall circuit area can be made smaller and the extra manufacturing cost can be kept to the lowest by a careful selection of the grid pitch, using template-trim lithography method, allowing random contact placement in the vertical direction, and using rectangular rather than square contacts. The purpose of this work is to optimize the gridded-layout-based process. The trade-off between the layout area and manufacturing cost, and the determination of the minimum grid pitch are discussed in this paper. We demonstrate that it is a 1-D scaling instead of the conventional 2-D scaling for standard cells and the narrow MOSFETs inside after the application of the gridded layout on the contact and gate levels. The corresponding effects on circuit performances, including the leakage current, are also explored.published_or_final_versio

Standard cell design with resolution-enhancement-technique-driven regularly placed contacts and gates

The practicability and methodology of applying resolution-enhancement- technique-driven regularly placed contacts and gates on standard cell layout design are studied. The regular placement enables more effective use of resolution enhancement techniques (RETs), which in turn enables a reduction of critical dimensions. Although regular placement of contacts and gates adds restrictions during cell layout, the over-all circuit area can be made smaller and the number of extra masks and exposures can be kept to the lowest by careful selection of the grid pitch, using template-trim chromeless phase-shifting lithography approaches, enabling unrestricted contact placement in one direction, and using rectangular rather than square contacts. Four different fabrication-friendly layouts are compared. The average area change of 64 standard cells in a 130-nm library range from -4.2 to -15.8% with the four fabricationfriendly layout approaches. The area change of five test circuits using the four approaches range from -16.2 to +2.6%. Dynamic power consumption and intrinsic delay also improve with the decrease in circuits area, which is verified with the examination results. © 2005 Society of Pnoto-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.published_or_final_versio

Photon assisted tunneling through three quantum dots with spin-orbit-coupling

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Graphene-Based Planar Microsupercapacitors: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

© 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim The continuous development of integrated electronics such as maintenance-free biosensors, remote and mobile environmental sensors, wearable personal electronics, nanorobotics etc. and their continued miniaturization has led to an increasing demand for miniaturized energy storage units. Microsupercapacitors with graphene electrodes hold great promise as miniaturized, integrated power sources thanks to their fast charge/discharge rates, superior power performance, and long cycling stability. In addition, planar interdigitated electrodes also have the capability to reduce ion diffusion distances leading to a greatly improved electrochemical performance. Either as standalone power sources or complementing energy harvesting units, it is expected that graphene-based microsupercapacitors will play a key role as miniaturized power sources in electronic microsystems. This review highlights the recent development, challenges, and perspectives in this area, with an emphasis on the link between material and geometry design of planar graphene-based electrodes and their electrochemical performance and integrability

3D tribo-nanoprinting using triboreactive materials

Tribology: the science of friction, wear and lubrication has never been associated in a positive way with the ability to manufacture at the nanoscale. Triboreactivity, when the contact between two surfaces promotes a chemical reaction, has been harnessed in this study to create highly tenacious nano-features. The reported 3D tribo-nanoprinting methodology has been demonstrated for organic and inorganic fluids on steel and silicon substrates and is adaptable through the interface tribology. The growth rate, composition and shape of the printed features were all found to be dependent on the nature of the printing liquid and shearing interfaces in addition to the applied temperature and contact force. The reported methodology in this study opens unprecedented future possibilities to utilize the nanoprinted films for the expanding fields of microelectronics, medical devices, flexible electronics and sensor technologies

A comprehensive study of the open cluster NGC 6866

We present CCD $UBVRI$ photometry of the field of the open cluster NGC 6866. Structural parameters of the cluster are determined utilizing the stellar density profile of the stars in the field. We calculate the probabilities of the stars being a physical member of the cluster using their astrometric data and perform further analyses using only the most probable members. The reddening and metallicity of the cluster were determined by independent methods. The LAMOST spectra and the ultraviolet excess of the F and G type main-sequence stars in the cluster indicate that the metallicity of the cluster is about the solar value. We estimated the reddening $E(B-V)=0.074 \pm 0.050$ mag using the $U-B$ vs $B-V$ two-colour diagram. The distance modula, the distance and the age of NGC 6866 were derived as $\mu = 10.60 \pm 0.10$ mag, $d=1189 \pm 75$ pc and $t = 813 \pm 50$ Myr, respectively, by fitting colour-magnitude diagrams of the cluster with the PARSEC isochrones. The Galactic orbit of NGC 6866 indicates that the cluster is orbiting in a slightly eccentric orbit with $e=0.12$. The mass function slope $x=1.35 \pm 0.08$ was derived by using the most probable members of the cluster.Comment: 14 pages, including 16 figures and 7 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Table 4 in the manuscript will be published electronicall

Progressive Filtering Using Multiresolution Histograms for Query by Humming System

The rising availability of digital music stipulates effective categorization and retrieval methods. Real world scenarios are characterized by mammoth music collections through pertinent and non-pertinent songs with reference to the user input. The primary goal of the research work is to counter balance the perilous impact of non-relevant songs through Progressive Filtering (PF) for Query by Humming (QBH) system. PF is a technique of problem solving through reduced space. This paper presents the concept of PF and its efficient design based on Multi-Resolution Histograms (MRH) to accomplish searching in manifolds. Initially the entire music database is searched to obtain high recall rate and narrowed search space. Later steps accomplish slow search in the reduced periphery and achieve additional accuracy. Experimentation on large music database using recursive programming substantiates the potential of the method. The outcome of proposed strategy glimpses that MRH effectively locate the patterns. Distances of MRH at lower level are the lower bounds of the distances at higher level, which guarantees evasion of false dismissals during PF. In due course, proposed method helps to strike a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. The system is scalable for large music retrieval systems and also data driven for performance optimization as an added advantage.Comment: 12 Pages, 6 Figures, Full version of the paper published at ICMCCA-2012 with the same title, Link:http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-81-322-1143-3_2