Process Metrology for Ultrathin Gate Dielectrics

One of the major challenges is to be able to grow and accurately measure such thicknesses of gate oxides. In addition, the gate oxide thickness may change during the polysilicon deposition, which is important to measure from the device point of view. The use of variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometer (VASE) has been shown to provide a technique for directly measuring the thickness of the oxide underneath polysilicon. The objective of this study Is to use VASE (energy range from 0.78 eV to 6 eV, which corresponds to wavelengths from 200 to 1600 nm) to measure ultra thin silicon dioxide layers with and without polysilicon. Thin oxides have been grown under different experimental conditions in a furnace. The first set of wafers had only native oxide, the second set of wafers followed a five minutes soak, and the third one followed a ten minutes soak at 750 C in dry oxygen. A 430 nm polysilicon layer has been deposited on these wafers by low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD). To extract useful information, a model is constructed that describes the sample structure. It has been possible to measure thin oxides without the polysilicon. With polysilicon, however, problems are encountered. The optical constants change significantly with polysilicon processing conditions and the model must be adjusted to take into account these changes. The effective media approximation (EMA) is often used that describes mixing of two phases — crystalline and amorphous. After experiment, we found that something changed in the oxide during the polysiicon deposition. It can either be the thickness of this oxide, or some contaminants can be incorporated between the oxide and the polysilicon, changing the refractive index

Instance-based Bird Species Identification with Undiscriminant Features Pruning

International audienceThis paper reports the participation of Inria to the audiobasedbird species identication challenge of LifeCLEF 2014 campaign.Inspired by recent works on ne-grained image classication, we introducean instance-based classication scheme based on the dense indexingof MFCC features and the pruning of the non-discriminant ones. To makesuch strategy scalable to the 30M of MFCC features extracted from thetens of thousands audio recordings of the training set, we used highdimensionalhashing techniques coupled with an ecient approximatenearest neighbors search algorithm with controlled quality. Further improvementsare obtained by (i) using a sliding classier with max pooling(ii) weighting the query features according to their semantic coherence(iii) making use of the metadata to lter incoherent species. Results showthe eectiveness of the proposed technique which ranked 3rd among the10 participating groups

Non-linear coupling between the two oscillation modes of a dc-SQUID

5 pagesInternational audienceWe make a detailed theoretical description of the two-dimensional nature of a dc-SQUID, analyzing the coupling between its two orthogonal phase oscillation modes. While it has been shown that the mode defined as ''longitudinal" can be initialized, manipulated and measured, so as to encode a quantum bit of information, the mode defined as ''transverse" is usually repelled at high frequency and does not interfere in the dynamics. We show that, using typical parameters of existing devices, the transverse mode energy can be made of the order of the longitudinal one. In this regime, we can observe a strong coupling between these modes, described by an Hamiltonian providing a wide range of interesting effects, such as conditional quantum operations and entanglement. This coupling also creates an atomic-like structure for the combined two mode states, with a V-like scheme

Rabi-like oscillations of an anharmonic oscillator: classical versus quantum interpretation

8 pagesInternational audienceWe have observed Rabi-like oscillations in a current-biased dc SQUID presenting enhanced coherence times compared to our previous realization~\cite{Claudon_PRL04}. This Josephson device behaves as an anharmonic oscillator which can be driven into a coherent superposition of quantum states by resonant microwave flux pulses. Increasing the microwave amplitude, we study the evolution of the Rabi frequency from the 2-level regime to the regime of multilevel dynamics. When up to $3$ levels are involved, the Rabi frequency is a clear signature of quantum behavior. At higher excitation amplitude, classical and quantum predictions for the Rabi frequency converge. This result is discussed in the light of a calculation of the Wigner function. In particular, our analysis shows that pronounced quantum interferences always appear in the course of the Rabi-like oscillations

Instance-based Bird Species Identification with Undiscriminant Features Pruning

International audienceThis paper reports the participation of Inria to the audiobasedbird species identication challenge of LifeCLEF 2014 campaign.Inspired by recent works on ne-grained image classication, we introducean instance-based classication scheme based on the dense indexingof MFCC features and the pruning of the non-discriminant ones. To makesuch strategy scalable to the 30M of MFCC features extracted from thetens of thousands audio recordings of the training set, we used highdimensionalhashing techniques coupled with an ecient approximatenearest neighbors search algorithm with controlled quality. Further improvementsare obtained by (i) using a sliding classier with max pooling(ii) weighting the query features according to their semantic coherence(iii) making use of the metadata to lter incoherent species. Results showthe eectiveness of the proposed technique which ranked 3rd among the10 participating groups

Main Targets of Interest for the Development of a Prophylactic or Therapeutic Epstein-Barr Virus Vaccine

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is one of the most widespread viruses in the world; more than 90% of the planet’s adult population is infected. Symptomatic primary infection by this Herpesviridae corresponds to infectious mononucleosis (IM), which is generally a benign disease. While virus persistence is often asymptomatic, it is responsible for 1.5% of cancers worldwide, mainly B cell lymphomas and carcinomas. EBV may also be associated with autoimmune and/or inflammatory diseases. However, no effective treatment or anti-EBV vaccine is currently available. Knowledge of the proteins and mechanisms involved in the different steps of the viral cycle is essential to the development of effective vaccines. The present review describes the main actors in the entry of the virus into B cells and epithelial cells, which are targets of interest in the development of prophylactic vaccines aimed at preventing viral infection. This review also summarizes the first vaccinal approaches tested in humans, all of which are based on the gp350/220 glycoprotein; while they have reduced the risk of IM, they have yet to prevent EBV infection. The main proteins involved in the EBV latency cycle and some of the proteins involved in the lytic cycle have essential roles in the oncogenesis of EBV. For that reason, these proteins are of interest for the development of therapeutic vaccines of which the objective is the stimulation of T cell immunity against EBV-associated cancers. New strategies aimed at broadening the antigenic spectrum, are currently being studied and will contribute to the targeting of the essential steps of the viral cycle, the objective being to prevent or treat the diseases associated with EBV

Shared nearest neighbors match kernel for bird songs identification -LifeCLEF 2015 challenge

International audienceThis paper presents a new fine-grained audio classification technique designed and experimented in the context of the LifeCLEF 2015 bird species identification challenge. Inspired by recent works on fine-grained image classification, we introduce a new match kernel based on the shared nearest neighbors of the low level audio features extracted at the frame level. To make such strategy scalable to the tens of millions of MFCC features extracted from the tens of thousands audio recordings of the training set, we used high-dimensional hashing techniques coupled with an efficient approximate nearest neighbors search algorithm with controlled quality. Further improvements are obtained by (i) using a sliding window for the temporal pooling of the raw matches (ii) weighting each low level feature according to the semantic coherence of its nearest neighbors. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique which ranked 2nd among the 7 research groups participating to the LifeCLEF bird challenge

Polychronous Interpretation of Synoptic, a Domain Specific Modeling Language for Embedded Flight-Software

The SPaCIFY project, which aims at bringing advances in MDE to the satellite flight software industry, advocates a top-down approach built on a domain-specific modeling language named Synoptic. In line with previous approaches to real-time modeling such as Statecharts and Simulink, Synoptic features hierarchical decomposition of application and control modules in synchronous block diagrams and state machines. Its semantics is described in the polychronous model of computation, which is that of the synchronous language Signal.Comment: Workshop on Formal Methods for Aerospace (FMA 2009

Video Copy Detection on the Internet: The Challenges of Copyright and Multiplicity

This paper presents applications for dealing with videos on the web, using an efficient technique for video copy detection in large archives. Managing videos on the web is the source of two exciting challenges: the respect of the copyright and the linkage of multiple videos. We present a technique called ViCopT for Video Copy Tracking which is based on labels of behavior of local descriptors computed along video. The re-sults obtained on large amount of data (270 hours of videos from the Internet) are very promising, even with a large video database (700 hours): ViCopT displays excellent robustness to various severe signal transformations, making it able to identify copies accurately from highly similar videos, as well as to link similar videos, in order to reduce redundancy or to gather the metadata associated. Finally, we also show that ViCopT goes further by detecting segments having the same background, with the aim of linking videos of the same cate-gory, like forecast weather programs or particular TV shows. 1

Labelling the Behaviour of Local Descriptors for Selective Video Content Retrieval

This paper presents an approach for indexing a large set of videos by considering the cinematic behaviour of local visual features along the sequences. The proposed concept is based on the extraction and the local description of interest points and further on the estimation of their trajectories along the video sequence. Analysing the low-level description obtained allows to highlight semantic trends of behaviours and then to assign labels. Such an indexing approach of the video content has several interesting properties: the low-level description provides a rich and compact description, while labels of behaviour provide a generic and semantic description, relevant for selective video content retrieval depending on the application. The approach is firstly evaluated for Content-Based Copy Detection. We show that taking these labels into account allows to significantly reduce false alarms. Secondly, the approach is experimented on particular applications of video monitoring, where selective labels of behaviour show their capability to improve the analysis and the retrieval of spatio-temporal video content