Electrical conductivity enhancement of epitaxially grown TiN thin films

Titanium nitride (TiN) presents superior electrical conductivity with mechanical and chemical stability and compatibility with the semiconductor fabrication process. Here, we fabricated epitaxial and polycrystalline TiN (111) thin films on MgO (111), sapphire (001), and mica substrates at 640oC and room temperature by using a DC sputtering, respectively. The epitaxial films show less amount of surface oxidation than the polycrystalline ones grown at room temperature. The epitaxial films show drastically reduced resistivity (~30 micro-ohm-cm), much smaller than the polycrystalline films. Temperature-dependent resistivity measurements show a nearly monotonic temperature slope down to low temperature. These results demonstrate that high temperature growth of TiN thin films leads to significant enhancement of electrical conductivity, promising for durable and scalable electrode applications.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Data mining middleware for wide-area high-performance networks,” Future Generation

In this paper, we describe two distributed, data intensive applications that were demonstrated at iGrid 2005 (iGrid Demonstration US109 and iGrid Demonstration US121). One involves transporting astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the other involves computing histograms from multiple high volume data streams. Both rely on newly developed data transport and data mining middleware. Specifically, we describe a new version of the UDT network protocol called Composible-UDT, a file transfer utility based upon UDT called UDT-Gateway, and an application for building histograms on high volume data flows called BESH for Best Effort Streaming Histogram. For both demonstrations, we include a summary of the experimental studies performed at iGrid 2005