The impact of III-V semiconductors on microelectromechanicalsystems

This article examines the special features of the III-V semiconductors, such as gallium arsenide and chemically related compounds, which make them an attractive alternative to silicon-based technology in the field of microelectromechanical systems. As in conventional electronic systems, it is not expected that the III-V compounds will become exclusively used in all instances, but rather a substantial niche market-exploiting the special advantages of the compound semiconductors-is likely to be established     

Industrial architectural assessment using TARA

Scenario based architectural assessment is a well-established approach for assessing architectural designs. However scenario-based methods are not always usable in an industrial context, where in our experience, they can be perceived as complicated and expensive to use. In this paper we explore why this may be the case and define a simpler technique called TARA, which has been designed for use in situations where scenario based methods are unlikely to be successful. The method is illustrated through an experience report that explains how it was applied to the assessment of two quantitative financial analysis systems, and its strengths, weaknesses and relationship to other methods are briefly discussed.     

One micrometre scale self-aligned cobalt disilicide Schottkybarrier diodes

CoSi₂/n-type silicon(111) Schottky barrier diodes on a 1 μm scale have been fabricated using a self-aligned silicide process incorporating magnetron sputtering and rapid thermal processing, in an industrial environment. Anneal temperatures in the range 700-1100°C have been used, and ideality factors of 1.06-1.07 were obtained in the range 700-900°C with larger values for higher temperatures. The consistency in the values of the ideality factor indicates that a wide annealing temperature window exists for the successful fabrication of CoSi₂/silicon diodes     

Spatio-temporal adaptive 3-D Kalman filter for video

This paper presents three-dimensional (spatio-temporal) Kalman filters for video as the extension of the two-dimensional (2-D) reduced update Kalman filter (RUKF) approach for images. We start out with three-dimensional (3-D) RUKF, a shift-invariant recursive estimator with efficiency advantages over the 3-D Wiener filter. Then, we turn to the motion-compensated extension MC-RUKF, which gives improved performance when coupled with a motion estimator. Since motion compensation sometimes fails, causing severe fluctuations in temporal correlation, we then present multimodel MC-RUKF, to adapt to variation in temporal and spatial correlation, by detecting the local image model out of a class, and using it in MC-RUKF. Finally, we introduce a novel multiscale model detection algorithm for use in high noise environments.     

Generating ROC curves for artificial neural networks

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is an established method of measuring diagnostic performance in medical imaging studies. Traditionally, artificial neural networks (ANN's) have been applied as a classifier to find one “best” detection rate. Recently researchers have begun to report ROC curve results for ANN classifiers. The current standard method of generating ROC curves for an ANN is to vary the output node threshold for classification. Here, the authors propose a different technique for generating ROC curves for a two class ANN classifier. They show that this new technique generates better ROC curves in the sense of having greater area under the ROC curve (AUC), and in the sense of being composed of a better distribution of operating points