J. Paraszczak

Foundations for smarter cities

This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities™. Smarter Cities are urban areas that exploit operational data, such as that arising from traffic congestion, power consumption statistics, and public safety events, to optimize the operation of city services. The foundational concepts are instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Instrumented refers to sources of near-real-time real-world data from both physical and virtual sensors. Interconnected means the integration of those data into an enterprise computing platform and the communication of such information among the various city services. Intelligent refers to the inclusion of complex analytics, modeling, optimization, and visualization in the operational business processes to make better operational decisions. This approach enables the adaptation of city services to the behavior of the inhabitants, which permits the optimal use of the available physical infrastructure and resources, for example, in sensing and controlling consumption of energy and water, managing waste processing and transportation systems, and applying optimization to achieve new efficiencies among these resources. Additional roles exist in intelligent interaction between the city and its inhabitants and further contribute to operational efficiency while maintaining or enhancing quality of life.

Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges

The transformation to smarter cities will require innovation in planning, management, and operations. Several ongoing projects around the world illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this transformation. Cities must get smarter to address an array of emerging urbanization challenges, and as the projects highlighted in this article show, several distinct paths are available. The number of cities worldwide pursuing smarter transformation is growing rapidly. However, these efforts face many political, socioeconomic, and technical hurdles. Changing the status quo is always difficult for city administrators, and smarter city initiatives often require extensive coordination, sponsorship, and support across multiple functional silos. The need to visibly demonstrate a continuous return on investment also presents a challenge. The technical obstacles will center on achieving system interoperability, ensuring security and privacy, accommodating a proliferation of sensors and devices, and adopting a new closed-loop human-computer interaction paradigm.

High-speed signal propagation on lossy transmission lines

This paper addresses some of the problems encountered in propagating high-speed signals on lossy transmission lines encountered in high-performance computers. A technique is described for including frequency-dependent losses, such as skin effect and dielectric dispersion, in transmission line analyses. The disjoint group of available tools is brought together, and their relevance to the propagation of high-speed pulses in digital circuit applications is explained. Guidelines are given for different interconnection technologies to indicate where the onset of severe dispersion takes place. Experimental structures have been built and tested, and this paper reports on their electrical performance and demonstrates the agreement between measured data and waveforms derived from analysis. The paper addresses the problems found on lossy lines, such as reflections, rise-time slowdown, increased delay, attenuation, and crosstalk, and suggests methods for controlling these effects in order to maintain distortion-free propagation of high-speed signals.

The evolution of interconnection technology at IBM

Advances in interconnection technology have played a key role in allowing continued improvements in integrated circuit density, performance, and cost. ibm contributions to interconnection technology over approximately the last ten generations of semiconductor products are reviewed. the development of a planar, back-end-of-line (beol) technology, used in ibm dram, bipolar, and cmos logic products since 1988, has led to a threefold increase in the number of wiring levels, aggressive wiring pitches at all interconnection levels, and high-leverage design options such as stacked contacts and vias. possible future beol technologies are also discussed, with emphasis on the use of higher-conductivity wiring and lower-dielectric-constant insulators. it is expected that their use will result in higher performance and reliability. applications include future, lower-power devices as well as more cost-effective, higher-performance versions of present-day designs.

Oxygen induced adhesion degradation at metal/polyimide interface

The role of oxygen in affecting the adhesive bonding at the metal/polyimide (polyimide‐on‐metal) interface has been studied. Both pyromellitic dianhydride (PMDA) ‐oxydianiline (ODA) and biphenyl‐tetracarboxylic dianhydride(BPDA) ‐p‐phenylene diamine (PDA) based poly(amic acid) precursors were cast and fully imidized on metal surfaces of Cr, Cu, Ni, Co, Cu/Ni, and Cu/Co in a nitrogen atmosphere. The peel strengths at the polyimide‐on‐metal interface were measured, using a 90° peel test, immediately after curing, and then remeasured after annealing in either nitrogen (N2−≤100 ppm O2 ) or air (N2 –21% O2 ) at 350 °C for 1 h. Very little or no change in peel strength was measured after these samples were annealed in nitrogen, while significant adhesion degradations were measured on all metals after annealing in air. The loss of polyimide (PI) adhesion to the Cu or Co surface is attributed to metal catalyzed thermal–oxidative degradation of the PI at the metal/PI interface, as characterized by polyimide thickn...

A study of the chemical and physical interaction between copper and polyimide

The interaction of pyromellitic dianhydride–oxydianiline based polyamic acid precursor with copper was investigated under various curing conditions. Two reactions were found to occur at the interphase boundary during the curing cycle: the interaction of Cu with polyamic acid, and Cu oxidation. It was found that the rates of both reactions are controlled by the oxygen level and supply of oxygen to the interface. Thus, the thickness of the polymer coating and the oxygen level in the curing ambient are found to be the rate determining factors. The presence of a high level of oxygen during curing of the polyimide film, particularly of a thin coating, was found to severely degrade the polyimide and to create an oxidized Cu film underneath. This resulted in a polyimide film having higher dielectric constant, reduced dielectric breakdown strength, a high metal‐to‐metal interface contact resistance, and a degraded adhesion between polyimide and the underlying Cu. The interface structure and the properties of the ...

Instrumenting the planet

During the last 50 years, population growth, along with increasingly affluent societies, has resulted in a greater demand for our limited physical infrastructures and natural resources than ever before. In addition, the risks of climate change have heightened the need for more sophisticated ways of controlling carbon emissions. Today, numerous streams of data are being collected from sensors that monitor the environment. When used in conjunction with computational models, these streams can be important sources of data for understanding physical phenomena and human behavior. In this paper, we present a vision of a pervasively instrumented world in which these streams of real-world data are combined with mathematical models to improve the ability to manage the consumption of increasingly scarce resources. Such an instrumented world requires a class of information technology systems that combine very large numbers of sensors and actuators with computing platforms for capturing and analyzing such data streams. We provide details on the characteristics, requirements, and possible applications of such platforms and the key roles that they will play in addressing various societal challenges.

Methods of creation and effect of microwave plasmas upon the etching of polymers and silicon

Abstract Although microwave stimulated plasmas have been studied for at least three decades, their implementation in microcircuit processing has been limited by their generation techniques. These limitations occur because the dimensions of commonly used resonant cavities are determined by the frequency at which the plasma is formed. Further, to maintain a high cavity Q, the diameter of the plasma must be smaller than the dimensions of the cavity. Even in the case where a waveguide is filled with a plasma, the plasma diameter is limited by the size of the waveguide. As a result, the typical dimensions of plasmas formed in these cavities are smaller than the dimensions of substrates undergoing plasma processing. Using techniques pioneered earlier which involve the use of surface waves, we show that microwave plasmas can be used to etch materials used in semiconductor processing, which compare favorably with typical R.F. (13.56 MHz) plasmas.

Electrostatic probe analysis of microwave plasmas used for polymer etching

Microwave plasma etching [S. Dzioba, G. Esten and H. M. Nagub, J. Electrochem Soc. 129, 2537 (1982); K. Suzuki, S. Okudaira, S. Nishimatsu, K. Usami, and I. Kanomata, J. Electrochem. Soc. 129, 2764 (1982)] is a novel technique which promises to have wide application in the semiconductor industry for the removal of silicon and polymeric materials. Its advantages include relatively high concentrations of both ions and chemically excited species and the ability to etch isotropically. This allows high etch rates to be achieved with a minimum of ion bombardment. Langmuir probe studies have been performed on microwave (915 MHz) plasmas in O2 to determine the spatial variation of the plasma parameters (ion density, electron temperature, and space potential), as well as their dependence on gas pressure, microwave power, and the addition of CF4. Probes have also been used in microwave plasmas with an rf bias applied to an internal electrode (combination plasmas). Ion densities on the order of 2×1010 cm−3 were typi...

High performance dielectrics and processes for ULSI interconnection technologies

One method of improving the performance of silicon integrated circuits is to reduce the delay of the interconnections between individual devices by reducing the resistance and capacitance of the connection. Even though it is possible to replace the commonly used aluminium conductors in current interconnection technologies with copper, no company has done so in production, due to a series of unanswered questions pertaining to the cost and leverage of doing so. This paper will attempt to elucidate the performance and cost benefits of this approach and will try to identify and resolve some of the important integration issues related to the inclusion of polymers and copper conductors into ULSI interconnections.<<ETX>>