Zhou Xiao-fang

Thermoelectric signals from Si/SiGe superlattices

p-Si/Si0.5Ge0.5 superlattices (SLs) grown on a vicinal-cut p-type silicon single crystalline substrate by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) were irradiated by a KrF excimer laser. Two types of transient laser induced voltage (LIV) signals were observed, among which the signals of 0.3 V in amplitude with time response ~40 ns showed up along the tilted directions, while voltage signals of ~10 mV with a time response of tens of microseconds presented along the untilted directions which were perpendicular to the tilted direction. The results demonstrate that the observed photoelectric signals of 0.3V amplitude are laser induced thermoelectric voltages (LITV) due to the tilting angle relation. The observed LIV signals implied that these SLs exhibited anisotropic Seebeck components. It was also found that the LIV signals increased with the p-type doping level in the Si layer, which was coincident with the expectation of the laser induced thermoelectric effect. According to the measured signals and the theoretical formula, one can calculate the physical parameters of the SLs. The calculated effective Seebeck anisotropy coefficients (Sab − Sc) for samples with 1018 cm−3 and 1020 cm−3 are approximately 11.2 µV K−1 and 18.2 µV K−1, respectively.

Solving SAT problem by heuristic polarity decision-making algorithm

This paper presents a heuristic polarity decision-making algorithm for solving Boolean satisfiability (SAT). The algorithm inherits many features of the current state-of-the-art SAT solvers, such as fast BCP, clause recording, restarts, etc. In addition, a preconditioning step that calculates the polarities of variables according to the cover distribution of Karnaugh map is introduced into DPLL procedure, which greatly reduces the number of conflicts in the search process. The proposed approach is implemented as a SAT solver named DiffSat. Experiments show that DiffSat can solve many “real-life” instances in a reasonable time while the best existing SAT solvers, such as Zchaff and MiniSat, cannot. In particular, DiffSat can solve every instance of Bart benchmark suite in less than 0.03 s while Zchaff and MiniSat fail under a 900 s time limit. Furthermore, DiffSat even outperforms the outstanding incomplete algorithm DLM in some instances.

Design of a high speed cascaded sigma-delta ADC

A high speed /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ ADC is designed for video application. A multi-bit cascaded /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulator is used to gain additional resolution under the oversampling rate of 4 or 8. Quantization errors are analyzed. Multi-stage halfband filters are used to remove the quantization error out of the base band. Simulation results are included.