STMicroelectronics

About: STMicroelectronics is a company organization based out in Geneva, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Signal & Transistor. The organization has 17172 authors who have published 29543 publications receiving 300766 citations. The organization is also known as: SGS-Thomson & STM.

Enabling strategies in organic electronics using ordered block copolymer nanostructures.

Abstract: Today’s lithographic techniques for carving silicon into circuit patterns are unable to achieve the future target of the semiconductor industry of fabricating ultrahigh density memory devices made of memory cells just few tens of nanometers apart. [ 1 ] The primary metric for gauging progress in the various semiconductor integrated circuit technologies is, indeed, the spacing, or pitch, between the most closely spaced wires within a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) circuit. The circuit components on today’s silicon chips are more than 100 nm across and modern DRAM circuits have 140 nm pitch wires and a memory cell size of 0.0408 μ m 2 . [ 2 ] Improving integrated circuit technology will require that these dimensions decrease over time. However, at present a large fraction of the patterning and materials requirements that we expect to need for the construction of new integrated circuit technologies have no known solution. [ 2 ] Promising ingredients for advances in integrated circuit technology are nanowires, [ 3 ] molecular electronics [ 4 ] and defecttolerant architectures, [ 5 ] as demonstrated by reports of single devices [ 6–8 ] and small circuits. [ 9 , 10 ] Methods of extending these approaches to large-scale, high-density circuitry are largely undeveloped. The need for very high bit density (the number of memory elements per square centimeter) has pushed the research towards the study of new advanced materials that can overcome these limiting scaling diffi culties and of alternative methods for building memory devices from the bottom up using individual molecules. [ 1 ] These methods start with atoms and molecules and climb up to nanostructures through assembly by various mechanisms of molecular recognition. Self-assembly is emerging as an elegant bottom-up method for fabricating nanostructured materials. [ 11–15 ] Particularly attractive is the self-assembly of organic molecules that, when combined with

Silicon planar technology for single-photon optical detectors

Abstract: In this paper we report the results relative to the design and fabrication of Single Photon Avalanche Detectors (SPAD) operating at low voltage in planar technology. These silicon sensors consist of pn junctions that are able to remain quiescent above the breakdown voltage until a photon is absorbed in the depletion volume. This event is detected through an avalanche current pulse. Device design and critical issues in the technology are discussed. Experimental test procedures are then described for dark-counting rate, afterpulsing probability, photon timing resolution, quantum detection efficiency. Through these experimental setups we have measured the electrical and optical performances of different SPAD technology generations. The results from these measurements indicate that in order to obtain low-noise detectors it is necessary to introduce a local gettering process and to realize the diode cathode through in situ doped polysilicon deposition. With such technology low noise detectors with dark counting rates at room temperature down to 10c/s for devices with 10mm diameter, down to 1kc/s for 50mm diameter have been obtained. Noticeable results have been obtained also as far as time jitter and quantum detection efficiency are concerned. This technology is suitable for monolithic integration of SPAD detectors and associated circuits. Small arrays have already been designed and fabricated. Preliminary results indicate that good dark count rate uniformity over the different array pixels has already been obtained.

Remanent memory device

Abstract: A remanent, electrically programmable and erasable, memory device comprises of a MOS type transistor whose gate insulator contains charged mobile species is disclosed. The gate insulator is comprised transversely of a sandwich comprising at least five areas. Two intermediate areas have first band-gap values, and two endmost and a central areas have band gap values greater than the first values.

Si 2p XPS spectrum of the hydrogen‐terminated (100) surface of device‐quality silicon

Abstract: An experimental study of the Si 2p XPS spectrum at different take-off angles of atomically flat, hydrogen-terminated 1 × 1 Si(100) is reported. The observed spectrum can be described accurately by considering three additional contributions to the spectrum of elemental silicon. Each contribution is attributed to a chemical state of silicon on the basis of its chemical shift with respect to elemental silicon and the depth of the region where it was originated. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Security of Keyed Sponge Constructions Using a Modular Proof Approach

Abstract: Sponge functions were originally proposed for hashing, but find increasingly more applications in keyed constructions, such as encryption and authentication. Depending on how the key is used we see two main types of keyed sponges in practice: inner- and outer-keyed. Earlier security bounds, mostly due to the well-known sponge indifferentiability result, guarantee a security level of c / 2 bits with c the capacity. We reconsider these two keyed sponge versions and derive improved bounds in the classical indistinguishability setting as well as in an extended setting where the adversary targets multiple instances at the same time. For cryptographically significant parameter values, the expected workload for an attacker to be successful in an n-target attack against the outer-keyed sponge is the minimum over \(2^k/n\) and \(2^c/\mu \) with k the key length and \(\mu \) the total maximum multiplicity. For the inner-keyed sponge this simplifies to \(2^k/\mu \) with maximum security if \(k=c\). The multiplicity is a characteristic of the data available to the attacker. It is at most twice the data complexity, but will be much smaller in practically relevant attack scenarios. We take a modular proof approach, and our indistinguishability bounds are the sum of a bound in the PRP model and a bound on the PRP-security of Even-Mansour type block ciphers in the ideal permutation model, where we obtain the latter result by using Patarin’s H-coefficient technique.