As process technology continues to shrink, interconnect current densities continue to increase, making it ever more difficult to meet chip reliability targets. For microprocessors in the latest 32nm processes, interconnect wear-out via electromigration is as critical a design parameter, if not more so, as timing, power, and area, and must be planned for from the outset. This paper presents a tr...

Cold plasma (CP) technology has proven very effective as an alternative tool for food decontamination and shelf-life extension. The impact of CP on food quality is very crucial for its acceptance as an alternative food processing technology. Due to the non-thermal nature, CP treatments have shown no or minimal impacts on the physical, chemical, nutritional and sensory attributes of various prod...

Millimeter-wave thermal analysis instrumentation is being developed for characterization of high temperature materials required for diverse fuel and structural needs in extreme high temperature reactor environments. A two-receiver 137 GHz system with orthogonal polarizations for anisotropic properties resolution has been implemented at MIT and is being tested with graphite and silicon carbide s...

Thermal energy storage (TES) system has been introduced as a practical facility for shifting load from peak hours to off-peak hours. Because of different energy consumption during day and night, peak and off peak period is created on load curve. Ice storage technology which is a kind of TES system, is implemented in different points of the world with the purpose of solving load shifting problem...

In recent years, with the development of photovoltaic system and photo-thermal system technology, hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) technology has been a breakthrough in many aspects. This paper describes the movable hybrid PVT system from the aspects of appearance structure, energy flow, and control circuit. The system is equipped with rolling wheels and the simulated light sources also can be...

Carbon nanotubes are a recently discovered material with excellent mechanical, thermal, and electronic properties. In particular, they are potential ballistic transporters and are theorized to have thermal conductivities greater than any other material currently known. In this thesis, we will examine two possible applications of carbon nanotubes in CMOS back-end processing. The first applicatio...

As integrated circuits (ICs) have scaled into nanometer dimensions, operating at gigahertz frequencies, interconnects have become critical in determining system performance, reliability, and manufacturability. This thesis presents new algorithms dealing with several important aspects of VLSI interconnects optimization and prediction, namely, noise reduction in global routing, temperature-aware ...