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Near field fiber optic probes have attracted a great deal of current interest mainly due to their ability to extend optical microscopy beyond the classical diffraction limit. Scanning optical microscopes using these probes have been yielded very high resolution in imaging and spectroscopic applications at visible and infrared wavelengths. The technology has been applied to imaging in biology, material science, surface chemistry and information storage. In this work, we explore a novel use of the near field fiber optic probes in optical heterodyne characterization of high speed devices. Because of the submicron feature size of modem electronic devices, conventional optical heterodyning only yields the response of the device as a whole. Introducing near field fiber optic probes allows one to examine spatially resolved details of device response and thereby provides a means to look more closely at the internal carrier dynamics. Our technique thus comprises an important tool for the experimental study of ultrafast devices.

This paper describes a parallel algorithm of an automated CMOS circuit extraction that transforms an IC layout into a circuit netlist suitable for circuit simulations. Using reconfigurable parallel machine architecture, the newly developed algorithm achieved a circuit extraction performance which is a constant time complexity. The layout of a CMOS inverter used successfully to demonstrate an efficiency of the newly developed algorithm.

Near-field optical heterodyning (NFOH) is a novel technique for the injection of millimeter waves at any arbitrary point of an ultrafast device or circuit with high degree of spatial localization. The technique has the capacity to provide details of the operation of the device being probed, which are inaccessible using conventional means. In essence, the technique involves optical mixing of two lasers in a tiny area of the device using near-field coupling. In this paper, we present the results of more comprehensive measurements, in which we performed a scan across the entire device under test. These results show first, the resolution capabilities of the NFOH technique and second, the kind of details one can obtain about the dynamics of ultrafast devices. Two new categories of devices, namely photoconductive switches and high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), were tested to illustrate the versatility of the technique.