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Robots utilized in the fields of welfare or agriculture should be light in weight and flexible in structure. A pneumatic actuator is considered as a candidate of actuators realizing such robots, because it is more powerful compared with a motor of the same weight. It is also flexible, clean and unexplosive. In this paper, a new structure of the pneumatic actuator with two-degree-of-freedom is proposed. By combining these proposed pneumatic actuators, multi-degree-of-freedom pneumatic manipulator can be easily constructed, and a fourteen-degree-of-freedom pneumatic dual manipulators was constructed. The performance of the proposed dual manipulators is confirmed through experiments for ball-handling with impedance control. The results show that the flexibility of the pneumatic actuator is appropriate to accomplish the coordinate motion of the right and left arms of the robot.

In sub-half micron CMOS, reduction of wiring capacitance is a key issue to improve the circuit performance because the ratio of wiring delay to total delay is increasing. In order to reduce the wiring capacitance, applying low dielectric materials to ULSI is most effective and developments of low dielectric materials have been reported recently. However, there have been no studies of applying those to sub-half micron CMOS. In this study, it is reported for the first time that the new low dielectric material "SiOF" which has been proposed previously has been applied to sub-half micron CMOS and the improvement of circuit performance has been confirmed. Moreover, it is clearly demonstrated that the SiOF film is inevitable to improve the circuit speed of 0.35 /spl mu/m CMOS with the scaling trend. Also, it is emphasized that the reduction of wiring capacitance with SiOF film is important from the viewpoint of power reduction in sub-half micron CMOS. >

A low dielectric fluorine-doped silicon oxide (SiOF) film, which was produced by adding C2F6 to the conventional chemical vapor deposited oxide, was applied to a 0.35 µm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) and its influence on metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor characteristics was analyzed. A shift of the transconductance was observed when the SiOF film was used as an intermediate dielectric and the Si3N4 film as the dielectric on the metal. An improvement in speed of 13% due to the SiOF film was experimentally confirmed under the condition where the transconductance does not show a shift. Using circuit simulations, the necessity for such low dielectric films as the SiOF film, on the scaling trend in the improvement of circuit performance, was clearly shown and was also emphasized from the point of view of power reduction. It was revealed that circuit speed and power consumption of 0.35 µm CMOS were degraded if the SiOF film was not used, because the improvement of the transistor performance did not overcome the increase in interconnect capacitance due to the increase in the adjacent interconnect capacitance component.

The TiSi2 local wiring technology has been newly characterized from the viewpoints of dopant interdiffusion and power reduction. It was found that only the p+/n junction degrades when TiSi2 local wiring connects the n+ layer and p+ layer. The results of electrical measurements using a set of new test patterns suggest the reason to be that boron does not diffuse from TiSi2 to Si due to the high efficiency of TiB formation. More than a 20% reduction in power dissipation at a low-power supply voltage of 1 V was obtained, which demonstrates that the scheme is promising for low-power sub-half-micron complementary metal oxide semiconductor.

It is concluded that in a shallow junction of post-junction silicide (PJS) scheme self-aligned silicide (SALICIDE) process, the decrease of impurity concentration at the TiSi2/Si interface significantly degrades performance of metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET). It is verified for the first time that this degradation is due to dopant redistribution from Si to TiSi2 during post-silicidation annealing. Dopant redistribution is strongly confirmed by evaluation of the contact resistance at the TiSi2/Si interface and analysis of impurity concentration by improved secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS) technique and a two-dimensional process simulation dealing with a SALICIDE process. In order to overcome the dopant redistribution-induced degradation, a novel SALICIDE scheme, doubly source/drain-ion-implanted SALICIDE (DIS), is proposed and concluded to be an alternative to PJS scheme.