Developing countries face steady growth in the prevalence of chronic diseases, along with a continued burden from communicable diseases. "Mobile" health, or m-health-the use of mobile technologies such as cellular phones to support public health and clinical care-offers promise in responding to both types of disease burdens. Mobile technologies are widely available and can play an important role in health care at the regional, community, and individual levels. We examine various m-health applications and define the risks and benefits of each. We find positive examples but little solid evaluation of clinical or economic performance, which highlights the need for such evaluation.

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Silicon carbide (SiC) is rapidly emerging as a leading platform for the implementation of nonlinear and quantum photonics. Here, we find that commercial SiC, which hosts a variety of spin qubits, possesses low optical absorption that can enable SiC integrated photonics with quality factors exceeding 10 7 . We fabricate multimode microring resonators with quality factors as high as 1.1 million, and observe low-threshold ( 8.5 ± 0.5 m W ) optical parametric oscillation using the fundamental mode as well as optical microcombs spanning 200 nm using a higher-order mode. Our demonstration is an essential milestone in the development of photonic devices that harness the unique optical properties of SiC, paving the way toward the monolithic integration of nonlinear photonics with spin-based quantum technologies.

As the geometry shrinking faces severe limitations, 3D wafer stacking with through silicon via (TSV) has gained interest for future SOC integration. Since TSV fill material and silicon have different coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE), TSV causes silicon deformation due to different temperatures at chip manufacturing and operating. The widely used TSV fill material is copper which causes tensile stress on silicon near TSV. In this paper, we propose systematic TSV stress aware timing analysis and show how to optimize layout for better performance. First, we generate a stress contour map with an analytical radial stress model. Then, the tensile stress is converted to hole and electron mobility variations depending on geometric relation between TSVs and transistors. Mobility variation aware cell library and netlist are generated and incorporated in an industrial timing engine for 3D-IC timing analysis. It is interesting to observe that rise and fall time react differently to stress and relative locations with respect to TSVs. Overall, TSV stress induced timing variations can be as much as ± 10% for an individual cell. Thus as an application for layout optimization, we can exploit the stress-induced mobility enhancement to improve timing on critical cells. We show that stress-aware perturbation could reduce cell delay by up to 14.0% and critical path delay by 6.5% in our test case.

Double patterning lithography (DPL) is considered as a most likely solution for 32 nm/22 nm technology. In DPL, the layout patterns are decomposed into two masks (colors), and manufactured through two exposures and etch steps. If the spacing between two features (polygons) is less than certain minimum coloring distance, they have to be assigned opposite colors. However, a proper coloring is not always feasible because two neighboring patterns within the minimum distance may be in the same mask due to complex pattern configurations. In that case, a feature may need to be split into two parts to resolve the conflict, resulting in stitch insertion which causes yield loss due to overlay and line-end effect. While previous layout decomposition approaches perform coloring and splitting separately, in this paper, we propose a simultaneous conflict and stitch minimization algorithm with an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. Since ILP is in class NP-hard, the algorithm includes three speed-up techniques: 1) grid merging; 2) independent component computation; and 3) layout partition. In addition, our algorithm can be extended to handle design rules such as overlap margin and minimum width for practical use as well as off-grid layout. Our approach can reduce 33% of stitches and remove conflicts by 87.6% compared with two phase greedy decomposition.