In the 50-plus years since the patent was issued to William Shockley in 1957, ion implantation has become a key process in the commercial production of semiconductor devices, advanced engineering materials and photonic devices. This article reviews the fundamental concepts of production ion implanters for both the processes used in manufacturing and also in the design of the tools themselves. Recent publications in the application areas of semiconductors and materials modification are summarized, focusing on the attendant process effects. These results demonstrate that ion implantation is a well understood technology with abundant and evolving applications.

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System-on-Chip (SoC) Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are ideal for real-time signal processing due to their low, deterministic latency and high performance. To showcase the utility of our open FPGA computational platform for real-time audio signal processing and computational modeling, several applications have been implemented. We have ported the openMHA hearing aid software [1] to our platform to show that pre-existing audio processing software can be implemented in SoC FPGAs by making external audio interfaces show up as a sound card. To highlight the ability to perform real-time computational modeling on our performance platform, we are implementing a real-time version of Laurel Carney’s auditory-nerve model [2] running in its own custom accelerator in the FPGA fabric. To illustrate the ability to develop DSP algorithms in MathWork’s Simulink and then implement them in the FPGA fabric we have taken several algorithms from Issa Panahi’s group [3] to show both frame-based processing (noise reduction) and sample-based processing (dynamic range compression). Finally, we show that the platform can be used to visualize audio signals using a real-time spectrogram where FFTs are computed in the FPGA fabric. [1] www.openmha.org. [2] JASA 126, 2390–2412. [3] www.utdallas.edu/ssprl/hearing-aid-project/.

A computer-aided engineering (CAE) model was developed to analyze the acoustic characteristics of a car cabin. Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0 was used to three-dimensionally represent the geometry of the cabin. The CAE, using COMSOL Multiphysics 4.2a, was performed to investigate the distribution of sound pressure fields at natural frequencies. The principle mode indices were (2, 1, 1), (2, 1, 1), (1, 1, 1), and (2, 2, 2), corresponding to the modal coefficients 1, 2, 3, and 4 and the natural frequencies of 179.691, 139.276, 221.620, and 231.386 Hz, respectively. The results of the analysis provided insight into the car cabin design to suppress exterior and interior noise.