Flame-resistant clothing or fabrics against thermal exposure is a crucial requirement in order to ensure people survivability and to protect the structure. A model-based method was developed to evaluate the thermal performance of flame-resistant fabrics used in protective clothing. The skin simulant sensor is used to determine the heat flux at the skin simulant surface from the elevation of temperature of the skin simulant surface. The heat flux is then applied to a newly developed skin thermal wave model (STWM) instead of Pennes' model, which inherits some questionable physical and physiological aspects, and the Henriques burn integral is incorporated into the new model to predict the level of skin injury. Results of tolerance time from the Stoll criterion method are also compared with those from the Henriques method with two skin models (Pennes' model and STWM) by a thermal protective performance calorimeter. Deviations between the STWM and the traditional Pennes' equation imply that the STWM, which accounts for finite thermal wave propagation, may provide realistic predictions on burn evaluation. The comparison measurements show that the test results by the STWM correlated well with those obtained from the Henriques method with Pennes' model. Therefore, this test method provides a new technique to accurately and precisely characterize the thermal performance of flame-resistant fabrics.

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We have investigated impacts of LaO incorporation into a high-k dielectric (HK) for threshold voltage (V t) tuning on gate leakage current (J g) in HK nFETs in detail. A J g-V g curve is not shifted along with a change in V t and J g decreases at fixed V g when V t is decreased by LaO incorporation in HK nFETs. Evaluation of barrier heights at a metal gate (MG)/HK interface suggests that this is owing to no decrease of the conduction band offset at a MG/HK interface by LaO incorporation. On the other hand, J g increases at fixed V g because a J g-V g curve is shifted along with V t when a work-function (WF) is lowered by MG. Therefore, a V t tuning technique of LaO incorporation has a clear advantage over a WF control by MG for suppressing the J g increase associated with the continued scaling of CMOSFETs.

We have developed a key process technology on HfOx-MIM (Metal-Insulator-Metal) capacitors, which overcomes a crucial issue on incidental TDDB failure. We revealed this failure was induced by the leakage current along the weak path through the micro-crystalline boundary in HfOx films. Novel stacked TiN bottom electrodes, which had amorphous TiN films on the top of crystalline electrodes, were adopted for suppressing the crystallization of the dielectrics. Excellent leakage characteristics below 10fA/cell and TDDB lifetime over 100yrs have been achieved for the concave type HfOx-MIM arrays with Teq of 1.1nm.