This book summarizes the research of more than a decade. Its early motivation dates back to the eighties and to the memorable talks Dr. C. Moglestue (FHG Freiburg) gave on his Monte-Carlo solutions of the Boltzmann transport equation at the NASECODE conferences in Ireland. At that time numerical semiconductor device modeling basically implied the application of the drift-diffusion model. On the one hand, those talks clearly showed the potential of the Monte-Carlo model for an accurate description of many important transport issues that cannot adequately be addressed by the drift-diffusion approximation. On the other hand, they also clearly demonstrated that at that time only very few experts were able to extract useful results from a Monte-Carlo simulator. With this background, Monte-Carlo research activities were started in 1986 at the University of Aachen (RWTH Aachen), Germany. Different to many other Monte-Carlo research groups, the Monte-Carlo research in Aachen took place in an environment of active drift-diffusion and hydrodynamic model development.

This book addresses modeling of systems that are important to the fabrication of three-dimensional microstructures. Selected topics are ion beam micromachining, x-ray lithography, laser chemical vapor deposition, photopolymerization, laser ablation, and thin films. Models simulating the behavior of these systems are presented, graphically illusratted, and discussed in the light of experimental results. Knowledge gained from such models is essential for system operation and optimization. This book is unique in that it focuses on high aspect ratio microtechnology. It will be invaluable to scientists, engineers, graduate students, and manufacturers engaged in research and development for enhancing the accuracy and precision of microfabrication systems for commercial applications.

This book, edited by Potyrailo and Amis, addresses a new paradigm-shifting approach in the search for new materials-Combinatorial Materials Science. One way to consider such an approach is to imagine an adventurous chef who decides to look for new entrees by cooking food ingredients in many pots using different combinations in every pot, and boil­ ing, steaming, or frying them in various ways. Although most of the pots will not have the tastiest food ever devised, some recipes will taste intriguing, and some eventually will lead to a discovery of a new fascinating cuisine. Of course, having a skilled chef design the com­ binatorial formulation will certainly be helpful in ensuring a successful outcome. Similar to food, each engineering material is a complex product of its chemical composition, structure, and processing. Generally, each of these components matters–-change one and you get another material. Most of these "new" materials will be less good than ones we use now since existing materials have been refined with the extensive work of scientists and engi­ neers. At the same time if one prepares diverse materials like our adventurous chef, chang­ ing material composition, processing conditions and time, etc. , some of these materials will be superior to existing ones and a few might represent breakout technology.

By adaptive signal processing, we mean, in general, adaptive ?ltering.In- known environments where we need to model, identify, or track time-varying channels, adaptive ?ltering has been proven to be an e?ective and powerful tool. As a result, this tool is now in use in many di?erent ?elds. Since the invention, by Widrow and Ho? in 1959, of one of the ?rst ad- tive ?lters, the so-called least-mean-square, many applications appeared to have the potential to use this fundamental concept. While the number of - plications (using adaptive algorithms) has been (and keeps) ?ourishing with time, thanks to several successes, the need for more sophisticated adaptive algorithms became obvious as real-world problems are more complex and more demanding. Even though the theory of adaptive ?ltering is already a well-established topic in signal processing, new and improved concepts are discovered every year by researchers. Some of these recent approaches are discussed in this book. The goal of this book is to provide, for the ?rst time, a reference to the hottest real-world applications where adaptive ?ltering techniques play an important role. To do so, we invited top researchers in di?erent ?elds to c- tribute chapters addressing their speci?c topic of study. Thousands of pages wouldprobablynotbe enoughto describeallthe practicalapplicationsutil- ing adaptive algorithms. Therefore, we limited the topics to some important applications in acoustics, speech, wireless, and networking, where research is still very active and open.

Fieldbus Technology (FT), an enabling platform has already emerged in order to cater the need for sophisticated and flexible control and as a matter of fact it has becoming the preferred choice for the next generation real-time automation and control solutions. This book incorporates a selection of research and development papers. Its scope is on history and background, contemporary standards, underlying architecture, comparison between different Fieldbus systems, applications, latest innovations, new trends as well as on compatibility, interoperability, and interchangeability.

Relay feedback has attracted considerable research attention for more than a century but there has been no recent summary of the many newly-developed tools and results now available for this important area as a whole, those that have been published tending to focus on one process or controller type only. Relay Feedback is divided into three parts, the first of which is devoted to the analysis of relay feedback systems within a general setting with information on: existence of solutions; existence of limit cycles; local and global stability of limit cycles; limit cycles with more than two switchings per period; plants with time delay; relays with asymmetric hysteresis. The second part, on the improvement of process identification shows the reader how to: modify a standard relay to provide better excitation of a process at a number of important frequencies; devise new algorithms designed to make better use of information from relay feedback tests. The book's third part is a presentation of recent developments in control design providing: a unified framework for the design of internal-model, proportional-integral-derivative or general-single-loop controllers for SISO or MIMO systems with or without time delays; characterisation of time delays and non-minimum phase zeros for closed-loop systems. Relay Feedback presents a comprehensive, up-to-date and detailed treatment of relay feedback theory, the use of relay feedback for process identification and the use of identified models for general control design in a single volume. The work assumes only knowledge of linear system theory on the part of the reader and should therefore be of use to graduate students and practising engineers as well as to researchers.