Elite athletes walk a fine line between performance success and failure. Although regarded by the public as examples of ultimate fitness, in reality they often exhibit vital signs bordering on clinical pathology. Their physiological parameters challenge our notions of what we consider clinically normal, for, as individuals, athletes represent a unique model of human stress adaptation and often, sadly, mal-adaptation. Understanding this human variance may assist ultimately in understanding aspects of well being in the population at large, in the work place and during healthy exercise, as well as when undergoing lifestyle changes to overcome disease, age-related changes and chronic stress.To maximise the potential of GB athletes and support the quest for gold at future World Championships, Summer and Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the UK's sports governing bodies and the UK sports governing bodies and research councils have identified the opportunity for engineering and physical science disciplines to support and interact with the sports community during training. Not only will this secure competitive advantage for UK athletes, it will also, of more general application, contribute understanding of the biology of athletic performance to gain insights which will improve the health and wellbeing of the population at large.The vision of ESPRIT is to position UK at the forefront of pervasive sensing in elite sports and promote its wider application in public life-long health, wellbeing and healthcare, whilst also addressing the EPSRC's key criteria for UK science and engineering research. The proposed programme represents a unique synergy of leading UK research in body sensor networks (BSN), biosensor design, sports performance monitoring and equipment design. The provision of ubiquitous and pervasive monitoring of physical, physiological, and biochemical parameters in any environment and without activity restriction and behaviour modification is the primary motivation of BSN research. This has become a reality with the recent advances in sensor design, MEMS integration, and ultra-low power micro-processor and wireless technologies. Since its inception, BSN has advanced very rapidly internationally. The proposing team has already contributed to a range of novel, low cost, miniaturised wireless devices and prototypes for sports and healthcare.

Germanium, in at the birth of the electronics revolution, is experiencing a renaissance as a semiconductor material - possibly even rivalling silicon, and is attracting huge interest as the silicon end-game hots up. It is perceived, audaciously but by many, as a potential candidate to maintain silicon-like technology and associated devices well beyond the envisaged end of silicon development (around 2020) and also take the technology into exciting new areas and performance regimes. This proposal sets out to explore some of the intriguing aspects and consequences of the fundamental electronic structure of Ge not previously examined. There are good theoretical arguments to suggest that some critical performance parameters can be dramatically enhanced if carriers travel in non-conventional crystallographic directions and when the germanium is under strain. We will investigate how these new environments affect the velocity/mobility and effective mass of the carriers (electrons and holes) and the processes that impede their motion (scattering).The project will be conducted by three UK university groups uniquely positioned to undertake this research and with international reputations for epitaxial growth of strained Ge (Warwick), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) for structural characterization on the nanoscale (Sheffield) and carrier transport modelling (Glasgow). The industrial standard CVD growth system at Warwick puts us in a unique position to contribute to this field of research, with good prospects of the high quality Ge structures being available early in the programme. Participation of IMEC, the leading European nano-processing laboratory, will give us unparalleled access to tools not available in the UK. Our intellectual property will be fully protected and could be exploited by numerous companies in the UK.The principal objective is to study 2D carrier transport in these largely untried orientations and to look for significant enhancements in carrier mobility compared to the conventional (100) orientation. Similar investigations are currently underway in silicon and it is opportune to now explore this in Ge. It is particularly timely in the light of IMEC's recent progress in Ge device fabrication using essentially silicon processing techniques.The programme consists of three integrated workpackages:WP1 - Growth and processing of strained Ge channel structures: Epitaxial processes will be developed, structural characterisation performed including high resolution TEM, and simple structures processed for electrical measurement.WP2 - Modulation doped buried channel structures: Initial assessment and screening of orientation and strain influences on hole and electron transport, quickly targeting optimised structures and specifically avoiding any perturbing effects of processing that may be detrimental to electron transport. Results from the measurements will be used by the Glasgow Device Modelling Group to develop/refine basic scattering and mobility models for this materials system and provide pointers to final choice of structures.WP3 - Surface-channel device structures: Structures containing a gate electrode to modulate the carrier population and make it an active device. The gate is separated from the channel by a very thin layer of a new (high-k) dielectric material, which will also scatter the carriers. Transport measurements down to very low temperatures will allow us to appraise the full device potential offered by Ge.By the end of the project we would expect to have a thorough understanding of the practical and theoretical aspects of 2D carrier transport in the full matrix of Ge surface orientations, channel directions and strain. Such knowledge can then be used to great advantage in helping realise new generations of highly performing devices that are needed in the nanoelectronics and the futuristic spintronics era.

The SESAME consortium is a newly-formed multidisciplinary group that proposes to investigate the use of wireless sensor-based systems in enhancing the performance of elite athletes and young athletes who have been identified as having world class potential. The project has goals of enhancing performance, improving coach education, and advancing sports science. Despite a specific focus on athletics, the technical approach and its solutions will be deliberately generic, to enable their subsequent application to a wider range of training and healthcare scenarios. At present, only a limited set of sensing technologies are available for the coaching of elite athletes, including motion capture, fixed force plates and video recording for feedback. However, they often disrupt the sporting activity and the data they return are difficult to interpret to provide appropriate feedback. Wireless sensing technologies, ranging from accelerometry and magnetometry through to accurate positioning systems, have the capacity to revolutionise the field, by providing information about limb positioning and orientation, athlete location, muscular function, and physiological status, all in real time. Through the SESAME project, dynamic data will come from wearable non-intrusive sensors, augmented by passive video capture. Raw sensor data will be processed to extract meaningful information using a combination of sensor fusion and stochastic signal processing to derive information that is meaningful to coaches and athletes. This will take place in the knowledge that human biomechanics constrains movement and will take account of errors introduced by sensor attachment mechanisms and sensor mispositioning. Biomechanical and physiological performance models will be informed by captured sensor data, and from them idealised movements and the performance effects of deviations will be captured.A comprehensive study of human factors is essential if coaches and athletes are to derive real benefit from SESAME. Ethnographic studies will be undertaken with coaches - to build expert domain-specific knowledge, to capture their cognitive models of performance, and to assist in the design of user interfaces. Feedback to coaches and athletes will be in two forms: (i) graphical, both as a data stream that has been processed to respect the coaches' cognitive models and by overlaying sensor data on video; (ii) as real-time feedback if feasible: e.g. using buzzers. Analysis of an athlete's performance is not only a real-time activity: a definitive record of sensor data, decision support recommendations, medical advice and any clinical events will be maintained, allowing users to take account of relevant medical inputs. Such an approach also allows for comparative studies between athletes and the mining of such information both to improve biological performance models and to understand the effect of deviation from the ideal and precursors to injury. The focus of the work will be on running - specifically sprinting. However, given the national importance of the 2012 Olympic Games we will also explore the possibility of using the technology in other athletic disciplines, more general forms of exercise, and rehabilitation following injury. Should time permit, wider applications such as gait analysis for cerebral palsy patients will also be explored. Athletic training is a highly demanding application domain from the viewpoint of wireless sensor networking / it is necessary to develop and integrate novel sensors, QoS-driven real-time networking, and system autoconfiguration, all using an extensible generic software infrastructure. Consequently, solving problems in this challenging domain will provide a necessary building block for the solution of more generic problems in ubiquitous and sentient computing.The SESAME consortium contains a blend of expertise that is essential for progress in deploying technology in this domain.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Contacts, made up of metal-semiconductor interfaces, are integral parts any semiconductor device. Compatibility of the metal and semiconductor components, homogeneity of structural and electrical characteristics of their interfaces, and robustness and durability of the contacts are crucial for the device proper functionality.Optimal operation of the contacts is a key to realisation of novel devices and development of new device concepts, including high mobility semiconductors based CMOS, tunnelling and spin-based transistors, tunnelling diodes, gas and infrared carbon-nanotube detectors, etc. Two major current trends in the semiconductor industry - miniaturisation of the devices and shift to new materials - pose the challenges for the contact technology: (i) robustness and stability of operation in ever smaller devices and (ii) compatibility of metal and semiconductor components. For example, the resistance of present day contacts is strongly affected by fluctuations in the currently being developed sub-22 nm technology. This problem is getting worse for smaller devices. On the other hand, introduction of new materials for high-mobility channels, e.g., Ge and III-Vs, necessitates the search for compatible metals and brings new challenges related to the contact fabrication. Therefore, understanding the dependence of the nanoscale metal-semiconductor interface properties on the atomic structure of this interface, chemical composition disorder, and defects is a key to formulating and exploiting new device concepts. In particular, this understanding is imperative for the developing of optimal contact fabrication procedures for nano-scale semiconductor devices.Primary aims of the proposed research are i) enabling and carrying out multiscale modelling of the optimal chemical compositions and structures of metal-semiconductor interfaces such that the Schottky barrier is minimal;ii) analysis of the role of interface defects, strain, and disorder on the carrier transport in CMOS devices.We will first develop a methodology which bridges ab initio simulations of atomic-scale structures and electronic properties of interfaces at 1-3 nm scale and simulation of device current-voltage characteristics at the scale of 5-50 nm. The results of the ab initio calculations will be transferred into 3D Monte Carlo (MC) transport simulations, which will allow us to make a realistic representation of the metal-semiconductor interface and develop a physical model of source/drain contacts. This model, in turn, will be incorporated into a 2D MC device simulator to predict the device performance and thus allow one for the straightforward comparison with experimental data obtained directly from the operating devices. Such methodology will allow us: i) to consider explicitly effects of point defects (<0.5 nm scale), composition disorder (~1 nm scale), and metal granularity (~1-2 nm scale) on the electronic properties of selected metal-semiconductor interfaces, ii) to incorporate these effects into 3D MC transport simulations through the metal-semiconductor interfaces,iii) to develop realistic models for source/drain contacts, carry out 2D MC device simulations, and to optimise device performance with respect to the properties of the contacts.The methodology will be first tested on the case of Ti metal contact with an archetypal III-V semiconductor GaAs and the results will be validated using experimental data provided by our project partners. Then other systems of increasing complexity will be investigated: interfaces of Ti metal with unary Si and Ge, doped GaAs, and ternary InGaAs semiconductors and, finally, interfaces of TiN metal alloy with InGaAs. Our theoretical predictions will be validated by and compared to experimental results at each scale: Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) data for the interface structures, resistance measurements for the transport through the interface, I-V characteristics for the device simulations.