Effects of annealing on the dielectric properties and microstructures of thin tantalum oxide film(25nm) deposited on p-type Si substrate with rf reactive magnetron sputtering were investigated. The leakage current density was remarkably reduced from to A/at the electric field of 2MV/cm after rapid thermal annealing(RTA) in at , while little leakage reduction was observed after furnace annealing in at . The structural changes of thin tantalum oxide film after annealing were examined using high resolution electron microscope(HREM). The results of HREM show that substantial reduction in the leakage current density after the RTA in can be attributed to crystallization and reoxidation of the thin amorphous tantalum oxide film.

In this paper, a new distributed parallel algorithm for pattern classification based upon Self-Organizing Neural Network(SONN)[10-12] is developed. This system works without any information about the number of clusters or cluster centers. The SONN model showed good performance for finding classification information, cluster centers, the number of salient clusters and membership information. It took a considerable amount of time in the sequential version if the input data set size is very large. Therefore, design of parallel algorithm is desirous. A new distributed parallel algorithm is developed and experimental results are presented.