Abstract: The techniques disclosed herein permit active, non-transparent management of financial assets within an exchange-traded fund while yielding the traditional advantages of scale and cost efficiency for secondary market participants. The fund may supplement traditional periodic disclosures of holdings with additional information to facilitate accurate intraday pricing of ETF shares. In this context, a substitute basket may be engineered and published on a daily basis that closely tracks the fund composition, but contains an active share of about 5-30% relative to the fund in order to obfuscate the actual fund holdings. This substitute basket may advantageously provide a high quality signal of fund value, while also facilitating in-kind transactions in the primary market that are closely related to the fund composition without revealing specific fund holdings or weightings.

Abstract: A method of annealing semiconductor devices to form substantially ohmic contact regions between a layer of wide band-gap semiconductor material and contact areas disposed thereon includes exposing the semiconductor devices to an annealing temperature less than approximately 900 degrees Celsius for an annealing duration of greater than approximately two hours.

Abstract: A receiving system dynamically searches a communications band for transmissions of messages having the same nominal communications parameters, including the use of the same spreading code, but having potentially different specific frequencies and code-phases. The receiver samples the communications band at each code-phase of the spreading code over a span of down-converted transmission frequencies. When a message element is detected at a particular code-phase and frequency, it is forwarded to a demodulator that demodulates the message and sends it to its intended destination. This technique allows each transmitter to be independent of the receiver. In a preferred embodiment of this invention, a Fast M-Sequence Transform (a Walsh-Hadamard Transform) is used to determine the power level at multiple code-phases at a given frequency in parallel, thereby substantially reducing the time required to search for transmissions at each discrete code-phase.

Abstract: A semiconductor device can comprise a contact material in substantially continuous contact with a contact region. In an embodiment the contact region may comprise an alloy comprising a wide band-gap material and a low melting point contact material. A wide band-gap material may comprise silicon carbide and a low melting point contact material may comprise aluminum. In another embodiment a substantially uniform ohmic contact may be formed between a contact material and a semiconductor material by annealing the contact at a temperature less than the melting point of the contact material. In an embodiment, the contact may be annealed for more than five hours.

Abstract: A Schottky barrier silicon carbide device has a Re Schottky metal contact. The Re contact 27 is thicker than 250 Angstroms and may be between 2000 and 4000 Angstroms. A termination structure is provided by ion milling an annular region around the Schottky contact.

Abstract: A method of annealing semiconductor devices to form substantially ohmic contact regions between a layer of wide band-gap semiconductor material and contact areas disposed thereon includes exposing the semiconductor devices to an annealing temperature less than approximately 900° Celsius for an annealing duration of greater than approximately two hours.