A study has been carried out to prepare CuInSe2 film using electrophoresis process, a simple non - vacuum technique. Preparative parameters were optimised to make compact films of CuInSe2. Thermal and laser annealing were carried out to recrystallise the films treated with different fluxes in order to make it robust and suitable for device fabrication.

Films of CdTe and CuInSe2 have been produced by a low cost process based on electrophoretic deposition using polar organic solvents. Investigations have been made on the recrystallisation of these films by laser annealing. Results have indicated improvement in the structure of the laser annealed CdTe samples providing more compact and robust films.

Films of CdTe have been produced by a novel low cost process based on electrophoretic deposition using polar organic solvents. The main advantage of this method is the high rate of deposition, greater than 20 μm/min. Details of the deposition process are given and the effects of post-deposition annealing of the samples have also been investigated using XRD, SEM and EDAX. Laser annealing resulted in melting of CdTe producing more compact and robust films.

Thin layers of In, Cu and Se were deposited at ambient temperature by thermal evaporation onto freshly cleaned glass substrates. The films were annealed in an inert atmosphere by an Argon-ion laser operating on all green lines with the power varied from 200 mW to 1 W. The films were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDAX) and X-ray diffractometry (XRD). The temperature-increment of the different layers under the incident laser powers were calculated theoretically. These results were used to suggest a mechanism for the formation of the CuInSe2 compound upon annealing the stack of elemental layers. It has been found that for the present form of the stack, the formation of the ternary chalcopyrite phase of CuInSe2 takes place through the appearance of the binary phase and subsequent reaction amongst them.

The BERKOM MultiMedia Transport System is designed for communication between distributed multimedia applications on top of broadband ISDN networks. Its core are the ST-II protocol on the network layer and an extended version of the XTP protocol called XTP-Lit on the transport layer. ST-II provides mechanisms for fast packet forwarding, multiple target connections and bandwidth management. XTP-Lite supports negotiation of QoS parameters, rate control and flexible error handling.

The theory of laser cavity birefringence induced by insertion of two quarter-wave plates into the cavity is developed to show how the intermode frequency of a two-mode laser can be tuned through a free spectral range by relative rotation of the plates. Birefringence is demonstrated in a helium-neon laser at 633 nm using an open cavity having a tube with anti-reflection coated windows. The lock-in between modes when the intermodal frequency approaches zero was investigated and found to be smallest when the tube was placed between the plates which were aligned with axes parallel. Active frequency stabilization at a frequency separation of 50 MHz was demonstrated using the mode-balancing technique.