The monitoring of the water cycle at the Earth surface which tightly interacts with the climate change processes as well as a number of practical applications (agriculture, soil and water quality assessment, irrigation and water resource management, etc…) requires surface temperature measurements at local scale. Such is the goal of the Indian-French high spatio-temporal TRISHNA mission (Thermal infraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural resource Assessment). The scientific objectives of the mission and research work conducted to consolidate the mission specifications are presented. Progress in modelling of surface fluxes is then discussed. The main specifications of the mission such as the revisit, the spatial resolution, the overpass time, the spectral bands and the orbit are analyzed and justified. The resulting baseline of the mission is given.

This paper describes the first study of the complete sequence from process simulation to circuit performance and the corresponding sensitivities for 0.25-/spl mu/m technology. This is made possible by a combination of physically based process models and a systematic calibration involving SIMS, one-dimensional (1-D), and two-dimensional (2-D) device characteristics. Simulated nFET and pFET characteristics match hardware (HW) within 5-10% for both long-channel and nominal length devices. Simulated ring-oscillator performance is in good agreement with HW data. Sensitivities of device characteristics and the inverter gate delay to process variations (within 10%) are quantified. These investigations establish the correlation between process variations and circuit performance.