Top illuminated organic photodetectors with dielectric/metal/dielectric transparent anode

The top illuminated organic photodetectors (OPDs) with a Dielectric/Metal/Dielectric (DMD) transparent anode are fabricated. The transparent electrode is composed of molybdenum trioxide (MoO₃)/silver (Ag)/MoO₃ layers and zinc oxide (ZnO)/aluminum (Al) is used for bottom cathode. The optimized DMD electrode has an optical transmittance of 85.7% at the wavelength of 546 nm and sheet resistance of ∼6 Ω/sq. The fabricated OPDs exhibit a high detectivity and wide range linearity.     

CN decoration of dibenzofuran modified biphenyl for high triplet energy host for blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes

A strongly electron deficient and high triplet energy host for blue emitters was developed by decorating a dibenzofuran modified biphenyl backbone structure with multiple CN units. Two hosts, 6,6′-bis(6-cyanodibenzo[b,d]furan-4-yl)-[1,1′-biphenyl]-3,3′-dicarbonitrile(CNDBF1) and 2,2′-bis(6-cyanodibenzo[b,d]furan-4-yl)-[1,1′-biphenyl]-4,4′-dicarbonitrile(CNDBF2), were derived from the CN decoration strategy for application in blue organic light-emitting diodes requiring high triplet energy host. They showed high triplet energy above 2.79 eV and acted as the electron transport type host based on the strong electron deficiency. The mixture of the CNDBF1 and CNDBF2 hosts with a hole transport type 3,3′-di(9H-carbazol-9-yl)-1,1′-biphenyl host performed as the exciplex host of a blue phosphor and accomplished high external quantum efficiency of 22.7% in the blue phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes.     

FPGA prototyping of emerging manycore architectures for parallel programming research using Formic boards

Performance evaluation of parallel software and architectural exploration of innovative hardware support face a common challenge with emerging manycore platforms: they are limited by the slow running time and the low accuracy of software simulators. Manycore FPGA prototypes are difficult to build, but they offer great rewards. Software running on such prototypes runs orders of magnitude faster than current simulators. Moreover, researchers gain significant architectural insight during the modeling process. We use the Formic FPGA prototyping board [1], which specifically targets scalable and cost-efficient multi-board prototyping, to build and test a 64-board model of a 512-core, MicroBlaze-based, non-coherent hardware prototype with a full network-on-chip in a 3D-mesh topology. We expand the hardware architecture to include the ARM Versatile Express platforms and build a 520-core heterogeneous prototype of 8 Cortex-A9 cores and 512 MicroBlaze cores. We then develop an MPI library for the prototype and evaluate it extensively using several bare-metal and MPI benchmarks. We find that our processor prototype is highly scalable, models faithfully single-chip multicore architectures, and is a very efficient platform for parallel programming research, being 50,000 times faster than software simulation.     

Polar-Cartesian Hybrid Transforms: A novel 2D range scan registration algorithm

Registration of range scans is commonly required in many localization and mapping algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Polar-Cartesian Hybrid Transforms for pair-wise registration of range scans. The proposed algorithm iteratively establishes correspondences by searching the points with closest polar angles in the polar coordinate frame. An angular look-up table is constructed based on the properties of the laser range finder to accelerate the searching procedure. In order to speed up the convergence, we compute the difference of polar range of every matched point pair to select the most contributing correspondences. After the correspondences are determined, the transformation is computed in Cartesian coordinate frame using a point-to-line metric. Combining the advantages of the polar and Cartesian coordinate frames, both robustness and efficiency are greatly improved compared with an up-to-date ICP algorithm.     

Electromigration effect on Sn-58 % Bi solder joints with various substrate metallizations under current stress

The electromigration behavior of low-melting temperature Sn-58Bi (in wt%) solder joints was investigated with a high current density between 3 and 4.5 × 10³ A/cm² between 80 and 110 °C. In order to analyze the impact of various substrate metallizations on the electromigration performance of the Sn-58Bi joint, we used representative substrate metallizations including electroless nickel immersion gold (ENIG), electroless nickel electroless palladium immersion gold (ENEPIG), and organic solderability preservatives (OSP). As the applied current density increased, the time to failure (TTF) for electromigration decreased regardless of the temperature or substrate metallizations. In addition, the TTF slightly decreased with increasing temperature. The substrate metallization significantly affected the TTF for the electromigration behavior of the Sn-58Bi solder joints. The substrate metallizations for electromigration performance of the Sn-58Bi solder are ranked in the following order: OSP-Cu, ENEPIG, and ENIG. Due to the polarity effect, current stressing enhanced the fast growth of intermetallic compounds (IMCs) at the anode interface. Cracks occurred at the Ni₃Sn₄ + Ni₃P IMC/Cu interfaces on the cathode sides in the Sn-58Bi/ENIG joint and the Sn-58Bi/ENEPIG joint; this was caused by the complete consumption of the Ni(P) layer. Alternatively, failure occurred via deformation of the bulk solder in the Sn-58Bi/OSP-Cu joint. The experimental results confirmed that the electromigration reliability of the Sn-58Bi/OSP-Cu joint was superior to those of the Sn-58Bi/ENIG or Sn-58Bi/ENEPIG joints.     

The rim zone of cement-based materials – Barrier or fast lane for chemical degradation?

Sophisticated evaluation models for the long-term stability of cement-based systems demand a precise knowledge of the mechanisms of deterioration reactions, particularly respecting a permanent exposure to aqueous environments. Commonly, insights into these mechanisms are deduced from long-term investigations. However, these chemical reactions start immediately after exposure to aggressive environments causing rapid changes of composition and structure. Consequently, properties of its rim zone change, which affects transport processes in aqueous solutions. In laboratory experiments, the influence of these surface processes on the stability of cement-based materials exposed to different chloride solutions was studied as a function of time and temperature. Analysis of compositional and structural changes beneath the surface reveal the role of crystalline covering layers for chemical resistance. Such layers are often described as protective barriers. However, these processes in the rim zone can accelerate chemical degradation and subsequently reduce the resilience of the cement-based materials to aggressive aqueous environments.     

Adaptive observer-based trajectory tracking control of nonholonomic mobile robots

In this paper, an adaptive observer-based trajectory tracking problem is solved for nonholonomic mobile robots with uncertainties. An adaptive observer is first developed to estimate the unmeasured velocities of a mobile robot with model uncertainties. Using the designed observer and the backstepping technique, a trajectory tracking controller is designed to generate the torque as an input. Using Lyapunov stability analysis, we prove that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable with respect to the estimation errors and tracking errors. Finally, the simulation results are presented to validate the performance and robustness of the proposed control system against uncertainties.     

Segment inertial parameters of Korean adults estimated from three-dimensional body laser scan data

In this study, body segment parameters of Korean adults were estimated using the three-dimensional (3D) body scan data from the SizeKorea database. Mass-inertial parameters and segment dimensions of 40 male subjects and 40 female subjects (18-59 years old) were estimated using a 16-segment model under the assumption that each segment has a constant density distribution after reconstructing the scan data. Therefore, several sets of linear regression functions based on gender, stature, and weight were established, which provided a convenient method for estimating body segment parameters of Korean adults. The obtained mass ratios of body segments were compared with those for Russians reported by Zatsiorsky and Seluyanov (1983) and for those for Chinese and Germans reported by Shan and Bohn (2003), in which the same 16-segment model was used. In addition, the results were compared with the Korean data results reported by [Jung, 1993] and [Lim, 1994], and Park et al. (1999). These comparisons revealed that Asians have larger head mass ratios and smaller lower limb mass ratios than Caucasians, while the differences in the head mass ratios between males and females from the same ethnic groups were not significant. Females were found to have larger mass ratios for the lower torso and smaller mass ratios for the upper torso, middle torso, upper arm, forearm, foot, and hand, as compared to males from the same ethnic groups. In addition, the data obtained by different researchers were compared, thereby showing high reproducibility of our method.

Relevance to industry

The obtained segment parameters can be used to define digital human models and applied to the fields of ergonomics and biomechanics, such as for workspace design, furniture design, vehicle interior design, and human movement analysis.     

A social-aware routing protocol for opportunistic networks

Understanding nodes mobility is of fundamental importance for data delivery in opportunistic and intermittently connected networks referred to as Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The analysis of such mobility patterns and the understanding of how mobile nodes interact play a critical role when designing new routing protocols for DTNs. The Cultural Greedy Ant (CGrAnt) protocol is a hybrid Swarm Intelligence-based approach designed to address the routing problem in such dynamic and complex environment. CGrAnt is based on: (1) Cultural Algorithms (CA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and (2) operational metrics that characterize the opportunistic social connectivity between wireless users. The most promising message forwarders are selected via a greedy transition rule based mainly on local information captured from the DTN environment. Whenever global information is available, it can also be used to support decisions. We compare the performance of CGrAnt with Epidemic, PROPHET, and dLife protocols in two different mobility scenarios under varying networking parameters. Results obtained by the ONE simulator show that CGrAnt achieves a higher message delivery and lower message redundancy than the three protocols in both scenarios. The only exception is in one of the scenarios, when messages have a time to live lower than 900 min, where CGrAnt delivers a bit less messages than dLife, although with a lower message redundancy.