Magnet Safety Assessment for ITER

The ITER magnet system consists of structurally linked sets of toroidal (TF) and poloidal (PF) field coils, central solenoid (CS), and various support structures. The coils are superconducting, force flow Helium cooled with a Kapton-Glass-Epoxy multilayer insulation system. The stored magnetic energy is about 100GJ in the TF system and 20GJ in the PF-CS. Coils and structure are maintained at 4 K by enclosing them in a vacuum cryostat. The cryostat, comprising an outer envelope to the magnets, forms most of the second radioactivity confinement barrier. The inner primary barrier is formed by the vacuum vessel, its ports and their extensions. To keep the machine size within acceptable bounds, it is essential that the magnets are in close proximity to both of the nuclear confinement barriers. The objective of the magnet design is that, although local damage to one of the barriers may occur in very exceptional circumstances, large scale magnet structural or thermal failure leading to simultaneous breaching of both barriers is not credible. Magnet accidents fall into three categories: thermal (which includes arcing arising from insulation failure and local overheating due to discharge failure in the event of a superconductor quench), structural (which includes component mechanical failure arising from material inadequacies, design errors and exceptional force patterns arising from coil shorts or control failures), and fluid (Helium release due to cooling line failure). After a preliminary survey to select initial faults conceivable within the present design, these faults are systematically analyzed to provide an assessment of the damage potential. The results of this damage assessment together with an assessment of the reliability of the monitoring and protective systems, shows that the magnets can operate with the required safety condition.     

Analysis and synthesis of on-chip spiral inductors

This paper presents a physically based compact model for estimating high-frequency performance of spiral inductors. The model accurately accounts for skin and proximity effects in the metal conductors as well as eddy current losses in the substrate. The model shows excellent agreement with measured data mostly within 10% across a variety of inductor geometries and substrate dopings up to 20 GHz. A web-based spiral inductor synthesis and analysis tool COILS, which makes use of the compact models, is presented. An optimization algorithm using binary searches speeds up the synthesis of inductor designs.     

Data mining of resilience indicators

In recent years, the Asia-Pacific region has experienced several financial setbacks, including speculative attacks in 1998 and the SARS outbreak in 2003. Financial stresses of this nature are unanticipated, and not all of the dangers can be predicted by the examination of market information and macroeconomic indicators. The Early Warning System (EWS) that has been adopted by the International Monetary Fund may not be able to predict future financial crises for all possible scenarios, because shocks come in many different forms. To supplement the EWS, this paper proposes a data mining framework to measure the resilience of an economy. The resilience framework does not predict a crisis, but rather assesses the current state of health of an economy and its ability to withstand a financial shock should one occur. The framework is based on a feedback system consisting of two stages. The first stage assigns a resilience score to each economy based on a fuzzy logic scoring scheme that is built on the ambiguous reasoning of experts. The second stage uses the classification tree approach to estimate thresholds for each economic indicator, and examines the quality of the fuzzy score. The result from the second stage is then passed back to the first stage as feedback. The final result is obtained when the feedback system reaches its equilibrium state. The proposed resilience framework is applied to the external-sector and the public-sector economies of several countries to illustrate its applicability.     

Hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin-film transistor arrays fabricated by digital lithography

A jet-printed digital-lithographic method, in place of conventional photolithography, was used to fabricate 64 /spl times/ 64 pixel (300 /spl mu/m pitch) matrix addressing thin-film transistor (TFT) arrays. The average hydrogenated amorphous silicon TFT device within an array had a threshold voltage of /spl sim/3.5 V, carrier mobility of 0.7 cm/sup 2//V/spl middot/s, subthreshold slope of 0.76 V/decade, and an on/off ratio of 10/sup 8/.     

Ordered dynamic channel assignment scheme with reassignment inhighway microcells

An ordered dynamic channel assignment with reassignment (ODCAR) scheme is proposed, and its performance is studied in a highway microcellular radio environment. Channels are assigned in an ordered basis in conjunction with a minimax algorithm under cochannel interference constraints, to provide high capacity and to alleviate worst case channel congestion in each microcell. Simulation results show significant performance improvements in terms of channel utilization and probability of call failure, at the expense of an increase in complexity and call switching requirements     

Broadband dual-polarized patch antennas fed by capacitively coupledfeed and slot-coupled feed

Designs of broadband dual-polarized patch antennas fed by promising feed structures of a capacitively coupled feed and a slot-coupled feed (antenna A), two capacitively coupled feeds of a 180° phase shift and a slot-coupled feed (antenna B), and two capacitively coupled feeds of a 180° phase shift and two slot-coupled feeds (antenna C) are proposed and experimentally studied. The first two feed designs are for the excitation of a single-element broadband patch antenna, while the last design is for a two-element broadband patch antenna. These proposed patch antennas have a thick air substrate, and the 10 dB return-loss impedance bandwidths obtained for the two polarizations are all greater than 13%. High isolation (<-30 dB for antenna A, <-32 dB for antenna B, <-35 dB for antenna C) between the two feeding ports for the entire impedance bandwidth of the proposed antennas can be obtained. Also, improved cross-polarization levels (>20 dB) in both E and H plane patterns for the two polarizations of antennas B and C are achieved     

Annular slot-coupled dielectric resonator antenna

An annular slot-coupled dielectric resonator antenna is investigated experimentally. As compared with the previous rectangular-slot version, the new configuration offers a much wider bandwidth of 18%. The return loss, radiation patterns, and antenna gain of the configuration have been measured and are discussed     

An antinociceptive effect of the intraperitoneal injection of nifedipine in rats, measured by tail-flick test

The tail-flick (TF) technique was used to assess the antinociceptive properties of nifedipine (NIF) given intraperitoneally (i.p.). First, the most suitable intensity of the noxious stimulus (temperature of the bulb) has been ascertained and used in the main study. Male Sprague-Dawley rats received NIF, dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) at the doses of 0.0, 0.5, 2, 5, 10 and 15 mg/kg, or control with no injection. For the main study, the noxious stimulus was limited to 15 sec (cut-off time) and TF latencies were recorded up to 120 min. The antinociceptive response was expressed as the area under the curve for each rat and analyzed by one-way ANOVA. The antinociceptive response to the lower doses of NIF (0.5 and 2 mg/kg) did not differ from control (no injection) and DMSO alone. Significance was found at 5, 10 and 15 mg NIF with no difference among the doses. However, there was an increasing tendency of the mean values from 0.5 to 15 mg NIF resulting in a positive correlation. The correlation coefficient was 0.32483 (p = 0.015) and regression equation Y = (19.37) x dose + 1320. Our data suggest that spinal mechanisms are involved in NIF-induced antinociception.     

An extraction method to determine interconnect parasitic parameters

Interconnect parasitic parameters in integrated circuits have significant impact on circuit speed. An accurate monitoring of these parameters can help to improve interconnect performance during process development, provide information for circuit design, or give useful reference for circuit failure analysis. Existing extraction methods either are destructive (such as SEM measurement) or can determine only partial parasitic parameters (such as large capacitor measurement). In this paper, we present a new method for extracting interconnect parasitic parameters, which can simultaneously determine the interlayer and intralayer capacitances, line resistance, and effective line width. The method is based on two test patterns of the same structure with different dimensions. The structure consumes less wafer area than existing methods. The method shows good agreement with SEM measurement of dielectric thickness in both nonglobal planarized and chemical-mechanical polished processes, and gives accurate prediction of the process spread of a ring oscillator speed over a wafer