Inkjet Printing of Self‐Assembled 2D Titanium Carbide and Protein Electrodes for Stimuli‐Responsive Electromagnetic Shielding

2D titanium carbides (MXene) possess significant characteristics including high conductivity and electromagnetic interference shielding efficiency (EMI SE) that are important for applications in printed and flexible electronics. However, MXene‐based ink formulations are yet to be demonstrated for proper inkjet printing of MXene patterns. Here, tandem repeat synthetic proteins based on squid ring teeth (SRT) are employed as templates of molecular self‐assembly to engineer MXene inks that can be printed as stimuli‐responsive electrodes on various substrates including cellulose paper, glass, and flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET). MXene electrodes printed on PET substrates are able to display electrical conductivity values as high as 1080 ± 175 S cm^?1, which significantly exceeds electrical conductivity values of state‐of‐the‐art inkjet‐printed electrodes composed of other 2D materials including graphene (250 S cm^?1) and reduced graphene oxide (340 S cm^?1). Furthermore, this high electrical conductivity is sustained under excessive bending deformation. These flexible electrodes also exhibit effective EMI SE values reaching 50 dB at films with thicknesses of 1.35 µm, which mainly originate from their high electrical conductivity and layered structure.     

A new criterion for linear 2-port stability using a singlegeometrically derived parameter

A stability parameter, μ(S), is defined for linear two-port circuits using a geometrical approach. It is shown that μ>1 alone is necessary and sufficient for a circuit to be unconditionally stable. This single parameter can replace the dual Rollet (K>1) and auxiliary conditions for determining unconditional stability. The parameters K and μ are compared by discussing their implications in terms of mapping circles     

Catalyst Design by NH4OH Treatment of USY Zeolite

Hierarchical zeolites are a class of superior catalysts which couples the intrinsic zeolitic properties to enhanced accessibility and intracrystalline mass transport to and from the active sites. The design of hierarchical USY (Ultra‐Stable Y) catalysts is achieved using a sustainable postsynthetic room temperature treatment with mildly alkaline NH₄OH (0.02 m ) solutions. Starting from a commercial dealuminated USY zeolite (Si/Al = 47), a hierarchical material is obtained by selective and tuneable creation of interconnected and accessible small mesopores (2–6 nm). In addition, the treatment immediately yields the NH₄⁺ form without the need for additional ion exchange. After NH₄OH modification, the crystal morphology is retained, whereas the microporosity and relative crystallinity are decreased. The gradual formation of dense amorphous phases throughout the crystal without significant framework atom leaching rationalizes the very high material yields (>90%). The superior catalytic performance of the developed hierarchical zeolites is demonstrated in the acid‐catalyzed isomerization of α‐pinene and the metal‐catalyzed conjugation of safflower oil. Significant improvements in activity and selectivity are attained, as well as a lowered susceptibility to deactivation. The catalytic performance is intimately related to the introduced mesopores, hence enhanced mass transport capacity, and the retained intrinsic zeolitic properties.     

Restrictions on the three-class ideal observer's decision boundary lines

We are attempting to develop expressions for the coordinates of points on the three-class ideal observer's receiver operating characteristic (ROC) hypersurface as functions of the set of decision criteria used by the ideal observer. This is considerably more difficult than in the two-class classification task, because the conditional probabilities in question are not simply related to the cumulative distribution functions of the decision variables, and because the slopes and intercepts of the decision boundary lines are not independent; given the locations of two of the lines, the location of the third will be constrained depending on the other two. In this paper, we attempt to characterize those constraining relationships among the three-class ideal observer's decision boundary lines. As a result, we show that the relationship between the decision criteria and the misclassification probabilities is not one-to-one, as it is for the two-class ideal observer.     

高分辨率S／TEM提升中国先进制造能力

二月初《上海证券报》上报导了美国某家主要半导体制造商将在大连投资建设一条65nm工艺线,在最近的一些新闻中经常可以见到此     

Research on encoding and decoding of non-binary polar codes over GF(2m)

Binary Polar Codes (BPCs) have advantages of high-efficiency and capacity-achieving but suffer from large latency due to the Successive-Cancellation List (SCL) decoding. Non-Binary Polar Codes (NBPCs) have been investigated to obtain the performance gains and reduce latency under the implementation of parallel architectures for multi-bit decoding. However, most of the existing works only focus on the Reed-Solomon matrix-based NBPCs and the probability domain-based non-binary polar decoding, which lack flexible structure and have a large computation amount in the decoding process, while little attention has been paid to general non-binary kernel-based NBPCs and Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) based decoding methods. In this paper, we consider a scheme of NBPCs with a general structure over GF(2^m). Specifically, we pursue a detailed Monte-Carlo simulation implementation to determine the construction for proposed NBPCs. For non-binary polar decoding, an SCL decoding based on LLRs is proposed for NBPCs, which can be implemented with non-binary kernels of arbitrary size. Moreover, we propose a Perfect Polarization-Based SCL (PPB-SCL) algorithm based on LLRs to reduce decoding complexity by deriving a new update function of path metric for NBPCs and eliminating the path splitting process at perfect polarized (i.e., highly reliable) positions. Simulation results show that the bit error rate of the proposed NBPCs significantly outperforms that of BPCs. In addition, the proposed PPB-SCL decoding obtains about a 40% complexity reduction of SCL decoding for NBPCs.     

Single Cell Bioprinting with Ultrashort Laser Pulses

Tissue engineering requires the precise positioning of mammalian cells and biomaterials on substrate surfaces or in preprocessed scaffolds. Although the development of 2D and 3D bioprinting technologies has made substantial progress in recent years, precise, cell-friendly, easy to use, and fast technologies for selecting and positioning mammalian cells with single cell precision are still in need. A new laser-based bioprinting approach is therefore presented, which allows the selection of individual cells from complex cell mixtures based on morphology or fluorescence and their transfer onto a 2D target substrate or a preprocessed 3D scaffold with single cell precision and high cell viability (93–99% cell survival, depending on cell type and substrate). In addition to precise cell positioning, this approach can also be used for the generation of 3D structures by transferring and depositing multiple hydrogel droplets. By further automating and combining this approach with other 3D printing technologies, such as two-photon stereolithography, it has a high potential of becoming a fast and versatile technology for the 2D and 3D bioprinting of mammalian cells with single cell resolution.     

Error-resilient decoding of context-based adaptive binary arithmetic codes

This paper addresses the problem of error-resilient decoding of bitstreams produced by the CABAC (context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding) algorithm used in the H.264 video coding standard. The paper describes a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation algorithm improving the CABAC decoding performances in the presence of transmission errors. Methods improving the re-synchronization and error detection capabilities of the decoder are then described. A variant of the CABAC algorithm supporting error detection based on a forbidden interval is presented. The performances of the decoding algorithm are first assessed with theoretical sources and by considering different binarization codes. They are compared against those obtained with Exp-Golomb codes and with a transmission chain making use of an error-correcting code. The approach has been integrated in an H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coder and decoder. The PSNR gains obtained are discussed.