Ag/Ni Metallization Bilayer: A Functional Layer for Highly Efficient Polycrystalline SnSe Thermoelectric Modules

The structural and electrical characteristics of Ag/Ni bilayer metallization on polycrystalline thermoelectric SnSe were investigated. Two difficulties with thermoelectric SnSe metallization were identified for Ag and Ni single layers: Sn diffusion into the Ag metallization layer and unexpected cracks in the Ni metallization layer. The proposed Ag/Ni bilayer was prepared by hot-pressing, demonstrating successful metallization on the SnSe surface without interfacial cracks or elemental penetration into the metallization layer. Structural analysis revealed that the Ni layer reacts with SnSe, forming several crystalline phases during metallization that are beneficial for reducing contact resistance. Detailed investigation of the Ni/SnSe interface layer confirms columnar Ni-Sn intermetallic phases [(Ni₃Sn and Ni₃Sn₂) and Ni_5.63SnSe₂] that suppress Sn diffusion into the Ag layer. Electrical specific-contact resistivity (5.32 × 10^?4 Ω cm²) of the Ag/Ni bilayer requires further modification for development of high-efficiency polycrystalline SnSe thermoelectric modules.     

Thermal Stress Assessment for Transient Liquid-Phase Bonded Si Chips in High-Power Modules Using Experimental and Numerical Methods

The potential of transient liquid-phase (TLP) bonding for chip packaging applications has been evaluated, focusing on three interlayer arrangements (Ag-Sn-Ag, Ni-Sn-Ni, and Ag-Sn-Ni). Shear tests on TLP-bonded components provided the interlayer-dependent mechanical strength as well as failure mode and position. Critical local stresses, i.e., failure criteria, within the intermetallic compound (IMC) layer were derived by replicating the shear test conditions with finite-element methods. The missing coefficient of thermal expansion for Ag₃Sn IMC was obtained by producing small IMC bulk samples and subjecting them to dilatometric measurements. The experimental results were implemented into a finite-element model of a representative power module architecture to provide first predictions on thermally induced residual stresses that could be classified into fail/safe, as successfully validated by TLP chip bonding experiments. A numerical parameter study then assessed thermal stresses, including failure prediction and design optimization for TLP-bonded Si chips, considering the influence of process temperature, service conditions, TLP interlayer system, and metallization layers within the TLP joint. The presented procedure serves as a guideline to choose an appropriate TLP interlayer system for predefined boundary conditions, or vice versa.     

Solid-State Reaction Mechanism and Deliquescence Phenomenon of K<Subscript>0.5</Subscript>Na<Subscript>0.5</Subscript>Nb<Subscript>0.7</Subscript>Al<Subscript>0.3</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript> Ceramic

Development of (K,Na)NbO₃-based ceramics has attracted much attention in recent decades. In this work, K_0.5Na_0.5Nb_0.7Al_0.3O₃ ceramic was prepared using conventional solid-state processing. A deliquescence phenomenon was observed when the specimen was exposed to moist atmosphere. The reaction mechanism and cause of deliquescence were investigated using x-ray diffraction analysis, scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectrometry, electron microprobe analysis, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, and thermogravimetric/differential scanning calorimetric analysis. The results revealed interactions mainly amongst the raw materials K₂CO₃, Na₂CO₃, and Nb₂O₅ as well as K₂CO₃, Na₂CO₃, and Al₂O₃, which can influence the sintering behavior of the mixture. (K,Na)NbO₃ and (K,Na)AlO₂ were present in the sintered K_0.5Na_0.5Nb_0.7Al_0.3O₃ ceramic, with the latter leading to deliquescence. During the sintering process, Al₂O₃ reacts with alkali oxides (Na₂O and K₂O), which are the decomposition products of carbonates, to form (K,Na)AlO₂. In addition, Al₂O₃ is more likely to react with K₂O compared with Na₂O.     

Computationally highly efficient mixture of adaptive filters

We introduce a new combination approach for the mixture of adaptive filters based on the set-membership filtering (SMF) framework. We perform SMF to combine the outputs of several parallel running adaptive algorithms and propose unconstrained, affinely constrained and convexly constrained combination weight configurations. Here, we achieve better trade-off in terms of the transient and steady-state convergence performance while providing significant computational reduction. Hence, through the introduced approaches, we can greatly enhance the convergence performance of the constituent filters with a slight increase in the computational load. In this sense, our approaches are suitable for big data applications where the data should be processed in streams with highly efficient algorithms. In the numerical examples, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approaches over the state of the art using the well-known datasets in the machine learning literature.     

Linear-time prediction mode reduction method for intracoding in H.264/AVC

We present a linear-time elimination method to adaptively reduce the nine intraprediction modes in H.264/AVC to two, three, five, or nine modes while preserving a satisfactory reconstructed video quality. Resemblance between prediction modes and appearing frequency for each prediction mode are first determined in an off-line way from the training video sequences. Prediction modes are modeled as vertices and resemblance between two prediction modes as the weight of the connecting edge in a complete graph. Then, find the Hamilton cycle with the minimum sum of weights. When encoding each intrablock, prediction modes corresponding to the adjacent vertices along the Hamilton cycle are examined for similarity. The prediction mode which appears less frequently in a pair of similar prediction modes is declared as redundant and eliminated. When compared with Laroche et al.’s method which aims to reduce the bitrate, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed elimination method can substantially reduce the execution time while preserving the peak signal-to-noise ratio and bitrate performance.     

A joint-optimization NSAF algorithm based on the first-order Markov model

Recently, the normalized subband adaptive filter (NSAF) algorithm has attracted much attention for handling colored input signals. Based on the first-order Markov model of the optimal weight vector, this paper provides some insights for the convergence of the standard NSAF. Following these insights, both the step size and the regularization parameter in the NSAF are jointly optimized by minimizing the mean-square deviation. The resulting joint-optimization step size and regularization parameter algorithm achieves a good tradeoff between fast convergence rate and low steady-state error. Simulation results in the context of acoustic echo cancelation demonstrate good features of the proposed algorithm.     

Design of oversampled nonuniform filter banks with arbitrary rational frequency partitioning

Among the theory and design of oversampled nonuniform filter banks (NUFBs), most of the existing works only consider the cases with integer decimators, and up to now the issue with rational sampling factors has not been discussed yet. In this paper, we generalize the partial modulation technique to realize arbitrary rational frequency partitioning of oversampled NUFBs with highly desired linear-phase (LP) property. Further for the subbands with sampling factors violating the guard band restriction, a phase-modification scheme is derived to avoid uneliminable large aliasing and meanwhile preserving the LP characteristics of shifted analysis/synthesis filters. By using the proposed method, the design issue of LP oversampled NUFBs can be reduced to that of several prototypes, decreasing the design complexity largely. As illustrated by examples, the proposed algorithm is more general in terms of arbitrary rational decimation and thus has broad application prospects.     

Structural sparse coding seeds–active appearance model for object tracking

In this paper, we propose a tracking algorithm that can robustly handle appearance variations in tracking process. Our method is based on seeds–active appearance model, which is composed by structural sparse coding. In order to compensate for illumination changes, heavy occlusion and appearance self-updating problem, we proposed a mixture online learning scheme for modeling the target object appearance model. The proposed object tracking scheme involves three stages: training, detection and tracking. In the training stage, an incremental SVM model that directly measures the candidates samples and target difference. The proposed mixture generate–discriminative method can well separate two highly correlated positive candidates images. In the detection stage, the trained weighted vector is used to separate the target object in positive candidates images with respect to the seeds images. In the tracking stage, we employ the particle filter to track the object through an appearance adaptive updating algorithm with seeds–active constrained sparse representation. Based on a set of comprehensive experiments, our algorithm has demonstrated better performance than alternatives reported in the current literature.     

Photonic Side-Channel Analysis of Arbiter PUFs

As intended by its name, physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are considered as an ultimate solution to deal with insecure storage, hardware counterfeiting, and many other security problems. However, many different successful attacks have already revealed vulnerabilities of certain digital intrinsic PUFs. This paper demonstrates that legacy arbiter PUF and its popular extended versions (i.e., feed-forward and XOR-enhanced) can be completely and linearly characterized by means of photonic emission analysis. Our experimental setup is capable of measuring every PUF internal delay with a resolution of 6 ps. Due to this resolution, we indeed require only the theoretical minimum number of linear independent equations (i.e., physical measurements) to directly solve the underlying inhomogeneous linear system. Moreover, it is not required to know the actual PUF responses for our physical delay extraction. We present our practical results for an arbiter PUF implementation on a complex programmable logic device manufactured with a 180 nm process. Finally, we give an insight into photonic emission analysis of arbiter PUF on smaller chip architectures by performing experiments on a field programmable gate array manufactured with a 60 nm process.     

Complete parameter measurement for MIMO bistatic radar without synchronization

In order to measure the range, angle, and Doppler frequency of the target without any synchronization in the bistatic radar, a novel complete parameter estimation method based on separability of a pair of Linear Frequency Modulation (LFM) signal is presented. The Doppler frequency is measured by the time difference between two peak positions corresponding to the positive and the negative LFM return signal respectively. Direction Of Departures (DODs) and Direction Of Arrivals (DOAs) of the target are estimated by constructing a special eigenmatrix in which the estimated angles can be extracted from the eigenvalue or the eigenvector. The target position can be located in the presence of the estimated DODs, DOAs and the signal delay difference between the echo and the directive wave signal in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) bistatic radar without any synchronization. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by the computer simulation.