Materials and Wireless Microfluidic Systems for Electronics Capable of Chemical Dissolution on Demand

Electronics that are capable of destroying themselves, on demand and in a harmless way, might provide the ultimate form of data security. This paper presents materials and device architectures for triggered destruction of conventional microelectronic systems by means of microfluidic chemical etching of the constituent materials, including silicon, silicon dioxide, and metals (e.g., aluminum). Demonstrations in an array of home‐built metal‐oxide‐semiconductor field‐effect transistors that exploit ultrathin sheets of monocrystalline silicon and in radio‐frequency identification devices illustrate the utility of the approaches.     

Miniaturized Flexible Electronic Systems with Wireless Power and Near‐Field Communication Capabilities

A class of thin, lightweight, flexible, near‐field communication (NFC) devices with ultraminiaturized format is introduced, and systematic investigations of the mechanics, radio frequency characteristics, and materials aspects associated with their optimized construction are presented. These systems allow advantages in mechanical strength, placement versatility, and minimized interfacial stresses compared to other NFC technologies and wearable electronics. Detailed experimental studies and theoretical modeling of the mechanical and electromagnetic properties of these systems establish understanding of the key design considerations. These concepts can apply to many other types of wireless communication systems including biosensors and electronic implants.     

Fixed Point Implementation of the QCELP Speech Coder

The Qualcomm code excited linear prediction (QCELP) speech coder was adopted to increase the capacity of the CDMA Mobile System (CMS). In this paper, we implemented the QCELP speech coding algorithm by using TMS320C50 fixed point DSP chip. Also the fixed point simulation was done with C language. The computation complexity of QCELP on TMS320C50 was about 33 MIPS and program size was 10k words and data memory was 4k words. In the normal call test on the CMS, where mobile to mobile call test was done in the bypass mode without double vocoding, mean opinion score for the speech quality was 3.11.     

Determinants of Corporate R&D Investment: An Empirical Study Comparing Korea's IT Industry with Its Non‐IT Industry

In our study, we extracted the market, finance, and government factors determining R&D investment of individual firms in the IT industry in Korea. We collected the financial data of 515 individual firms belonging to IT and non‐IT industries between 1980 and 1999 from the Korea Investors Service's database and investigated the empirical relationship between the factors using an ordinary regression model, a fixed effects model, and a random effects model. The main findings of our study are as follows: i) The Herfindahl Index variable representing the degree of market concentration is statistically insignificant in explaining R&D expenditures in the IT manufacturing industry. ii) Assets, which is used as a proxy variable for firm size, have a positive and statistically significant coefficient. These two results suggest that the Schumpeterian Hypothesis may be only partially applied to the IT manufacturing industry in Korea. iii) The dividend variable has a negative value and is statistically significant, indicating that a tendency of high dividends can restrict the internal cash flow for R&D investment. iv) The sales variable representing growth potential shows a positive coefficient. v) The subsidy as a proxy variable for governmental R&D promotion policies is positively correlated with R&D expenditure. This suggests that government policy has played a significant role in promoting R&D activities of IT firms in Korea since 1980. vi) Using a dummy variable, we verified that firms reduced their R&D investments to secure sufficient liquidity under the restructuring pressure during Korea's 1998 and 1999 economic crisis.     

Critical heat flux performance for flow boiling of R-134a in vertical uniformly heated smooth tube and rifled tubes

In the present paper, critical heat flux (CHF) experiments for flow boiling of R-134a were performed to investigate the CHF characteristics of four-head and six-head rifled tubes in comparison with a smooth tube. Both of rifled tubes having different head geometry have the maximum inner diameter of 17.04 mm while the smooth tube has the average inner diameter of 17.04 mm. The experiments were conducted for the vertical orientation under outlet pressures of 13, 16.5, and 23.9 bar, mass fluxes of 285-1300 kg/m²s and inlet subcooling temperatures of 5-40 °C in the R-134a CHF test loop. The parametric trends of CHF for the tubes show a good agreement with previous understanding. In particular, CHF data of the smooth tube for R-134a were compared with well-known CHF correlations such as Bowring and Katto correlations. The CHF in the rifled tube was enhanced to 40-60% for the CHF in the smooth tube with depending on the rifled geometry and flow parameters such as pressure and mass flux. In relation to the enhancement mechanism, the relative vapor velocity is used to explain the characteristics of the CHF performance in the rifled tube.     

Cavity length and absorption dependent longitudinal beat in iodine photodissociation laser

As the cavity length of the iodine photodissociation laser (iodine PDL) is varied, the number of neighboring coherent modes increases and the time-dependent mode-competition effect gives rise to typical changes in the pulse shape. The ratio of the number of all coherent modes to that of all oscillating modes is found to be as high as 80 percent when the cavity length is 450 cm. The frequency width in which the neighboring modes are coherent is approximately 0.1 GHz for all cavity lengths used. The effect of a BDN absorber placed in the cavity is distinct in the shorter cavities.     

Anisotropic properties of aromatic polyamides containing non-rigid rodlike units

Summary Three kinds of aromatic polyamides were synthesized by Higashi reaction: aromatic polyamides with even, odd number of methylenes and a meta phenylene as a joint in the main chain. Each polymer consisted of 7 p-phenylene-amide elements as a rigid segment. The polymer with even number of methylenes showed a lyotropic liquid crystalline behavior and a broader biphasic region than the fully para aromatic polyamide such as poly(p-phenylene terephthalamide). Most polymers with odd number of methylenes did not form a liquid crystalline phase and showed a crystallo-solvate. Exceptionally, the polymer with glutaryl unit was observed to have the swollen gel of colored pattern by the polarized microscope. The zigzag polymer, characterized by the highly kinetic rigidity, revealed an anisotropic gel phase in a solution.