Polymeric (SU-8) optical microscanner driven by electrostatic actuation

A torsional micromechanical scanner was fabricated using photosensitive polymer (SU-8). The proposed polymer-based optical microscanner with reduced torsional stiffness offers a new approach to increase scanning angles. The scanner consists of two parts; the top layer (micro mirror and electrodes) and the bottom layer (anchors and electrodes). The SU-8 scanner is actuated by electrostatic force generated by gap-closing electrodes. For the fabricated optical scanner with the mirror size of 3 × 3 mm², the experimentally obtained scanning angles were 0.43° for 60 Hz (non-resonant) and 1.54° for 1.13 kHz (resonant) at the input voltage of 160 V. This paper also proposes a simple and new fabrication method, which can effectively control the stiffness of the torsional springs by molding SU-8 photoresist through V-groove on the silicon substrate, thereby increasing the scanning angles.     

A Simple Space-Time-Frequency Block Code Scheme for Four Transmit Antennas

It is well known that the full rate and full diversity complex space-time block code (STBC) is not existed for four transmit antennas. In this letter, we propose a simple quasi-orthogonal space-time-frequency block code (QO-STFBC) scheme with four transmit antennas and n _R receive antennas, where every two transmit antennas constitute one group and each group transmits signals over different subcarriers. The receiver can separate the received signals from each group via odd/even index FFT operation. After recombining the separated received signals with received antennas, an equivalent half rate orthogonal STFBC (O-STFBC) can be used for decoding. Thus, the full rate and full diversity are achieved at the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Simulation result shows that the proposed QO-STFBC scheme has better performance than the other schemes, in rate 2 layered Alamouti scheme is about 4 dB, full rate QO-STBC scheme is about 5 dB and half rate O-STBC scheme is about 7 dB at 10^?3 BER for the transmission of 2 bits/s/Hz.     

Novel Maskless Bumping for 3D Integration

A novel, maskless, low‐volume bumping material, called solder bump maker, which is composed of a resin and low‐melting‐point solder powder, has been developed. The resin features no distinct chemical reactions preventing the rheological coalescence of the solder, a deoxidation of the oxide layer on the solder powder for wetting on the pad at the solder melting point, and no major weight loss caused by out‐gassing. With these characteristics, the solder was successfully wetted onto a metal pad and formed a uniform solder bump array with pitches of 120 µm and 150 µm.     

Mass Spectrometry-Based Disulfide Mapping of Lysyl Oxidase-like 2

Lysyl oxidase-like 2 (LOXL2) catalyzes the oxidative deamination of peptidyl lysines and hydroxylysines to promote extracellular matrix remodeling. Aberrant activity of LOXL2 has been associated with organ fibrosis and tumor metastasis. The lysine tyrosylquinone (LTQ) cofactor is derived from Lys653 and Tyr689 in the amine oxidase domain via post-translational modification. Based on the similarity in hydrodynamic radius and radius of gyration, we recently proposed that the overall structures of the mature LOXL2 (containing LTQ) and the precursor LOXL2 (no LTQ) are very similar. In this study, we conducted a mass spectrometry-based disulfide mapping analysis of recombinant LOXL2 in three forms: a full-length LOXL2 (fl-LOXL2) containing a nearly stoichiometric amount of LTQ, Δ1-2SRCR-LOXL2 (SRCR1 and SRCR2 are truncated) in the precursor form, and Δ1-3SRCR-LOXL2 (SRCR1, SRCR2, SRCR3 are truncated) in a mixture of the precursor and the mature forms. We detected a set of five disulfide bonds that is conserved in both the precursor and the mature recombinant LOXL2s. In addition, we detected a set of four alternative disulfide bonds in low abundance that is not associated with the mature LOXL2. These results suggest that the major set of five disulfide bonds is retained post-LTQ formation.     

Universal Filtering Via Hidden Markov Modeling

The problem of discrete universal filtering, in which the components of a discrete signal emitted by an unknown source and corrupted by a known discrete memoryless channel (DMC) are to be causally estimated, is considered. A family of filters are derived, and are shown to be universally asymptotically optimal in the sense of achieving the optimum filtering performance when the clean signal is stationary, ergodic, and satisfies an additional mild positivity condition. Our schemes are comprised of approximating the noisy signal using a hidden Markov process (HMP) via maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation, followed by the use of the forward recursions for HMP state estimation. It is shown that as the data length increases, and as the number of states in the HMP approximation increases, our family of filters attains the performance of the optimal distribution-dependent filter. An extension to the case of channels with memory is also established.     

Flight path optimization passing through waypoints for autonomous flight control systems

Trajectory optimization is performed to generate a flight path passing specified waypoints. To deal with the unspecified time of passing through a waypoint, an auxiliary variable is introduced. Normalization of the time variable by the auxiliary variable transforms the waypoint optimization problem into the conventional optimization problem. The condition for passing through the waypoints can be relaxed, so that the vehicle passes specified waypoints within a certain acceptable range. Sequential quadratic programming is used to solve the optimization problem. As a numerical example, six degree-of-freedom vehicle dynamics is considered. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional trajectory optimization problems with several waypoints are solved to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.