A design advisor for the optimal inspection of circularity tolerance

In the wake of growing importance for quality and the need to reduce inspection costs simultaneously, the need for a scientific method of selecting an optimum inspection strategy for coordinate measuring machine (CMM) based inspection has become very important. The inspection error resulting from CMM inspection is greatly affected by the profile irregularities and the sampling strategy, which includes sample size, sampling methods, and algorithms used for form evaluation. This paper describes a system that can recommend an optimal inspection plan based on the needs of the user. A design of experiments (DOE) based approach is used to relate the inspection error with sampling strategies. Surface irregularities are included in the form of lobes formed on the profile. A new two-way model is proposed that works in both directions between the sampling strategy and the performance metrics. The results indicate that the number of lobes and the sampling method used have little impact on the inspection error, while the sample size and form evaluation algorithms have a significant influence. An inspection plan advisor is presented, which provides an inspection plan based on the estimated shape and acceptable measurement error.     

BioFET sensor for detection of albumin in urine

Characterisation of a BioFET for detection of albumin in a mixture of human urine is presented. To avoid electrolyte effect of the urine, it was measured in PBS (phosphate buffer saline) at a fixed pH after albumin binding. The drain current was modulated by the albumin bound to the anti-albumin immobilised on the gate surface of the BioFET. The current variation ratio was likely to be proportional to the concentration of the albumin in the range 50-250 mg/1. The results show the feasibility of the BioFET as a urinary albumin sensor.     

Polygonal extrusion

A sweeping operation called polygonal extrusion is defined to improve the modeling power of CSG-based modeling. It is assumed that a 2D cross-sectional polygon (sweeping polygon) moves in space while its containing plane is kept orthogonal to the tangent direction of the trajectory curve, a planar polygonal chain having no self-intersections. The objective of the paper is to compute the boundary of the swept volume of the sweeping polygon as a set of polygons (or triangles). The most significant challenge to accomplishing this objective is the problem of trimming the swept volume. To solve the trimming problem, 2D-curve offsetting methods are employed. Two algorithms are presented for polygonal extrusion that are based on different offsetting methods, the Voronoi diagram and PWID offset. The proposed algorithms have been implemented and tested with various examples. Published online: 28 January 2003     

A tolerant approach to reconstruct topology from unorganized trimmed surfaces

Presented in this paper is a topology reconstruction algorithm from a set of unorganized trimmed surfaces. Error-prone small geometric elements are handled to give proper topological information. It gives complete topology to topologically complete models, and it is also tolerant to incomplete models. The proposed algorithm is vertex-based in that clues for topological information are searched from the set of vertices first, not from that of edges.     

Austenitizing treatment influence on the electrochemical corrosion behavior of 0.3C-14Cr-3Mo martensitic stainless steel

Effects of austenitizing treatment temperatures on aqueous corrosion properties of martensitic stainless steels were investigated by electrochemical tests (potentiodynamic test, potentiostatic test and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy), and surface analyses (optical microscopy and XRD). The results of potentiodynamic test revealed that the breakdown potential increased with the increased austenitizing temperature, indicating increased relative resistance to initiation of localized corrosion. EIS measurements showed that MSS3 (1030 °C) exhibits larger polarization resistance value than MSS1 (970 °C) and MSS2 (1000 °C) at passive and breakdown states. This was caused by decreasing the amount of Cr-rich M₂₃C₆ carbide which acts as preferential sites for pitting corrosion.     

Category Norms as a Function of Culture and Age: Comparisons of Item Responses to 105 Categories by American and Chinese Adults.

Understanding how aging influences cognition across different cultures has been hindered by a lack of standardized, cross-referenced verbal stimuli. This study introduces a database of such item-level stimuli for both younger and older adults, in China and the United States, and makes 3 distinct contributions. First, the authors specify which item categories generalize across age and/or cultural groups, rigorously quantifying differences among them. Second, they introduce novel, powerful methods to measure between-group differences in freely generated ranked data, the rank-ordered logit model and Hellinger Affinity. Finally, a broad archive of tested, cross-linguistic stimuli is now freely available to researchers: data, similarity measures, and all stimulus materials for 105 categories and 4 culture-by-age groups, comprising over 10,000 fully translated unique item responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trenched‐Sinker LDMOSFET (TS‐LDMOS) Structure for 2 GHz Power Amplifiers

This paper proposes a new LDMOSFET structure with a trenched sinker for high‐power RF amplifiers. Using a low‐temperature, deep‐trench technology, we succeeded in drastically shrinking the sinker area to one‐third the size of the conventional diffusion‐type structure. The RF performance of the proposed device with a channel width of 5 mm showed a small signal gain of 16.5 dB and a maximum peak power of 32 dBm with a power‐added efficiency of 25% at 2 GHz. Furthermore, the trench sinker, which was applied to the guard ring to suppress coupling between inductors, showed an excellent blocking performance below ?40 dB at a frequency of up to 20 GHz. These results confirm that the proposed trenched sinker should be an effective technology both as a compact sinker for RF power devices and as a guard ring against coupling.     

Data retention characteristics of sub-100 nm NAND flash memory cells

In contrast to the conventional theories, we have revealed that the most distinguished mechanism in the data retention phenomenon after Fowler-Nordheim (FN) stress in sub-100 nm NAND Flash memory cells is the annihilation of interface states. Interface state generation rate increases rapidly as the channel width of NAND flash cell decreases. Comparison of interface states and stress-induced leakage current (SILC) component during retention mode shows that the annihilation of interface states strongly affects data retention characteristics of the programmed cells.