Effect of rinsing and drying on silicon surface cleaning for epitaxial growth

We investigated the effect of the rinsing and drying technique on the oxygen and carbon concentration on a silicon surface. Rinsing in deionized water increased the interfacial oxygen concentration and helped generate defects. Blow-drying was more efficient than spin-drying in reducing interfacial oxygen concentration. Exposure to the atmosphere was detrimental to obtaining high crystallinity in the epitaxial layer. We evaluated the effectiveness of the cleaning process by observing the grown epilayer and the epilayer/substrate interface.     

Galvanic coupling effect on corrosion behavior of Al alloy-matrix composites

Galvanic coupling effect on the corrosion of SiC-reinforced aluminum alloy-matrix composites was investigated in a sodium chloride solution. The potentiodynamic polarization measurement indicated that pitting potentials of metal matrix composites (MMCs) and AA2124 matrix alloy were similar, and pitting potential of MMCs was almost same as corrosion potential, while pitting susceptibility of MMCs was higher than that of AA2124 alloy. Galvanic current by formation of galvanic couple between SiCw and matrix reveals very low value because of large cathodic polarization of SiC. However, by increasing potential of matrix to pitting potential by this galvanic couple and thus, forming pits easily at the weak passive film near SiC reinforcing phase preferentially, it is concluded that pitting susceptibility of MMCs increases highly than AA2124 alloy of matrix composition.     

Tribological behavior of plasma spray coatings for marine diesel engine piston ring and cylinder liner

High-temperature wear characteristics between plasma spray coated piston rings and cylinder liners were investigated to find the optimum combination of coating materials using the disc-on-plate reciprocating wear test in dry conditions. The disc and plate represented the piston ring and the cylinder liner, respectively. Coating materials studied were Cr₂O₃-NiCr, Cr₂O₃-NiCr-Mo, and Cr₃C₂-NiCr-Mo. Plasma spray conditions for the coating materials were established adjusting stand-off distance to obtain a coating with a porosity content of ∼5%. It was found that a dissimilar coating combination of Cr₂O₃-NiCr-Mo and Cr₃C₂-NiCr-Mo provided the best antiwear performance. The addition of molybdenum was found to be beneficial to improve the wear resistance of the coating. Hardness differences between mating surfaces were also important factors in determining the wear characteristics, so that it should be controlled below 300 in Vickers hardness under dry conditions. Adhesive wear accompanying with metal transfer was a dominant wear mechanism for dry conditions.     

Pre-annealing effect of electroless Ni−B deposit as a diffusion barrier for electroplated Cu electrodes

Ni−B film of 1 μm thickness was electrolessly deposited on an electroplated Cu bus electrode. The film, which encapsulates the Cu bus electrodes, prevents Cu oxidation and serves as a diffusion barrier against Cu contamination of the transparent dielectric layer in a plasma display during the firing process at 580 °C. The microstructure of theas-deposited barrier film was amorphous phase and crystallized to Ni and Ni₃B after annealing at 300 °C. The good barrier properties observed here can be explained by Ni₃B precipitates at the grain boundaries acting as a fast diffusion path via pre-annealing at 300 °C before the firing process at 580 °C.     

Caustic stress corrosion cracking of alloys 600 and 690 with NaOH concentrations

In order to evaluate the stress corrosion cracking resistance for commercial alloys (C600MA, C600TT, C690TT) and Korean-made alloys (K600MA, K690TT), C-ring tests were performed in a caustic environment of 4, 10, 20, 30, and 50% NaOH solution at 315°C, for 480 h with an applied potential of 125 mV vs. OCP. Different stress corrosion cracking phenomena were observed according to the NaOH concentration. The rate of caustic IGSCC attack did not appear to increase monotonically with caustic concentrations, but peaked at a concentration between 4 and 50% caustic, or approximately 30% NaOH. Intergranular stress corrosion cracking was found for C600MA in 10, 20, and 30% NaOH solutions, while no cracking was observed in the 4 and 50% NaOH solutions. In 30% NaOH solution, transgrnular stress corrosion cracking was detected in C690TT, which may be related with the large amount of plastic strain (150% yield) and the applied potential (125 mV vs. OCP). The overall data clearly indicate that C600MA has the worst SCC resistance while K690TT offers the best resistance. There is also fairly good correlation between the caustic SCC susceptibility and some metallurgical parameters, particularly the grain size and the yield strength at room temperature. Specifically, materials having larger grain size and lower yield strength exhibited higher caustic SCC resistance.     

A timing controller embedded driver IC with 3.24‐Gbps eDP interface for chip‐on‐glass TFT‐LCD applications

This paper presents a timing controller embedded driver (TED) IC with 3.24‐Gbps embedded display port (eDP), which is implemented using a 45‐nm high‐voltage CMOS process for the chip‐on‐glass (COG) TFT‐LCD applications. The proposed TED‐IC employs the input offset calibration scheme, the zero‐adjustable equalizer, and the phase locked loop‐based bang‐bang clock and data recovery to enhance the maximum data rate. Also, the proposed TED‐IC provides efficient power management by supporting advanced link power management feature of eDP standard v1.4. Additionally, the smart charge sharing is proposed to reduce the dynamic power consumption of output buffers. Measured result demonstrates the maximum data rate of 3.24 Gbps from a 1.1 V supply voltage with a 7.9‐inch QXGA 60‐Hz COG‐LCD prototype panel and 44% power saving from the display system.     

Video-based weathering gallery

We present a simple and effective method for constructing a gallery that consists of weathering effect elements called time-dependent appearance manifolds (TDAMs). Since TDAMs are computed from sample video clips showing dynamic weathering phenomena, they represent very smooth changes in the appearance of weathered pixels over time. Once a gallery with a variety of weathering effects is prepared, users can interactively choose and apply the predefined effects onto the surface of 3D graphic models and then finally assign the most appropriate one. This video-based weathering method can be implemented with very simple algorithms and it supports predictable, intuitive, and natural effects. Our system allows users to produce photorealistic augmented videos that include 3D graphic models weathered by our method. Moreover, users can easily enhance the realism of the augmented videos by manipulating rendering parameters such as the degree of weathering, texturing, lighting, and shadowing through user-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs).     

A secure image encryption scheme based on chaotic maps and affine transformation

Due to the interesting nonlinear dynamic properties of chaotic maps, recently chaos-based encryption algorithms have gained much attention in cryptographic communities. However, many encryption schemes do not fulfil the minimum key space requirement, which is an essential concern in many secure data applications. In this paper, an efficient chaos-based image encryption scheme with higher key space is presented. Even with a single round of encryption, a significantly larger key space can be achieved. The proposed scheme removes correlation among image pixels via random chaotic sequences, simply by XOR and addition operations. In order to resist against numerous attacks, we apply the affine transformation to get the final ciphertext image. The security of the proposed scheme is proved through histogram, contrast, PSNR, entropy, correlation, key space, key sensitivity and differential attack analysis. Many significant properties of chaotic maps, sensitivity to initial condition and control parameters, structure and attack complexity, make the anticipated scheme very reliable, practical and robust in various secure communication applications.     

How to maneuver in the world of negative online reviews,the important ethical considerations for attorneys,and changes needed to protect the legal profession

The advent of the Internet and social media has revolutionized the way society communicates, the speed in which news is disseminated, and the approach that people take in their daily decision-making. Online reviews are now common place on nearly every consumer-related website. Consequently, attorneys are also being publicly scrutinized by their clients on a range of topics from price, competence, satisfaction, personality, communication, and effectiveness. On one side of the coin, this new phenomenon can be very rewarding since attorneys were previously limited to receiving a small number of referrals from the word-of-mouth promotion before the creation of online reviews. However, the exact opposite is true. Negative online reviews, whether accurate or not, may deter potential clients from even giving the attorney a second thought. As a result, a firm's business can feel the immediate impact of negative reviews. Attorneys, who legitimately need and want to protect their business and reputation, cannot speak freely online to defend their honor. Rather, an attorney must be mindful of not disclosing confidential client information or crossing other ethical lines that may then expose the attorney to potential discipline. There are several interests that must be considered such as allowing attorneys to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, respect and adherence to the ethical rules of non-disclosure of confidential information, allowing attorneys to preserve their reputation, and protecting an attorney's marketability and means of generating income. This article explores the trend in offering reviews online in a variety of industries, including legal services, the statistical findings regarding the prevalence of this information and consumers' reliance on the information while making a purchasing decision. This article also considers the positive and negative implications of the reviews being so widely spread, while highlighting unique considerations as it relates to the practice of law and factors that may greatly skew a reviewer and reader's perceptions. Next, this article outlines the ethical considerations of attorneys if they want to respond to negative online feedback, such as disclosure of confidential information. Then, this article analyzes the American Bar Association (ABA) and several US states' ethics opinions for guidance for attorneys who wish to respond negative reviews. Finally, this article details the author's recommendations for attorneys, the ABA, and the US states and propose the areas where additional ethics opinions, rules and guidelines should be focused to establish a proper balance between the valuable insights discovered from a client's review and attorneys' legitimate interests in protecting their reputation and livelihood from inaccurate, malicious, or erroneous postings.     

A novel part-based approach to mean-shift algorithm for visual tracking

Visual tracking is one of the most important problems considered in computer vision. To improve the performance of the visual tracking, a part-based approach will be a good solution. In this paper, a novel method of visual tracking algorithm named part-based mean-shift (PBMS) algorithm is presented. In the proposed PBMS, unlike the standard mean-shift (MS), the target object is divided into multiple parts and the target is tracked by tracking each individual part and combining the results. For the part-based visual tracking, the objective function in the MS is modified such that the target object is represented as a combination of the parts and iterative optimization solution is presented. Further, the proposed PBMS provides a systematic and analytic way to determine the scale of the bounding box for the target from the perspective of the objective function optimization. Simulation is conducted with several benchmark problems and the result shows that the proposed PBMS outperforms the standard MS.