Stress Power Dependent Self-Heating Degradation of Metal-Induced Laterally Crystallized n-Type Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors

Using a fluorinated high-k/metal gate stack combined with a stress relieved preoxide (SRPO) pretreatment before high-k deposition, we show significant device reliability and performance improvements. This is a critical result since threshold voltage instability may be a fundamental problem, and performance degradation for high-fc is a concern. The novel fluorinated Ta_infinC_y/HfZrO_infin/SRPO gate stack device exceeds the positive-bias-temperature-instability and negative-bias-temperature-instability targets with sufficient margin and has electron mobility at 1 MV/cm comparable to the industrial high-quality polySi/SiON device on bulk silicon.     

A survey on the sanitary condition of commercial foods of plant origin sold in Brazil

The objective of the study was to evaluate the hygienic conditions and practices of commercial foods of plant origin in establishments and street marketed by street vendors in cities in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Forty different sales points were evaluated (establishments that prepared and sold fruit juices and street vendors that commercialized fresh coconut water, sugarcane juice and orange juice) using a questionnaire with 12 items, divided into three blocks (salesmen/handlers, operations, installations). The results indicated that the activities related to the commerce of fruit beverages in the cities of São Gonçalo and Rio de Janeiro required the elaboration of a set of actions by the Sanitary Vigilance Agency in order to improve the hygienic and sanitary level and minimize health risk to consumers. Important requirements in the legislation relevant to this type of food are still not followed; adequate packaging and storage of the raw material, obtaining the raw material from registered suppliers, hygiene of the handlers and adequate management of wastes produced during the activities in question are amongst the main items deserving attention.     

Lyapunov Design of Multivariable MRAC via Generalized Passivation

A Lyapunov design of multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) model‐reference adaptive control (MRAC) systems is proposed using new generalized passivity concepts based on WSPR and WASPR properties. The new design avoids control overparameterization and leads to the simplest unnormalized gradient algorithm by means of a passivating multiplier. To this end, a necessary and sufficient condition on the high frequency gain matrix to achieve the WASPR property is established. This condition is referred to as Positive Diagonal Jordan (PDJ) form. Based on the robustness WSPR and WASPR properties, a systematic determination of a robust passivating matrix multiplier is then presented. The advantages of the new design are illustrated by numerical simulation including a robotics adaptive visual servoing problem and a 4‐input‐4‐output dynamic system. © 2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd     

Graphics Evolutionary Computations in Higher Order Parametric Bezier Curves

This work demonstrates in practical terms the evolutionary concepts and computational applications of Parametric Curves. Specific cases were drawn from higher order parametric Bezier curves of degrees 2 and above. Bezier curves find real life applications in diverse areas of Engineering and Computer Science, such as computer graphics, robotics, animations, virtual reality, among others. Some of the evolutionary issues explored in this work are in the areas of parametric equations derivations, proof of related theorems, first and second order calculus related computations, among others. A Practical case is demonstrated using a graphical design, physical hand sketching, and programmatic implementation of two opposite-faced handless cups, all evolved using quadratic Bezier curves. The actual drawing was realized using web graphics canvas programming based on HTML 5 and JavaScript. This work will no doubt find relevance in computational researches in the areas of graphics, web programming, automated theorem proofs, robotic motions, among others.     

Residuated bilattices

We introduce a new product bilattice construction that generalizes the well-known one for interlaced bilattices and others that were developed more recently, allowing to obtain a bilattice with two residuated pairs as a certain kind of power of an arbitrary residuated lattice. We prove that the class of bilattices thus obtained is a variety, give a finite axiomatization for it and characterize the congruences of its members in terms of those of their lattice factors. Finally, we show how to employ our product construction to define first-order definable classes of bilattices corresponding to any first-order definable subclass of residuated lattices.     

MODEL‐REFERENCE OUTPUT‐FEEDBACK SLIDING MODE CONTROLLER FOR A CLASS OF MULTIVARIABLE NONLINEAR SYSTEMS

This paper proposes an output‐feedback sliding mode control design for a class of uncertain multivariable plants with nonlinear disturbances. The approach used here is based on the control parameterization employed in model‐reference adaptive control. The disturbances are allowed to be unmatched and to depend not only on the plant output but also on its unmeas‐urable state. A less restrictive condition on the uncertainty of the high frequency gain matrix is also obtained.     

PS/PMMA-CdSe/ZnS Quantum Dots Hybrid Nanofibers for VOCs Sensors

Hybrid nanofibers containing CdSe/ZnS quantum dots have been produced by electrospinning of hybrid latexes to characterize the electro-optical behavior of this novel luminescent sensing material. The latexes are synthesized by seeded semi-batch emulsion polymerization yielding cross-linked core-shell PS/QDs/PMMA particles with efficiently encapsulated quantum dots guaranteeing a good optical stability. Addition of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) or polyethylene oxide (PEO) to the latexes is necessary to produce polymeric dispersions suitable for electrospinning manufacture of the nanometric fibers. The optimized polymeric dispersions are successfully electrospun obtaining fluorescent nanofibers in both cases. The hybrid nanofibers are sensitive to selected solvents (acetone, methanol and THF) and present positive response making them good candidates for the production of VOC sensors.     

Metal-Coated <100>-Cut GaAs Coupled to Tapered Parallel-Plate Waveguide for Cherenkov-Phase-Matched Terahertz Detection: Influence of Crystal Thickness

The influence of crystal thickness of metal-coated <100>-cut GaAs (M-G-M) on Cherenkov-phase-matched terahertz (THz) pulse detection was studied. The M-G-M detectors were utilized in conjunction with a metallic tapered parallel-plate waveguide (TPPWG). Polarization-sensitive measurements were carried out to exemplify the efficacy of GaAs in detecting transverse magnetic (TM)- and transverse electric (TE)-polarized THz waves. The reduction of GaAs’ thickness increased the THz amplitude spectra of the detected TM-polarized THz electro-optic (EO) signal due to enhanced electric field associated with a more tightly-focused and well-concentrated THz radiation on the thinner M-G-M. The higher-fluence THz beam coupled to the thinner M-G-M improved the integrated intensity of the detected THz amplitude spectrum. This trend was not observed for TE-polarized THz waves, wherein the integrated intensities were almost comparable. Nevertheless, good agreement of spectral line shapes of the superposed TM- and TE-polarized THz-EO signals with that of elliptically polarized THz-EO signal demonstrates excellent polarization-resolved detection capabilities of M-G-M via Cherenkov-phase-matched EO sampling technique.     

All normalized anti-monotonic overlap graph measures are bounded

In graph mining, a frequency measure for graphs is anti-monotonic if the frequency of a pattern never exceeds the frequency of a subpattern. The efficiency and correctness of most graph pattern miners relies critically on this property. We study the case where frequent subgraphs have to be found in one graph. Vanetik et al. (Data Min Knowl Disc 13(2):243?C260, 2006) already gave sufficient and necessary conditions for anti-monotonicity of graph measures depending only on the edge-overlaps between the instances of the pattern in a labeled graph. We extend these results to homomorphisms, isomorphisms and homeomorphisms on both labeled and unlabeled, directed and undirected graphs, for vertex- and edge-overlap. We show a set of reductions between the different morphisms that preserve overlap. As a secondary contribution, we prove that the popular maximum independent set measure assigns the minimal possible normalized frequency and we introduce a new measure based on the minimum clique partition that assigns the maximum possible normalized frequency. In that way, we obtain that all normalized anti-monotonic overlap graph measures are bounded from above and below. We also introduce a new measure sandwiched between the former two based on the polynomial time computable Lovász ??-function.