The performance of miniature metallic PEM fuel cells

A prototype of metallic PEM fuel cell with thin stainless steel bipolar plates was tested for their potential applications in portable electronic products. The flow field pattern was grown from the stainless steel plates by the electroforming process. The main flow channel has the dimensions of 300 μm (width) × 300 μm (depth). The dimensions of the micro-features were 100 μm width × 50 μm depth and 50 μm width × 50 μm depth. The material of the electroformed flow field pattern is nickel. A prototype of a single cell with total thickness of 2.6 mm, overall reaction area of 4 cm² and bipolar plate area of 16 cm² was assembled for this study. In order to improve its corrosion resistance, the bipolar plates were coated with 5 μm thick of multi-layered corrosion resistant material.     

A study of the backup reprovisioning problem for FIPP p-cycles on WDM networks

As networks grow in size and complexity, both the probability and the impact of failures increase. The pre-allocated backup bandwidth cannot provide 100% protection guarantee when multiple failures occur in a network. In this article, we focus on how to recover the protecting capabilities of FIPP (Failure-independent path-protecting) p-cycles against the subsequent links failure on WDM networks, after recovering the working paths affected by the failure of link. Two recovering policies are designed to recover the protecting capabilities of the FIPP p-cycles if possible, unless there is no sufficient network resource. They are Cycle Recovery Policy and Path Recovery Policy. In addition, a Cycle Adjust algorithm is proposed and used to recover the affected cycles. The simulation results of the proposed methods are also given.     

An Automatic Presence Service for Low Duty-Cycled Mobile Sensor Networks

We consider providing presence service for duty-cycled wireless sensor networks through a multihop approach. The presence service is to ensure automatic network monitoring by which each node would know whether the sink node is reachable or not. Towards providing such presence service, we tackle three problems: 1) efficient neighbor discovery due to not-always-awake nature of duty-cycling and the mobile environment, 2) light presence message passing from the sink node to all reachable nodes given broadcasting is expensive and difficult in an embedded duty-cycling network, and 3) automatic network monitoring if there is node failure and network partition. In our protocol, in order to save power consumption, an online node which is reachable from the sink node only book-keeps the broadcast schedule of its parent in a breadth-first-search spanning tree in order to trace the online status all along. The offline node which is not reachable from the sink node stays awake periodically based on quorum-based wakeup scheduling, and probes the beacons which may come from online nodes. The presence protocol can automatically detect link failure or network partition, and it can also automatically recover online status for each sensor node if there is a path to the sink node, which is significant for applications that are sensitive to end-to-end latency constraints. The presence protocol proposed is implemented through a layered approach so that it is independent from any specific MAC and routing protocols. We make extensive simulations in order to validate the energy efficiency and reliability of our design.     

一款灌入/拉出3A电流跨导驱动快速瞬态响应低漏失稳压器

本文设计了一款可以灌入(sink)和拉出(source)3A电流,低电源、低功耗的CMOS低漏失电压线性稳压器。采用电流镜像结Gm(跨导)驱动的LDO架构可以获得高稳定性和快速负载瞬态响应。基于UMC 0.5um标准CMOS工艺投片验证,芯片面积为1.0mm2。空载时该LDO静态电流为220uA,最大带载3A。测试表明,使用30uF陶瓷电容,在-1.8A到 1.8A 0.1us负载跳变时,该LDO可以在低于2us的时间达到稳态,且过冲小于1mV。     

Response time improvement of AlGaN photoconductive detectors by adjusting crystal-nuclei coalescence process in metal organic vapor phase epitaxy

AlGaN photoconductive ultraviolet detectors are fabricated to study their time response characteristics. Persistent photoconductivity,a deterring factor for the detector response time,is found to be strongly related to the grain boundary density in AlGaN epilayers.By improving the crystal-nuclei coalescence process in metal organic vapor phase epitaxy,the grain-boundary density can be reduced,resulting in an-order-of-magnitude decrease in response time.     

High-powered thermal gel degradation evaluation on board-level HFCBGA subjected to reliability tests

HFCBGA is a thermally enhanced FCBGA with its heat spreader extending the heat conduction area by connecting itself to the rear side of the silicon die. A thermal interface material plays an important role as a heat conduction path. The thermal performance should not only be checked at time zero, and several reliability tests have to be undertaken to uncover the field conditions faced by end users. A temperature cycling test, highly-accelerated temperature and humidity stress test and multiple reflows are utilized to investigate the thermal resistance of junction to case of a selected thermal gel.     

自写入光波导聚合物微透镜阵列的设计与制作

利用聚合物SU-8光刻胶在激光作用下折射率会发生变化的特点,将其作为最后的光学材料,采用光刻胶热熔法和图形转移法,设计并制作了填充因子接近0.75、自写入光波导、六角排列的微透镜阵列。对阵列的表面形态、三维结构和光学性能分别进行了观察、测试与分析,发现用SU-8胶制作的微透镜阵列外观良好,边缘清晰;自写入光波导微透镜阵列的三维结构良好;波导末梢的光点分布均匀,光强一致性高。这种自写入光波导的微透镜阵列降低了透镜阵列与探测阵列精确装配的难度,而且其制作工艺流程简单、成本低廉、适合批量复制,这种阵列元件还有质量轻、体积小的特点,有很广的应用前景。     

Effects of Minor Amounts of Zn on the Sn-Zn/Ni Interfacial Reactions and Phase Equilibria of the Ternary Sn-Zn-Ni System at 250°C

This study investigated the effects of minor Zn additions (less than 1 wt.%) to pure Sn on the phase formation and microstructural evolution at the interfaces between Ni and Sn-Zn solders. When the Zn content was less than 0.3 wt.%, the reaction product was Ni₃Sn₄, which had no Zn solubility. By contrast, for reactions with more than 0.4 wt.% Zn, one high-Zn-containing phase (about Sn-35 at.%Ni-20 at.%Zn) was formed, which was proven to be a ternary intermetallic compound, the τ-phase. In addition to composition analysis, x-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis revealed that the crystallographic structure of the τ-phase was different from that of Ni₃Sn₄. Furthermore, a partial isothermal section in the Sn-Zn-Ni ternary system (less than 40 at.% Ni) at 250°C was experimentally determined to contain 12 different Sn-Zn-Ni alloys. Three three-phase regions were identified: Ni₃Sn₄ + τ + liquid, Ni₅Zn₂₁ + τ + liquid, and Ni₅Zn₂₁ + Zn + liquid. The equilibrium phase boundaries for liquid separately with Ni₅Zn₂₁, τ, and Ni₃Sn₄ were highly consistent with the Zn concentrations where the phase transitions occurred in the interfacial reactions.     

Discrimination of breast cancer by measuring prostate-specific antigen levels in women's serum

Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has been reported to be a potential biomarker of breast cancer. Serum PSA of normal women is around 1 pg/mL, which is usually undetectable by current assay methods; thus an ultrasensitive measurement of PSA expression in women's serum is necessary to distinguish normal from malignant breast diseases. To enhance the sensitivity of conventional immunoassay technology for the detection of PSA in sera, we adopted a localized surface plasmon coupled fluorescence fiber-optic biosensor, which combines a sandwich immunoassay with the localized surface plasmon technique. The concentration of total PSA (t-PSA) (from 0.1 to 1000 pg/mL) in phosphate-buffered saline solution and the normalized fluorescence signal exhibit a linear relationship where the correlation coefficient is 0.9574. In addition, the concentration of additional t-PSA in 10-fold-diluted healthly women's serum across a similar range was measured. The correlation coefficient for this measurement is 0.9142. In clinical serum samples, moreover, the experimental results of t-PSA detection show that both the mean value and median of normalized fluorescence signals in the breast cancer group (155.2 and 145.7, respectively) are higher than those in the noncancer group (46.6 and 37.1, respectively). We also examined the receiver operating characteristic curve for t-PSA, and the area under the curve (AUC) is estimated to be 0.9063, the AUC being used to measure the performance of a test to correctly identify diseased and nondiseased subjects.     

Analytical approximate periodic solutions for two-degree-of-freedom coupled van der Pol-Duffing oscillators by extended homotopy analysis method

In this study, the extended homotopy analysis method (EHAM) is applied to derive the accurate approximate analytical solutions for multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) coupled oscillators. The present paper not only introduces the rationale for the EHAM for MDOF oscillators, but also strengthens the availability of the conventional homotopy analysis method (HAM) in solving complex MDOF dynamical systems. Employing the EHAM for the two-degree-of-freedom (TDOF) coupled van der Pol-Duffing oscillator, the explicit analytical solutions of frequency ?? and displacements x ₁(t) and x ₂(t) are formulated for various initial conditions and physical parameters. To verify the accuracy and correctness of this approach, a number of comparisons are conducted between the results of the EHAM and the numerical integration (i.e. Runge-Kutta) method. It is shown that the third-order analytical solutions of the EHAM agree well with the numerical integration solutions, even if the time variable t progresses to a comparatively large domain in the time history responses.