Improved homogenization of Ni in sintered steels through the use of Cr-containing prealloyed powders

The homogenization of Ni in powder metal (PM) steel compacts is usually difficult even after high-temperature sintering at 1250°C. An earlier study by the authors demonstrated that this problem can be alleviated through the addition of 0.5 wt pct Cr in the form of stainless steel powders. To further improve the microstructure and mechanical properties of Ni-containing PM steels and to understand the mechanisms, an attempt was made in this study using the Fe-3Cr-0.5Mo prealloyed powder as the base material. The results showed that the distribution of the Ni additives was significantly improved. As a result, the tensile strength of the Fe-3Cr-0.5Mo-4Ni-0.5C compact sintered at 1250°C reached 1323 MPa. The elongation was higher than 1 pct. These sinter-hardened properties, which were attained using a slow furnace cooling rate, were comparable to those of the sinter-hardened alloys reported in the literature using accelerated cooling and were equivalent to those of the best quenched-and-tempered alloys registered in the Metal Powder Industries Federation (MPIF) standards. These improvements were attributed to the positive effect of Cr addition on alloy homogenization due to the reduction of the repelling effect between Ni and C, as was demonstrated through the thermodynamic analysis using the Thermo-Calc program.     

A power-driven multiplication instruction-set design method for ASIPs

This paper presents a novel power-driven multiplication instruction-set design method for application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). Based on a dual-and-configurable-multiplier structure, our proposed method devises a multiplication instruction set for low-power ASIPs. Our method exploits the execution sequences of multiplication instructions and effective bit widths of variables to reduce power consumed by redundant multiplication bits while minimizing the multiplication execution time. Experimental results on a set of DSP programs demonstrate that our proposed method achieves significant power reduction (up to 18.53%) and execution time improvement (up to 10.43%) with 18% area overhead.     

A high-performance multichannel dual-gate poly-Si TFT fabricated by excimer laser irradiation on a floating a-Si thin film

A new excimer laser annealing (ELA) process that uses a floating amorphous-Silicon (a-Si) thin film with a multichannel structure is proposed for high-performance poly-Si thin-film transistors (TFTs). The proposed ELA method produces two-dimensional (2-D) grain growth, which can result in a high-quality grain structure. The dual-gate structure was employed to eliminate the grain boundaries perpendicular to the current flow in the channel. A multichannel structure was adapted in order to arrange the grain boundary to be parallel to the current flow. The proposed poly-Si TFT exhibits high-performance electrical characteristics, which are a high mobility of 504 cm/sup 2//Vsec and a low subthreshold slope of 0.337 V/dec.     

Optically preamplified receiver performance due to VSB filtering for 40-Gb/s optical signals modulated with various formats

Optically preamplified receiver performance according to the vestigial sideband (VSB) filtering has been numerically investigated for 40-Gb/s optical signals modulated with nonreturn-to-zero, duobinary nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ), return-to-zero (RZ), carrier-suppressed RZ, and duobinary carrier-suppressed RZ formats. The VSB filtering enables the spectral widths of NRZ, duobinary NRZ, and RZ signals to be reduced without severe power penalties at the receiver. On the other hand, carrier-suppressed RZ and duobinary carrier-suppressed RZ signals have no large advantages over VSB filtering because of the characteristics of their signals. Our results suggest that RZ signals are the most suitable modulation format for VSB filtering, without considering the filter loss, because of the tolerance of the intersymbol interference and a large spectral width. However, duobinary NRZ signals are the most suitable modulation format for VSB filtering, considering the filter loss, because of their narrow spectral width.     

Inhibition effect of carbon dioxide on the oxidation of hydrogen over a platinum foil catalyst

This paper investigates the catalytic ignition of the H₂/O₂/CO₂ mixture on platinum in a stagnation flow at atmospheric pressure experimentally and numerically. We measure the ignition temperatures of the gas mixtures flowing towards resistively heated platinum with various composition ratios and various diluent gases of N₂, Ar and CO₂. Compared with N₂ or Ar, the CO₂ dilution shows higher ignition temperature by about 50 K, even at the same composition ratio. The ignition temperature increase is proportional to the dilution ratio. Through the numerical simulation, it is illustrated that higher ignition temperature is caused by the adsorption of CO₂ and following dissociation on platinum surface, which was to date considered negligible in catalytic combustion.     

Improved Yen-Joye's authenticated multiple-key agreement protocol

An authenticated multiple-key agreement protocol is proposed. The protocol is not only secure against the unknown-key attack but also more efficient than other protocols.     

Effects of contact shape on biological wet adhesion

Wet adhesion is widely adopted in biological adhesion systems in nature. Wet adhesion is studied in this paper with the focus on the effect of different contact shapes (flat, concave, convex, and ring-like) on the adhesion force. The evolution of the liquid bridge between a fiber tip and substrate during the detaching process shows two transition points. The first transition from the radius-controlled to the contact-angle controlled process is critical to influence the strength and robustness of adhesion. We show that a concave shape is more effective than a flat one, while a convex shape has no advantage. A ring-like contact shape has advantages in a hydrophobic environment and on a rough surface.     

Observer design for autonomous discrete-time nonlinear systems

We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for a discrete-time nonlinear system to be locally state equivalent to the nonlinear observer form. The result looks similar to the continuous counterpart except for the fact that Ad-operation is utilized instead of ad-operation.