In this study, the fictitious time integration method (FTIM) is applied to investigate wave propagation over an arbitrary bathymetry with measured uncertainty. The FTIM is used to convert the higher-order elliptic mild-slope equation (EMSE) into a FTIM like EMSE (FTIMEMSE). It has the advantage to describe wave transformation from deep water to shallow water region in a large coastal area with numerical efficiency. The validity of the noise resistance for the measured uncertainty of the bathymetry is also studied. In addition, typical examples for waves propagating over an elliptic shoal rest on a horizontal and sloping bottom is presented. It is concluded that the FTIM is robust in the numerical stability and capable of against the noise of the measurement.

Surveillance is integral for the monitoring and control of infectious diseases. We conducted prospective laboratory surveillance of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in five Singaporean public-sector hospitals from 2006 to 2010, using WHONET 5.6 for data compilation and analysis. Molecular profiling using multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis, staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec classification and multilocus sequence typing was performed for a random selection of isolates. Our results showed overall stable rates of infection and bacteraemia, although there was significant variance among the individual hospitals, with MRSA rates increasing in two smaller hospitals and showing a trend towards decreasing in the two largest hospitals. The proportion of blood isolates that are EMRSA-15 (ST22-IV) continued to increase over time, slowly replacing the multi-resistant ST239-III. A new MRSA clone – ST45-IV – is now responsible for a small subset of hospital infections locally. More effort is required in Singaporean hospitals in order to reduce the rates of MRSA infection significantly.

In the past 15 years, stretchable electronic circuits have emerged as a new technology in the domain of assembly, interconnections, and sensor circuit technologies. In the meantime, a wide variety of processes using many different materials have been explored in this new field. In the current contribution, we present an approach inspired by conventional rigid and flexible printed circuit board (PCB) technology. Similar to PCBs, standard packaged, rigid components are assembled on copper contact pads using lead-free solder reflow processes. Stretchability is obtained by shaping the copper tracks as horseshoe-shaped meanders. Elastic materials, predominantly polydimethylsiloxanes, are used to embed the conductors and the components, thus serving as a circuit carrier. We describe mechanical modeling, aimed at optimizing the build-up toward maximum mechanical reliability of the structures. Details on the production process, reliability assessment, and a number of functional demonstrators are described.

Capacitive CMOS MEMS sensors are usually defined by anisotropic dry etching processes (RIE and DRIE). These processes can provide clean and vertical sidewall geometry. However, during the dry-etching processes, charges are added to the gate electrodes of the on-chip MOSFET’s through metal pads and micro-structures, and the voltage may be raised to the level of breaking down the gate oxide, which leads to large leakage current and fails the circuit. On another hand, the thin spring beams in capacitive CMOS MEMS accelerometers suffer from in-plane curling and out-of-plane curling caused by stress gradient. Furthermore, the stress in the layers of MEMS structure is a function of temperature. Therefore, the in-plane curling and out-of-plane curling vary with temperature, leading to varying electrode coupling area in the sensing beams. This in turn causes variation in the sensitivity and the DC offset of sensors, meaning that usually the thermal stability of CMOS MEMS capacitive accelerometers is very poor. To cope with these problems, this work develops a new wafer-level post-CMOS process for fabricating thermally stable capacitive accelerometers. The resultant MEMS structures have high aspect ratio (e.g. 2-2.5 μm gaps versus 57 μm depth) and are insensitive to residual stress as well as temperature change. Excellent thermal stability was achieved intrinsically by making the crystalline Si layer in the sensors thick. Moreover, this process totally avoids the charge damage problem during the dry-etching procedure. For demonstration, an accelerometer sensor was fabricated by using the proposed process and was integrated with an on-chip sensing circuit in commercial 0.35 μm 2P4M CMOS process. High detection sensitivity of 595 mV/g and very low thermal variation of 1.68 mg/°C were successfully achieved.

For the fabrication of bulk strained Si devices, a thin Si layer is deposited on a virtual substrate consisting of a several μm thick compositionally graded SiGe layer. A simpler approach utilizing H or He implantation to enhance relaxation of a thin SiGe film was recently reported. In this current work, hydrogen implantation is used to enhance the SiGe relaxation; and, relaxation beyond the previous reported limit is demonstrated. Experiments are performed on CVD deposited SiGe films with Ge fractions ranging from 20% to 40 % and thickness in the range of 100nm to about 500nm. After annealing at 800°C, relaxation of more than 80% is achieved. PMOS and NMOS devices are successfully fabricated and much enhanced hole and electron mobilities are demonstrated.

This study was performed to determine the prevalence, distribution of specimen sources, and antimicrobial susceptibility of the Acinetobacter calcoaceticus–Acinetobacter baumannii (Acb) species complex in Singapore. One hundred and ninety-three non-replicate Acb species complex clinical isolates were collected from six hospitals over a 1-month period in 2006. Of these, 152 (78·7%) were identified as A. baumannii, 18 (9·3%) as ‘Acinetobacter pittii’ [genomic species (gen. sp.) 3], and 23 (11·9%) as ‘Acinetobacter nosocomialis’ (gen. sp. 13TU). Carbapenem resistance was highest in A. baumannii (72·4%), followed by A. pittii (38·9%), and A. nosocomialis (34·8%). Most carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii and A. nosocomialis possessed the blaOXA-23-like gene whereas carbapenem-resistant A. pittii possessed the blaOXA-58-like gene. Two imipenem-resistant strains (A. baumannii and A. pittii) had the blaIMP-like gene. Representatives of carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii were related to European clones I and II.

The previous monolithic active grating bender design met some basic design requirements. However, after a real grating (BM-AGM) had been fabricated and installed for testing, the results showed that the usable length is a mere 60 mm because of the higher-order term error in the surface profile. A method was thus derived to eliminate the higher-order term error by modifying the width of the bender substrate through finite-element method simulation, reducing the residual error from about 100 nm to 6 nm. Owing to the closure of the grating department of Zeiss, ruling the monolithic bender is no longer available and the design has to be modified to a composite-type bender with Si substrate. A prototype was fabricated and assembled to examine all the design situations. The surface roughness of the width-modified Si substrate is around 30 nm before assembly. The residual error after assembly and bending is less than 10 nm. It proves that the design is feasible. However, due to the manufacturing capacity of the vendor, a short-length substrate is required and the design has to be modified. The detailed design modification and testing results are presented in this paper.

In previous studies, low-k carbon-doped silicon oxide (SiOC) films were deposited using organosilicon precursor: (CH3)xSiH4−x. In this paper, we present the properties of PECVD low-k SiOC films produced by using conventional SiH4 based gas precursors. The SiH4 based SiOC films have similar gross physical and electrical characteristics to those of (CH3)xSiH4−x based SiOC. Since the precursors are inexpensive, commercially available and convenient to operate for existing tools, the process should not require additional cost as compared with that of PECVD silicon dioxide. We demonstrate the feasibility of integrating Cu with SiOC on damascene interconnection. The evaluation on electrical performance of the Cu/SiOC based damascene structure will be discussed.

There is a growing interest in the application of large area electronics on curved surfaces. One approach towards realizing this goal is to fabricate circuits on planar substrates of thin plastic or metal foil, which are subsequently deformed into arbitrary shapes. The problem that we consider here is the deformation of substrates into a spherical shape, where the strain is determined by geometry and cannot be reduced by simply using a thinner substrate. The goal is to achieve permanent, plastic deformation in the substrates, without exceeding fracture or buckling limits in the device materials.

Our experiments consist of the planar fabrication of amorphous silicon device structures onto stainless steel or Kapton® polyimide substrates, followed by permanent deformation into a spherical shape. We will present empirical experiments showing the dependence of the results on the island/line size of the device materials and the deformation temperature. We have successfully deformed Kapton® polyimide substrates with 100 [.proportional]m wide amorphous silicon islands into a one steradian spherical cap, which subtends 66 degrees, without degradation of the silicon. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building semiconductor devices on plastically deformed substrates despite a 5% average biaxial strain in the substrate after deformation.

The beam position monitors (BPMs) with submicron-level resolution act as the major eyes of storage ring in detecting the position of electron beams and are used for feedback system to guide the beam orbit to the desired track. Compared to major improvements on backend electronics, the physical devices generate and transmit signals had little improvement due to the lack of control on manufacturing processes including all mechanical tolerance requirements. The design started with ANSYS to simulate mechanical deformation. Due to the small size (submillimetre) and complicated assembly of feedthrough structure, it is difficult to achieve 1 % tolerance (submicron) in all aspects including machining and brazing. The smallest tolerance for machining is 5 µ and the overall tolerance will be 30 µm. The influence of the tolerance on mechanical will be shown on time-domain reflectometry measurement. The resulted heat-related issue will also be discussed and addressed since the problem happened at SLAC (private communication with Albert Sheng at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) and DIAMOND (presented at the RF Button Heating Mini-Workshop at EPAC 2008). Manufacturing steps will be described. The consequence of mismatch on manufacturing will be discussed. All related measurement and simulation data are presented in this paper.

Remote Plasma-enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (RPCVD) has been used to grow GexSi1−x/Si heteroepitaxial thin films at low temperatures (∼450°C). In situ RHEED has been used to confirm that smooth, single crystal heteroepitaxial films can be grown by RPCVD. Plan-view and cross-sectional TEM have been employed to study the microstructure of the heteroepitaxial films. Lattice imaging high resolution TEM (HRTEM) has shown perfect epitaxial lattice alignment at the heterojunction interfaces. GexSi1−x/Si films which exceed their CLT's appreciably show dense Moiré fringes under plan-view TEM. The spacings between the fringes have been used to estimate the relaxed lattice constants. In addition to the inhomogeneous strain observed in-XTEM, Selected Area electron Diffraction (SAD) analysis of the interfaces displays two split patterns. The spacings between the diffraction spots have been used to calculate the lattice constants in the epitaxial films in different crystal directions, which agree very well with the prediction by Vegard's law as well as the estimate from plan-view TEM analysis. HRTEM analysis also reveals the crystallographic nature of the interfacial misfit dislocations in the relaxed films.

Reactive YBa2Cu3O7-δ powders have been produced via freeze-drying, carbonate- and oxalate-coprecipitating methods. In the coprecipitating methods, sodium carbonate and sodium oxalate were used as precipitants. These powders were characterized by TGA, XRD, and SEM. The morphologies of the YBa2Cu3O7-δ powders produced from these methods are different from each other. The influence of hot-press process on the bulk density, micro-structure development and superconducting properties of YBa2Cu3O7-δ samples was also studied.

The characteristics of YBa2Cu3O7−x (YBCO) thin films by laser ablation on MgO bicrystals have been investigated. The bicrystals were fabricated by hot pressing two single crystals with the configuration of [001] tilt boundaries. The YBCO films were epitaxial grown with C-axis normal to the both adjacent grains of bicrystals. The FWHM about (005) reflection was 0.4–0.5 degree, indicating the high degree of the oriention for the film with small mosaic spread. Our preliminary study showed that the typical value of Jc on either side of the bicrystal boundary was 0.4–10×106 A/cm2 at 15K, while that across the 10° tilt boundaries was 0.3–9×105 A/cm2 at 15K. These results implied that the artificial grain boundaries effectively weakened the supercurrent, and therefore, the weak-link properties of artificial boundaries were more easily controllable than those of naturally occuring grain boundaries.