We discuss the fabrication and characterization of undoped hydrogenated and crystallized silicon thin films grown by reactive magnetron sputtering at growth rate of about 2 Å/s and at a temperature as low as 100 °C for various ratios of hydrogen dilution in the gas phase mixture (argon + x% hydrogen). Combined infrared absorption and Raman scattering spectroscopy techniques as well as conventional and high resolution transmission electron microscopy and stress measurements are used to fully characterize the films. In this temperature range, a minimum hydrogen dilution of 30% with respect to the plasma mixture (argon + hydrogen) is necessary to produce nanocrystalline films with crystalline volume fraction of about 65%. Moreover, these films are found to promote much lower stress intensity than those reported in previous works. The nature and strength of the stresses are dependent on the film microstructure.


Meshless methods are new numerical simulation methods. Meshless methods are based on a simple set of nodes that has to be optimized to obtain a good convergence of the approximation. For these reasons, in this paper, we have developed a new procedure in order to generate the initial set of nodes. This approach does not rely on any existing meshing technique, such as Delaunay or advancing front. It is based on a map density of nodes and a regularization procedure.

When performing the analysis of electromechanical transient problems with movement, it is needed to take into account the air gap deformation with time. A new remeshing procedure is proposed. It is based on node displacements coupled to a Delaunay algorithm. The node movement is described using bubbles in association with a physical model. The procedure generates high-quality meshes.