Taiwan Comprehensive University System

Aging and lifestyle factors, including high-sugar and high-fat diets, promote a systemic metabolic imbalance that promotes neurodegeneration. Hericium erinaceus has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine. Recently, its functional activities, such as antimetabolic dysfunction, antineuroinflammatory activities, and stimulation of nerve growth factor (NGF) synthesis, have been revealed. This study demonstrated that Hericium erinaceus mycelium (HEM) and an isolated diterpenoid derivative, erinacine A (EA), may reverse spatial learning disabilities in aging mice (15 months old) fed with a high-fat and high-sucrose diet (HFSD). Aging mice were randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: (1) a chow diet (control), (2) an HFSD, and an HFSD supplemented with either (3) HEM or (4) EA for 18 weeks. The Morris water maze (MWM) and Y-maze were used for behavioral assessments. Both HEM- and EA-treated mice had shorter mean daily escape latencies than HFSD-treated mice in the MWM. In addition, HEM-treated mice had a slightly increased exploratory time and frequency in the novel arm in the Y-maze. Quantitative PCR revealed that both HEM- and EA-treated mice exhibited reduced messenger RNA (mRNA) expression of tumor necrosis factor-α, interleukin-1β, and HEM-treated mice exhibited increased mRNA expression of NGF and NeuN in the hippocampus. Moreover, HEM and EA also decreased body weight, abdominal fat, plasma glucose, serum and liver total cholesterol, and liver triacylglycerol. Thus, HEM may be a potential health-promoting supplement for minimizing the progression of aging and obesity-induced neurodegeneration by reducing metabolic abnormalities and neuroinflammatory cytokines and increasing neurogenesis factors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the parameters such as thermal loads, adhesive material properties and fillets, bump materials, and moisture, affecting the warpage and bump-joint stresses of the chip-on-glass (COG) packages with anisotropic conductive film (ACF). Two- and three-dimensional finite-element models (FEMs) are employed for calculating the warpage and bump- joint stresses in terms of such parameters. In addition, the real-time full-field Twyman-Green interferometry is used for measuring the out-of-plane deformations of the specimens and providing validation of the warpage calculated from finite-element models. Also, Suhir's close-form solution of a die-substrate assembly is applied for looking into insight of thermomechanics, especially for adhesive stresses and correlated with finite-element results. The results show that the fillets strongly affect the warpage of the COG specimens by changing the convex shape of warpage for those without fillets to the saddle shape for those with fillets. However, unlike those with fillets, the warpage of the COG is insensitive to those with or without (gold or polymer) bumps. It is also found that the two-dimensional (2-D) FEM in consistence with Suhir's solution can be used for approximately addressing both warpage and bump-joint stress issues. The COG warpage results for thermal loads, from 2-D FEM, indicate that the maximum warpage is very sensitive to the modulus of the ACFs (especially for low modulus) rather than the thermal expansion coefficients of the ACFs, which are consistent with Suhir's solution. The stress results show that the COG with gold bumps provides higher bump-joint stresses (especially for compressive transverse normal stress, which is important for maintaining good electrical contact between bumps and tracks through the conductive particles in the ACF) than that with polymer bumps for the isothermal loaded case. Note that negative isothermal load here applied represents the cooling temperature change from an uniform elevated temperature of the ACF curing in the COG packaging. Furthermore, the transverse normal bump-joint stress increases three fold, when the fillets are present for the COG either with polymer bumps or with gold bumps. The similar mechanism is found in the case of the COGs under thermal-gradient loads. It is also seen that the higher the elastic modulus (E) and thermal expansion coefficient (CTE) of the ACF, the larger the compressive transverse normal bump-joint stress. It is also interestingly found that the volume swelling of the ACF due to moisture absorption provides very relatively large tensile transverse normal bump-joint stresses for the COGs with bumps. These tensile stresses could be one order of magnitude larger than the compressive values resulted from other parameters discussed here. As a result, the approaches to well controlling ACF moisture absorption and selecting low-moisture-expansion ACF materials are very critical to improving the reliability of the COG packages