Advanced adhesion enhancement system for high frequency PCB manufacturing

With the current technology, all-optical networks require nonblocking switch architectures for building optical cross-connects. The crossbar switch has been widely used for building an optical cross-connect due to its simple routing algorithm and short path setup time. It is known that the crossbar suffers from huge signal loss and crosstalk. The Clos network uses a crossbar as building block and reduces switch complexity, but it does not significantly reduce signal loss and crosstalk. Although the Spanke's network eliminates the crosstalk problem, it increases the number of switching elements required considerably (to 2N2 - 2N). In this paper, we propose a new architecture for building nonblocking optical switching networks that has much lower signal loss and crosstalk than the crossbar without increasing switch complexity. Using this architecture we can build non-squared nonblocking networks that can be used as building block for the Clos network. The resulting Clos network will then have not only lower signal loss and crosstalk but also a lower switch complexity.

The amount of technological progress occurred in the last few years has brought an add up to the benefits of bonding in Orthodontics. Research-based findings have constantly led to the development of new materials that are aimed to simplify the clinical procedures like bonding of brackets to compromised enamel surfaces. Hence, the present study is aimed to assess the bond strength of orthodontic brackets on fluorosed enamel using adhesion promoters. To evaluate the shear bond strength (SBS) of orthodontic brackets bonded on fluorosed enamel using conventional Transbond XT and new adhesion promoters such as Enhance LC and All Bond 3. The study involved 90 non carious, extracted teeth with mild to moderate fluorosis randomly divided into 3 Groups. In Group - I (control group) the teeth were bonded with conventional Transbond XT and cured with LED light. In Group - II Enhance LC was applied to fluorosed enamel before bonding and in Group - III All Bond 3 was used. Shear bond strength was tested by using Universal testing Instron machine. ANOVA and Post-Hoc Tukey's tests were used to compare shear bond strength. Adhesive remnant on the tooth was assessed and scored using adhesive remnant index (ARI). Results showed a reduced SBS values (9.43MPa ±3.03) with conventional Transbond XT on fluorosed enamel. Among the adhesion boosters used Enhance LC illustrated lesser SBS values (12.03 MPa ± 4.42) compared with All Bond 3 (14.38MPa ±4.92). ARI showed bond failure at bracket resin interface in group I & group II and at enamel resin interface in group III although statistically insignificant. It was concluded that using adhesion boosters on fluorosed enamel showed higher bond strength compared to the control group. Among the two adhesion promoters used All Bond 3 expressed highest bond strength compared to Enhance LC although statistically insignificant.

Wen-Sheng Zhao from Hangzhou University, China, talks to Electronics Letters about the paper ‘Novel electromagnetic bandgap structure for wideband suppression of simultaneous switching noise’, page 1243 Wen-Sheng Zhao My research fields include interconnect modelling, multiphysics simulations and microwave sensor design. My major research topic is signal and power analysis of silicon via (TSV)-based 3D integrated systems. In recent years, the fourth industry revolution has shown an urgent need to develop next generation memory modules. As a key technology of industry 4.0, TSV-based high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has attracted a lot of interest from both the research and industrial worlds. To guarantee the system performance, it is necessary to perform signal/power/thermal integrity analysis for an HBM module. We are currently working on the issues related to the physical design of HBM modules (such as TSV modeling, equaliser design, and power noise suppression). Modern circuits are developing towards miniaturisation, high frequency and low power consumption, which puts strict constraints on the signal and power integrity design. For example, the operating voltages are continuously lowered, thereby limiting noise margin in power distribution network (PDN). Under such circumstances, power/ground noise is becoming a serious problem. To resolve this issue, various techniques including decoupling capacitor and electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) have been proposed and are under study. In comparison with decoupling capacitor, EBG structure can provide wideband noise suppression, and has been widely explored in the chip, package, and board. To improve the system performance, it is always desirable to increase the stopband bandwidth and rejection level of EBG structure. In this Letter, a power plane with coplanar EBG etched in the S-bridge EBG was proposed. With the proposed EBG structure, an ultrawide bandgap from 0.28 to 25 GHz with a high suppression level of -45 dB was achieved. Moreover, the signal integrity performance of the proposed EBG power plane was examined. The signal integrity can be ensured by utilising differential traces as the transmission structure. The proposed design can be used to reduce power/ground noise efficiently for mixed signal systems. We expect the proposed design to provide performance improvements in various mixed-signal systems in the immediate future. Currently, we are also working on developing EBG structures for silicon interposer and on-chip PDN. In the longer term, we expect that the EBG structures can be further explored and used in the physical design optimisation of HBM systems. As the clock frequency of the circuit system is continuously increased, the frequency of the simultaneous switching noise (SSN) also increases. However, the low-frequency components of the noise are not reduced accordingly. Therefore, the major issue we faced was developing a wide stopband EBG structure with a low cutoff frequency. Moreover, as grooves etched on the power/ground plane have an adverse impact on the signal transmission, we had to pay special attention to ensure signal integrity in the EBG design procedure. When we began studying TSV technologies, there was very little real-world deployment. Although several semiconductor giants such as Samsung presented some TSV based memory modules, these systems remained in the laboratory stage. Nowadays, TSV technology has matured, and the TSV-based HBM modules have been used in many graphics processing units since 2015. We are currently working on the physical design and optimisation (including signal and power integrity analysis) for TSV-based integrated systems. We have seen the introduction of many kinds of techniques (e.g., EBG, equaliser, differential signaling, and active decoupling) which will be helpful for future designs. There is no doubt that further improvements are always desirable to promote wide applications of TSV based integrated systems.

In equine surface electromyography (sEMG), challenges related to the reliability and interpretability of data arise, among other factors, from methodological differences, including signal processing and analysis. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the filtering-induced changes in basic signal features in relation to the balance between signal loss and noise attenuation. Raw sEMG signals were collected from the quadriceps muscle of six horses during walk, trot, and canter and then filtered using eight filtering methods with varying cut-off frequencies (low-pass at 10 Hz, high-pass at 20 Hz and 40 Hz, and bandpass at 20-450 Hz, 40-450 Hz, 7-200 Hz, 15-500 Hz, and 30-500 Hz). For each signal variation, signal features-such as amplitude, root mean square (RMS), integrated electromyography (iEMG), median frequency (MF), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-along with signal loss metrics and power spectral density (PSD), were calculated. High-pass filtering at 40 Hz and bandpass filtering at 40-450 Hz introduced significant filtering-induced changes in signal features while providing full attenuation of low-frequency noise contamination, with no observed differences in signal loss between these two methods. Other filtering methods led to only partial attenuation of low-frequency noise, resulting in lower signal loss and less consistent changes across gaits in signal features. Therefore, filtering-induced changes should be carefully considered when comparing signal features from studies using different filtering approaches. These findings may support cross-referencing in equine sEMG research related to training, rehabilitation programs, and the diagnosis of musculoskeletal diseases, and emphasize the importance of applying standardized filtering methods, particularly with a high-pass cut-off frequency set at 40 Hz.

Studies of experimental adhesion modifiers based on a mixture of fatty acids from the production of light vegetable oils. The properties of rubber compounds and their vulcanizates obtained using experimental adhesion promoters KK with cobalt content from 7.5 to 16.5% are investigated. The plastic-elastic and vulcanization properties of the properties of breaker rubber compounds based on polyisoprene, the physical and mechanical properties of breaker rubbers and the bond strength in the “rubber-brass-plated steel cord system” were studied. When testing belt rubbers containing experienced adhesion promoters or an imported analog of Manobond 680C, the following features were revealed. The plasticity of the prototypes was in the range of 0.2-0.4. This indicates satisfactory processing properties. The Mooney viscosity of the prototypes was lower than that of the production sample. The use of experienced adhesion promoters instead of the analogue (Manobond 680C) increases the resistance to scorching. On the basis of the analysis of elastic-strength properties, it was found that in terms of the conditional tensile strength, the prototypes were inferior to the serial ones. However, rubbers containing the KK-12, KK-13.5, KK-15 promoters met the control standards. The tensile elongation at break of the experimental rubbers is higher than that of the serial sample. This may indicate the formation of a more uniform cure network in the presence of the test products. When testing rubber-metal-hard composites, it was noted that, under normal conditions, the experienced adhesion promoters have advantages over Manobond 680C. However, at elevated temperatures, under conditions of salt and steam-air aging, they are slightly inferior to Manobond 680C. It has been established that the experimental adhesion promoters provide the required set of technical properties of belt rubbers with a CO2 + content of 12–16.5% wt. Thus, it is possible to recommend the adhesion promoters KK 12, KK-13.5, KK 15 for practical use in the composition of belt rubber compounds. This will allow replacing a foreign-made product and reducing the cost of production.

Silver nanowires are printable and conductive, and are believed to be promising materials in the field of printed electronics. However, the resistivity of silver nanowire printed lines is higher than that of metallic particles or flakes even when sintered at high temperatures of 100-400 °C. Therefore, their applications have been limited to the replacement of transparent electrodes made from high-resistivity materials, such as doped metallic oxides, conductive polymers, carbon nanotubes, or graphenes. Here we report that using printed silver nanowire lines, signal losses obtained in the high-frequency radio were lower than those obtained using etched copper foil antennas, because their surfaces were much smoother than those of etched copper foil antennas. This was the case even though the resistivity of silver nanowire lines was 43-71 μΩ cm, which is much higher than that of etched copper foil (2 μΩ cm). When printed silver nanowire antennas were heated at 100 °C, they achieved signal losses that were much lower than those of silver paste antennas comprising microparticles, nanoparticles, and flakes. Furthermore, using a low temperature process, we succeeded in remotely controlling a commercialized radio-controlled car by transmitting a 2.45 GHz signal via a silver nanowire antenna printed on a polyethylene terephthalate film.

Improving the dielectric properties of the highly epitaxial ferroelectric thin films for high frequency tunable microwave elements has been a global target in the past several years. Recently, we have developed a unique technique to achieve the giant dielectric tunability of 80% with extremely low dielectric insertion loss of 0.001 at 1.0 MHz and 0.005 at 12 GHZ from the additional Mn doping (Ba,Sr)TiO3 thin films on (001) MgO. The high frequency (10-30 GHz) dielectric measurements also demonstrate that the Mn:BSTO films are excellent in both dielectric property and very low insertion loss values of only 0.2 dB at 10 GHz and more than 1.5 dB at 30 GHz. On the other hand, we also systematically investigated the highly epitaxial (Pb,Sr)TiO3 and Ba(Ti,Zr)O3 thin films on (001) MgO. The high frequency dielectric property measurements on the as-grown thin films exhibit excellent dielectric properties such as large tunability, low dielectric loss, and good stability. These results indicate that highly epitaxial ferroelectric thin films are good candidates for developing the high-frequency, room-temperature tunable microwave devices.

Multi-beam antenna is an important way to increase the channel capacity of cellular communications. It is available in two ways, one is based on optical methods, such as Luneberg lens and Rotman lens. However, the common problem with this method is that the lens size is too large or difficult to process. Another method is based on beam-forming network composed of coupler and phase shifter, such as Butler matrix. The Butler matrix has been studied for a long time, in the form of microstrip, stripline, or substrate-integrated waveguide. The substrate-integrated waveguide with low insertion loss is mainly used in the higher frequency such as millimeter wave band. The microstrip is mainly used in 4G/5G base stations, suitable for broadband design and process. Low side-lobe level, narrow beams are especially important for multi-beam base station antennas. The traditional Butler matrix is 4 × 4 Butler matrix for 4-beam base stations. However, the traditional Butler matrix can only output equal-amplitude power, with a side-lobe level higher than −13.4 dB. The beam width is too wide due to the few number of antenna. The 4 × 4 Butler Matrix with attenuator can reduce the side-lobe level, but it will increase the insertion loss of the beam-forming network. The 4 × 4 Butler matrix with phase shifter and power divider can form a 4 × 6 Butler matrix, which reduce the beam width beam and side-lobe level. However, for large-angle scanning, not only the side-lobe level, but also the grating-lobe problem caused by the wide-angle scanning and wide antenna spacing needs to be solved. The array with triangle arrangement can reduce the side-lobe and grating-lobe level. A wide-band 4-beam antenna array and beam-forming network for 4G base stations are presented in this paper. Adopting triangular arrangement, the number of antenna in sub-array is increased, and the antenna spacing is reduced, resulting in good side-lobe and grating-lobe level suppression. The output amplitude and phase errors are small over a wide band, with low insertion loss.

In this paper, we present a new photonic switching network. The proposed network is constructed by concatenating modified plus-minus 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> and inverse modified plus-minus 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> networks with two center stage overlapped. The performance is evaluated and compared with other networks to show the superiority of the proposed network over other networks. To construct the proposed network we require less number of switching elements. The proposed network yields less signal loss and first-order crosstalk, thus it scales well. The proposed network is a good choice for constructing photonic switch with low signal loss and cross talk.

In this paper, a compact 1.71-2.69GHz diplexer is designed and fabricated for mobile phone terminals based on high-resistivity silicon (HRS) integrated passive device (IPD) technology. Low insertion loss and compact size can be achieved by utilizing new LC resonances to provide transmission zeros. The chip size of the diplexer is 1.525mm×0.95mm×0.1mm. Test results show that the operating center frequencies of the low and high frequency bands of the diplexer are 1.94 GHz and 2.595 GHz, respectively. The low band maximum insertion loss is 1.3dB in 1.71GHz ~ 2.17GHz. The high band maximum insertion loss is 0.7dB in 2.5GHz ~ 2.69GHz. The isolation between two bands is better than 11.2dB in 1.71GHz ~ 2.69GHz.

The development of PSAs suitable for specific applications requires an optimization of the two most essential properties: sufficient bond strength and clean removability. The latter is conveniently obtained by controlling the mode of debonding to an interfacial failure, yet the issue of bond strength is challenging since the optimum bond strength must be available in the same failure mode. More complication arises from the fact that the methods, such as peel and creep tests, used to evaluate the bond strength are often qualitative and the results obtained may not accurately reveal the effects of various PSA design parameters. In the present study, a new method, named cyclic strain application (CSA) test, is devised to evaluate the durability of PSAs. A key feature of this test is that by applying a controlled cyclic strain on a PSA/substrate interface we can quantitatively monitor the temporal stress variation as well as the time for interfacial failure (t f). As a result, the effects of various PSA design parameters, such as molar mass, blending with low molar mass fractions, adhesion promoters, and the level of crosslinking on PSA durability can be clearly seen. Other factors being equal, higher molar mass samples showed greater t f, while, blending with low molar mass fractions led to a reduced t f. The use of a strong adhesion promoter, as anticipated, increased t f. However, it should be noted that excessive bond strength may lead to a cohesive failure, which is detrimental in the design of good PSAs. From a comparison of t f with peel strength, it was clearly shown that t f, the key parameter obtained from the CSA test, had a strong correlation with peel strength. In addition, some other information, such as the detailed influences of the level of crosslinking and molar mass on PSA durability was also obtained from the CSA test. Lastly, some important PSA design concepts and other examples utilizing the CSA test are presented.

The compatibility of silicon photonics with existing CMOS fabrication processes enables the possibility of large scale manufacturing of integrated photonics for communication applications above 100Gbit/s. However, the design of silicon photonics devices that are able to fulfil the high-performance requirements of broad optical bandwidth ( 50nm), low loss (2dB), high-speed (25Gbit/s), low driving voltage (≥ –5V), large fabrication tolerance (±20nm) and high reproducibility across the wafer is a unique practical challenge. In this work, we present a library of passive and active integrated silicon photonic devices that meet the stringent design requirements for communication applications. The design, modelling and experimental results are presented for low loss edge couplers with insertion loss < 2dB, low-loss waveguides and bends, high-performance polarization beam splitter with extinction ratio above 25 dB, broadband directional couplers with optical bandwidth above 50nm, and arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) with low insertion loss < 1dB. Last but not least, high-speed silicon modulators (25Gbit/s) with phase efficiency VπL ≤ 2V.cm at DC reverse bias of ≥ –5V and low propagation loss of ≤ ∼1dB/mm are demonstrated.

The interaction between asphalt binder and aggregate is fundamental to ensure adequate performance of asphalt mixtures, mainly in the presence of water. The work of adhesion generated between both materials directly affects the resistance of asphalt mixture to moisture damage, because it measures the ease with which water can displace asphalt binder from the aggregate surface. The objective of this study was to characterize the bond strength between asphalt and several aggregate sources. A PG 64-22 neat binder was modified with several additives to determine the effect on adhesion: polymers, nanomaterials, and adhesion promoters. To measure the strength of adhesion, the bitumen bond strength (BBS) test and contact angle measurements between asphalt binder and the aggregate surface by means of goniometry were used. The surface energy of the asphalt and the aggregate, with and without the presence of water, was estimated also. Testing was performed on all binders and on each binder–aggregate combination after ( a) rolling thin-film oven (RTFO) aging and ( b) RTFO and pressure aging vessel aging. The BBS results identified differences in bond strength as a result of moisture conditioning and aging. The differences depended on the aggregate source and binder type. Different failure modes were also observed (i.e., cohesive, adhesive). The results also indicated an increase in strength of adhesion associated with the aging process: the main resistance gain was observed after RTFO aging. Finally, changes in bond strength were compared with functional composition changes associated with the aging process and related to changes in performance.

Selective infiltration etching is a newly developed surface treatment used to modify the surface of zirconiabased materials, rendering it ready for bonding with resin cements. The aim of this study was to evaluate zirconia/resin bond strength and durability using the new technique. Zirconia disks received one of the following surface treatments: selective infiltration etching or airborne-particle abrasion with 50-μm aluminum oxide particles, while as-sintered surfaces served as control. The zirconia disks were bonded to pre-aged composite resin disks using a light-polymerized adhesive resin (Panavia F 2.0). Zirconia resin bond strength was evaluated using the microtensile bond strength test (MTBS) and the test was repeated after each of the following intervals of accelerated artificial aging: thermocycling (10,000 cycles between 5°C and 55°C), 4 weeks, 26 weeks, 52 weeks, and 104 weeks of water storage (37°C ). A repeated measures ANOVA and Bonferroni post-hoc tests were used to analyze the data (n = 18, α = 0.05). There were significant differences in the MTBS values between the three test groups at each of the test intervals (p < 0.001). After 2 years of artificial aging, all specimens of the control group demonstrated spontaneous failure, while significant reduction in the bond strength of the particle-abraded groups was observed (21.3 MPa). The bond strength of the selective infiltration etched group was relatively stable (44.1 MPa) after completion of artificial aging. Within the limitations of this study, micromechanical retention and adhesion promoters are prerequisites for establishing a strong and durable bond to zirconia-based materials.

Concentration of solutions for electrolytically etching Rexillium III