The spin-coated thin-film morphology of poly(4-vinylpyridine) has been studied by AFM; the dark lines or disks (circular holes) in the AFM height images correspond to the depressed regions. An epitaxy-like ‘‘nano-trench’’ pattern was observed in the noncrystalline polymer film deposited on the crystalline graphite substrate. The transition from surface-templated to isotropic dewetting occurs du...

Trench is connected to very narrow and deep excavation filled with bentonite suspension. This paper presents estimation of its stability in cohesive soil. The stability is assessed by two calculation methods. The first involves the equilibrium of forces acting on the rigid wedge. The second one includes numerical calculations conducted in Plaxis 3D Foundations. A few examples having different d...

In contrast to typical planning problems, automated earthmoving operations such as digging a trench or leveling a mound of soil pose some additional challenges. First, soil is diffuse and therefore a unique description of the world requires a very large number of variables. Second, the interaction between the robot and the world is very complex to the point that it is not possible to accurately...

The junction of the Aleutian Island and the Kamchatka peninsula defines a sharp turn in the boundary of the Pacific and North American plates, terminating the subduction zones of the northwest Pacific. The regional pattern of shear-wave birefringence near the junction indicates that trench-parallel strain follows the seismogenic Benioff zone, but rotates to trench-normal beyond the slab edge. A...

Plasma immersion ion implantation (PIII) is an established technique in certain niche microelectronics applications such as the synthesis of silicon-oninsulator. In other applications such as shallow junction formation by plasma doping, trench doping, and fabrication of blue light emitting materials, PIII has unique advantages over conventional techniques and may be the technique of choice in t...

A bio-inspired evolutionary method with DNA is presented for solving a cable trench problem in this paper. The cable trench problem is a combination of the shortest path problem and the minimum spanning tree problem, which makes it difficult to be solved by a conventional computing method. DNA computing is applied to overcome the limitation of a silicon-based computer. The numerical values are ...

The aim of this work is to study the etching of trenches in silicon and the generation of voids during the filling of genuinely three-dimensional trench structures with silicon dioxide or nitride. The trenches studied are part of the manufacturing process of power MOSFETs, where void-less filling must be achieved. Another area of applications is capacitance extraction in interconnect structures...

Porous dielectrics such as SiCOH are used as the insulator in interconnect wiring in microelectronics devices to lower the dielectric constant and therefore decrease the resistive–capacitive delay. After etching a trench in low-k dielectrics in fluorocarbon plasmas, a CFx polymer remains on the sidewalls, which must be removed in a manner that does not damage the low-k material. This can be acc...