Introduction MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is a mission to orbit the planet Mercury. The comprehensive scientific data collected through the one-Earth-year orbital mission phase will allow scientists to study and understand the environment and evolution of the innermost terrestrial planet. The five-year cruise phase and the harsh environment of Mercur...

Purpose – To determine the status of internet and e-commerce adoption by the Taiwan semiconductor industry, the research is designed to help government and enterprise in formulating strategic plans and making resource allocation decisions. Design/methodology/approach – Using the three-level model of internet commerce adoption (MICA), a survey of 287 companies and web sites was designed. Semicon...

Electronic devices are entering every field of life nowadays. Also medicine uses electrical instruments and devices every day, and the safety and reliability are the key factors in that sector. Also the operational aspects of devices are of course vital and make the device useful and worth wile. However, the hardware of the device plays also a key role, since without it the programs cannot func...

A biological sensor and wireless interface have been implemented in a 0.25-um RF CMOS process. The device provides a bioassay platform based on an array of CMOS Hall-Effect sensors. The 2.2-mm chip is powered and interrogated by a wireless link and requires no additional packaging for use in biological fluids. Introduction Recently, biological assay platforms based on semiconductor or MEMS tech...

Tin whisker growth is a serious reliability concern for electronics using high-density packaging. Whisker growth behavior of tin lead eutectic solders doped with different neodymium concentration (5–0.1wt.%) was studied in present work. Results indicate that the Nd in the all of the Sn–Pb–Nd alloys mainly exists in NdSn3 intermetallic compound, and that the distribution of the NdSn3 phase is ve...

A novel 16-channel optical backplane bus with volume holographic optical elements (VHOEs), operating as diffraction grating beam alignment guides, was designed and fabricated for a high-performance computing system multi-slot bus. These thin film VHOEs were fabricated to diffract light beams for each bus slot into a glass wave-guiding plate (refractive index 1.52) for total internal reflection ...

Integrated photonics offers the possibility of compact, low energy, bandwidth-dense interconnects for large port count spatial optical switches, facilitating flexible and energy efficient data movement in future data communications systems. To achieve widespread adoption, intimate integration with electronics has to be possible, requiring switch design using standard microelectronic foundry pro...

Prior to the mid 1980s, the dominance of through-hole packaging of integrated circuits (ICs) provided easy access to nearly every pin of every chip on a printed circuit board. Providing accessibility and controllability for board testing was simply a matter of probing the board. With the advent of surface mount packaging, the accessibility for probing printed circuit boards began to diminish. L...

The success of printing technology in the electronics industry primarily depends on the availability of metal printing ink. Various types of commercially available metal ink are widely used in different industries such as the solar cell, radio frequency identification (RFID) and light emitting diode (LED) industries, with limited usage in semiconductor packaging. The use of printed ink in semic...