The majority of solar cells produced today are made with crystalline silicon wafers, which are typically manufactured by growing a large piece of silicon and then sawing it into ~200 pm wafers, a process which converts one-half of the high-purity silicon into waste sawdust. To bypass the sawing process, a new method for making high-quality multicrystalline wafers without sawing is under develop...

OBJECTIVE To determine patient experience of pain during treatment with fixed orthodontic appliances, expectations of pain during debond and whether biting on a soft acrylic wafer during debond decreases pain experience. DESIGN Multicentre randomized controlled trial. SETTING Three UK hospital based orthodontic departments: Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham Dental Hospital ...

The reach and impact of the Internet of Things will depend on the availability of low-cost, smart sensors-"low cost" for ubiquitous presence, and "smart" for connectivity and autonomy. By using wafer-level processes not only for the smart sensor fabrication and integration, but also for packaging, we can further greatly reduce the cost of sensor components and systems as well as further decreas...

Motivated by the yield optimization problem in semiconductor manufacturing, we model the wafer to wafer integration problem as a special multi-dimensional assignment problem (called WWI-m), and study it from an approximation point of view. We give approximation algorithms achieving an approximation factor of 3 2 and 4 3 for WWI-3, and we show that extensions of these algorithms to the case of a...

As high volume semiconductor manufacturing approaches sub-65nm transistor technology nodes, process excursions during production and their avoidance are consuming sizeable engineering resources. Daily fabrication production can be significantly impacted by process induced defects and result in increase wafer scrap caused by poor wafer handling, tool aborts during process and resultant suppresse...

The objective of this project is to acquire in-situ data during chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) including slurry film thickness and flow, wafer-pad contact, waferscale friction, and small-scale shear force measurements. The unifying project goal is to utilize a consistent set of experimental data to develop better physical understanding of material removal rate (MRR) and polish quality ...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to prepare a novel fentanyl wafer formulation by a freeze-drying method, and to evaluate its in vitro and in vivo release characteristics, including its bioavailability via the sublingual route. METHODS The wafer formulation was prepared by freeze-drying an aqueous dispersion of fentanyl containing sodium carboxymethylcellulose and amylogum as matrix...