Impact of agglomeration state of gold particles on pulmonary toxicity Nanoparticle (NP) toxicity testing comes with many challenges. One of them is agglomeration/aggregation of nanoparticles in physiological media. In this study, we address the effect of agglomerated versus single particle suspensions of nanosized and submicronsized gold on the inflammatory response in the lung. Single nanopart...

Ultrasound phantoms are generally of two types. One mimics the acoustic properties of tissue (with regard to the speed of sound, average attenuation, etc.). The main purpose of the other is to approximate the sonographic appearance of tissue. The latter is often used as a biopsy training aid. Those which mimic the acoustic properties of tissue have been constructed of agar with suspended graphi...

Value prediction was proposed in the mid 90’s to enhance the performance of highend microprocessors. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are no Value Prediction implementations available on the market. Moreover, the research on Value Prediction techniques almost vanished in the early 2000’s as it was more effective to increase the number of cores than to dedicate silicon to Value...

The dewetting dynamics of ultrathin polymer films, e.g. in the model system of polystyrene on a polydimethylsiloxane-covered substrate, exhibits interesting behavior like a fast decay of the dewetting velocity and a maximum in the width of the built-up rim in the course of time. These features have been recently ascribed to the relaxation of residual stresses in the film that stem from the none...

A simple method of measuring charge in surface states as a function of the surfacepotential in MOS transistors or MOS capacitors is proposed. A constant d.c. current is fed into the gate of an MOS transistor and with the help of an operational amplifier, the gate voltage V, with respect to the bulk is plotted as a function of gate charge Q,. The gate charge as a function of the surfacepotential...

The small-signal response is discussed for double injection structures heavily doped with deep recombination centers. The discussion is based on an exact small-signal linearization of the nonlinear equations describing the steady state. Diffusion is neglected, but space charge, thermal emission, and positionand injection-level-dependent lifetimes are included. The problem is reduced to finding ...

Embedded system design is driven by strong efficiency constraints in terms of performance, silicon area and power consumption, as well as pressure on the cost and time-to-market. As of today, this forms three tough problems: 1) many-core systems are becoming mainstream, however there is still no decent approach for distributing software applications on those platforms; 2) these systems still in...

In this thesis, research on a-Si:H Schottky diodes and a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions is presented with the focus on the capacitance spectroscopy and information on electronic properties that can be derived from this technique. Last years a-Si:H/c-Si heterojunctions (HJ) have received growing attention as an approach which combines wafer and thin film technologies due to their low material consump...

The number of transistors that can be put on a given silicon area doubles on every technology generation. Consequently, the number of on-chip cores increases quickly, making it possible to build general-purpose processors with hundreds of cores in a near future. However, though having a large number of cores is beneficial for speeding up parallel code sections, it is also important to speed up ...

This thesis deals with the development of an optical sensor based on micro interferometric backscatter detection (MIBD). A price effective, highly sensitive and ready for mass production platform is the goal of this project. The thesis covers three areas. The first part of the thesis deals with theoretical models for describing the optical phenomena utilized in this technique. A model based on ...