The amount of twin formation of electroplated and thermally treated copper thin films was evaluated by electron back-scattering diffraction (EBSD) analysis. The result establishes the importance of twin formation in the analysis of stress-induced voiding, and indicates that with the inclusion of a copper alloy co-element, twin formation was significantly reduced relative to pure-copper. Further...

The influence of cathode agitation on the residual stress of electroplated gold has been investigated. Using a custom-built plating cell, a periodic, reciprocating motion was applied to silicon substrates that were electroplated with soft gold. A commercially available gold sulfite solution was used to deposit the 0.6 lm thick gold films using a current density of 3.0 mA/cm and a bath temperatu...

In high-strength steels it is often difficult to distinguish between hydrogen embrittlement and various other brittle failure mechanisms. The objective of this work was to develop a sensitive analytical procedure based on secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) that would allow in-service identification of local hydrogen accumulation, either during quality control or during failure analysis of e...

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a kind of Rapid prototyping (RP) technique, which allows direct transformation of CAD files into physical models. This paper attempts to identify and study the influence of electroplating layer thickness on the mechanical strength of Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) samples developed from the FDM process. The study is conducted on the tensile test samples...

The growth of η and η’-Cu6Sn5 has been proven as a preferential growth behavior on single crystal copper. However, a layer of single crystal copper is not possible to be electroplated. It can not be utilized in the electronic industry. In this paper, we electroplated an array of (111) uni-directional Cu pad followed by electroplating SnAg2.3. After being reflowed at 260C for 1 minute, the η-Cu6...

This note describes the design, fabrication, and testing of a novel microelectromechanical systems Coulter counter. The Coulter counter will be used to detect and monitor impedance changes of cells as a function of time in response to different experimental extracellular environments. The device consists of SU-8 (negative photoresist) microchannels, vertical electroplated electrodes, polydimeth...

Copper kills bacteria rapidly by a mechanism that is not yet fully resolved. The antibacterial property of copper has raised interest in its use in hospitals, in place of plastic or stainless steel. On the latter surfaces, bacteria can survive for days or even weeks. Copper surfaces could thus provide a powerful accessory measure to curb nosocomial infections. We here investigated the effect of...