The effects of wire and ribbon bond interconnection on the transmission characteristics at millimeter wave frequency range was presented. The insertion loss and return loss was closely related with the ratio of the signal line width to that of bonded wire or ribbon. The most promise condition for low loss interconnection was that the width of bonded wire or ribbon should be compatible to the width of signal lines. In the actual fabrication of LTCC amp module, the insertion loss of packaging is very small which means that the loss due to bonding is nearly negligible. However, the S11 and S22 degraded severely due to the difference of the types of transmission lines between chip and packaging module. A new transition structure was introduced in order to compensate this difference of transmission lines.

The synthesis of organic and inorganic nano- and microspheres has attracted much interest for a variety of applications ranging from drug delivery to chemical storage and catalysis. We recently demonstrated the assembly of magnetic nanoparticles and polycations into hybrid microspheres in a single-step synthesis via complex coacervation. These microspheres showed viability for bio-applications as indicated by toxicity tests, and are therefore potential targeted drug delivery devices, as they can be directed magnetically. This work reports the recent progress on the potential use of these assemblies in drug release by controlling their porosity. Fluorescein tagged dextran molecules with different MW have been infiltrated into these entities to determine critical pore size by confocal fluorescence microscopy. Different physicochemical characterization results are also presented.

Dielectric properties of bismuth-zinc-niobium oxide (Bi1.5Zn1.0Nb1.5O7, BZN) thin films have been investigated for embedded capacitor. Crystalline BZN has a pyrochlore structure in nature and shows a dielectric constant of ∼ 200 and very low leakage current when crystallized. Since the process temperature is limited to < 200 due to an organic based substrate in printed circuit board, as-deposited BZN film is composed of an amorphous phase, confirmed by XRD analysis. However, it shows remarkably high dielectric constant of 113. It makes BZN to be a proper candidate as a decoupling embedded capacitor in power delivery circuits. Effects of post treatment such as oxygen plasma treatment and low temperature thermal annealing on dielectric properties of BZN thin films are studied. By optimizing deposition conditions, amorphous BZN thin film is well processed in the current PCB process and provides a capacitance density as high as 218 nF/cm2 and leakage current less than 1 μA/cm2 at 3V.

In this paper, authors examine the design and implementation of a new charge feedback control circuitry for a voltage amplifier used in driving of a piezoelectric actuator. Actuators driven in the usual voltage feedback regime display a nonlinear voltage-displacement relationship, known as hysteresis. Use of the new charge feedback control circuitry resulted in significant reduction (70%) of the hysteresis-related nonlinearity.