A high-performance flow-focusing geometry for spontaneous generation of monodispersed droplets is demonstrated. In this geometry, a two-phase flow is forced through a circular orifice integrated inside a silicon-based microchannel. The orifice with its cusp-like edge exerts a ring of maximized stress around the flow and ensures controlled breakup of droplets for a wide range of flow rates, forming highly periodic and reproducible dispersions. The droplet generation can be remarkably rapid, exceeding 10(4) s(-1) for water-in-oil droplets and reaching 10(3) s(-1) for oil-in-water droplets, being largely controlled by flow rate of the continuous phase. The droplet diameter and generation frequency are compared against a quasi-equilibrium model based on the critical Capillary number. The droplets are obtained despite the low Capillary number, below the critical value identified by the ratio of viscosities between the two phases and simple shear-flow.
Reversible logic has shown potential to have extensive applications in emerging technologies such as quantum computing, optical computing, quantum dot cellular automata as well as ultra low power VLSI circuits. Recently, several researchers have focused their efforts on the design and synthesis of efficient reversible logic circuits. In these works, the primary design focus has been on optimizing the number of reversible gates and the garbage outputs. The number of reversible gates is not a good metric of optimization as each reversible gate is of different type and computational complexity, and thus will have a different quantum cost and delay. The computational complexity of a reversible gate can be represented by its quantum cost. Further, delay constitutes an important metric, which has not been addressed in prior works on reversible sequential circuits as a design metric to be optimized. In this work, we present novel designs of reversible sequential circuits that are optimized in terms of quantum cost, delay and the garbage outputs. The optimized designs of several reversible sequential circuits are presented including the D Latch, the JK latch, the T latch and the SR latch, and their corresponding reversible master-slave flip-flop designs. The proposed master-slave flip-flop designs have the special property that they don't require the inversion of the clock for use in the slave latch. Further, we introduce a novel strategy of cascading a Fredkin gate at the outputs of a reversible latch to realize the designs of the Fredkin gate based asynchronous set/reset D latch and the master-slave D flip-flop. Finally, as an example of complex reversible sequential circuits, the reversible logic design of the universal shift register is introduced. The proposed reversible sequential designs were verified through simulations using Verilog HDL and simulation results are presented.
The BOSCH etch process, which is commonly used in microelectromechanical system fabrication, has been extensively investigated in this work for implementation in through-silicon via (TSV) technology for 3D-microsystems packaging. The present work focuses on thermo-mechanical stresses caused by thermal loading due to post-TSV processes and their impact on the electrical performance of through-silicon copper interconnects. A test vehicle with deep silicon copper-plated comb structure was designed to study and evaluate different deep silicon via etch processes and its effect on the electrical leakage characteristics under various electrical and thermal stress conditions. It has been shown that the leakage current between the comb interconnect structures increases with an increase in sidewall roughness and that it can be significantly lowered by smoothening the sidewalls. It was also shown that by tailoring a non-BOSCH etch process with the normal BOSCH process, a similar leakage current reduction can be achieved. It was also shown through thermo-mechanical simulation studies that there is a clear correlation between high leakage current behavior due to non-uniform Ta barrier deposition over the rough sidewalls and the thermo-mechanical stress induced by post-TSV processes.
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