Integration of microbolometers with infrared microstrip antennas

We report on various integration schemes of infrared microbolometers with microstrip antennas. The first integration design consists of two gold (Au) rectangular microstrip patches coupled along the radiating edges by a narrow niobium (Nb) strip. Devices using silicon oxide are compared to devices using amorphous silicon as antenna substrate. An extension of the twin-patch detector design is the microstrip dipole antenna-coupled microbolometer. Two ways of connecting the device to the contact pads via narrow dc leads are presented and compared. The contribution of the dc leads to the detector response is eliminated by directly connecting the dipole to the contact pads. The thermal isolation of the microbolometer from the silicon wafer is improved by incorporating air into the antenna dielectric substrate. This leads to higher detector responsivity and shifts the resonance towards longer antennas. The implementation of a bridge microstrip dipole antenna structure is also discussed.     

A tabu search heuristic for solving the CLSP with backlogging and set-up carry-over

In this paper, the multi-item, single-level, capacitated, dynamic lot sizing problem with set-up carry-over and backlogging, abbreviated to CLSP⁺, is considered. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem. A heuristic method consisting of four elements: (1) a demand shifting rule, (2) lot size determination rules, (3) checking feasibility conditions and (4) set-up carry-over determination, provides us with an initial feasible solution. The resulting feasible solution is improved by adopting the corresponding set-up and set-up carry-over schedule and re-optimizing it by solving a minimum-cost network flow problem. Then the improved solution is used as a starting solution for a tabu search procedure, with the value of moves assessed using the same minimum-cost network problem. Computational results on randomly generated problems show that the algorithm, which is coded in C++, is able to provide optimal solutions or solutions extremely close to optimal. The computational efficiency makes it possible to solve reasonably large problem instances routinely on a personal computer.     

A short proof that N 3 is not a circle containment order

A partially ordered set P is called a circle containment order provided one can assign to each xP a circle C _x so that . We show that the infinite three-dimensional poset N ³ is not a circle containment order and note that it is still unknown whether or not [n]³ is such an order for arbitrarily large n.