Chalcogen-Containing Manganese Carbonyl Clusters: Synthesis and Structural Transformations

Recently, we have developed several synthetic routes to the new classes of chalcogen-containing manganese carbonyl clusters, and the interesting structural transformations and reactivity of the resultant clusters have been investigated as well. In this short review, the syntheses and bonding modes of the sulfur, selenium, and tellurium-containing manganese carbonyl complexes reported by our laboratory will be presented, and the cluster growth and transformation will be systematically compared and discussed.     

Synthesis and ion‐sensing phenomena of two new helical conjugated oligomers containing 1,10‐phenanthroline and oligo‐alkylthiophene

Two new 1,10‐phenanthroline (Phen) containing conjugated oligomers, oligo‐3,8‐bis(4‐octylthiophene‐2‐yl)‐1,10‐phenanthroline) (PDTPh) and oligo‐3,8‐bis‐(4‐octyl‐5‐(4‐ctylthiophene‐2‐yl)thiophene‐2‐yl)‐1,10‐phenanthroline) (PTTPh), as well as their corresponding monomers (OTPhOT and OTOTPhOTOT) were prepared and their metal ion‐sensing properties were investigated. The oligomers showed high thermal stability, good proccessibility, and gave varied color when reacted with different metal ions. Oligomers also showed distinct responses toward metal ions when compared with their corresponding monomers, suggesting that the ionochromic responses were determined by not only the coordinating ability of Phen unit but also the conformation of oligomer chains. Moreover, the differences in the ion‐sensing behaviors between OTPhOT and OTOTPhOTOT also suggested that the coordination ability of Phen depends on its substituents. The oligo‐alkylthiophene moieties in PDTPh and PTTPh acted as spacers to reorganize the conformation of the oligomer chains, as well as the electron donating groups to adjust the coordination ability of the Phen. These findings provide a clue for designing Phen‐containing ion‐sensors for specified ion‐sensing applications. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 46: 1586–1597, 2008     

Microwave switching behaviors of Fe/Ag/Fe/Ag epitaxial films

In this study, Fe/Ag/Fe/Ag ferromagnetic structures were epitaxially grown on a GaAs(1 0 0) substrate. Using the Network Analyzer (Agilent 8510C), FMR (ferromagnetic resonant) signals were observed in samples as the in-plane magnetic field was applied to either hard- or easy-axes. Of interest was that our sample demonstrated a FMR-switching behavior in hard-axis but not in easy-axis. The detecting data showed that the switch magnetic field was much smaller than what has been stated previously in Fe/Cu/Fe systems by other laboratories. In addition to the frequency switch in FMR, we also observed a magnetic reversal behavior in its M–H curve. Data presented that both of the FMR and magnetic reverse took place in the same direction (hard-axis).     

Classroom Assessment: Teachers’ Conceptions and Practices in Mathematics

The purpose of this study was to explore teachers’ conceptions about assessment and their actual assessment practices. The sample for the study consisted of 269 mathematics teachers in Grades 1 through 4 in a southeastern state. The teachers completed a cross-sectional, Likert-scale survey. Using chi-square to examine the relationships between grade level and teachers’ conceptions and between grade level and teachers’ practices, the researchers found several significant differences, transcending an indication of relationship by chance.     

An acoustic echo canceler

The authors describe an experimental 1000-tap single-chip adaptive AEC (acoustic echo canceler) occupying 28 mm² of die area in 3-μm, double-metal, p-well, CMOS technology. A floating-point format and power-of-two multiplications are chosen to simplify the hardware. To exploit pipelining and parallelism, interleaved data storage and multibank memory sharing the same addresses are designed. Hardware minimization is considered from both the system and the architecture perspective. In a loudspeaker telephone application, 27 dB of echo reduction is achieved after 1 s of convergence time     

Baud-rate channel equalization in nanometer technologies

Chip design technology has been accelerating the advances of the communication technology in the past decades because a chip with larger computing capacity can support a communication system of higher transmission bandwidth. Since the communication transceivers are now in the multigiga bits/second range, the computing bandwidth requirement for a transceiver has grown into several hundreds of giga-FLOPs second range. To support such big computing tasks on a chip, nanometer technology and pure baud-rate computing without pipelining and oversampling overheads will be much more important. Meanwhile, baud-rate computing does not require extra-digital control for the digital-signal processing functions. This can greatly reduce the power consumption and chip area of a VLSI system. Yet, there are several design issues, such as the output signal-to-noise ratio, algorithmic mapping for computing model, and the critical path for the datapath design of the VLSI computing function, which need to be resolved under small silicon area requirements A novel baud-rate channel equalization architecture based on training coefficient relaxation techniques is presented in this paper to resolve these issues in nanotechnology such as 130- and 90-nm technologies. This design paradigm clearly demonstrates its advantage to enable multiport transceiver system-on-a-chip designs in nanometer technology. Trends for the baud-rate computing in smaller geometry are also explained.     

Li0.5Fe2.5−xMnxO4 ferrite sintered from microwave-induced combustion

Li_0.5Fe_2.5−xMn_xO₄ (0≦x≦1.0) powders with small and uniformly sized particles were successfully synthesized by microwave-induced combustion, using lithium nitrate, ferric nitrate, manganese nitrate and carbohydrazide as the starting materials. The process takes only a few minutes to obtain as-received Mn-substituted lithium ferrite powders. The resultant powders annealed at 650 ^°C for 2 h and were investigated by thermogravimeter/differential thermal analyzer (TG/DTA), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM), and thermomagnetic analysis (TMA). The results revealed that the Mn content were strongly influenced the magnetic properties and Curie temperature of Mn-substituted lithium ferrite powder. As for sintered Li_0.5Fe_2.5−xMn_xO₄ specimens, substituting an appropriate amount of Mn for Fe in the Li_0.5Fe_2.5−xMn_xO₄ specimens markedly improved the complex permeability and loss tangent.     

A Compact Slot Antenna Utilizing a Right/Left-Handed Transmission Line Feed

A novel compact planar antenna utilizing cascaded right/left-handed transmission lines is proposed. The significance of layout planning with respect to radiation is investigated and discussed in this paper. Two segments of transmission lines of the same electrical length with opposite signs are cascaded to provide zero phase at the operation frequency. The closed-form formulas for the equivalent circuit of a transmission line are used for circuit design. Both antenna layout and radiation mechanism are discussed. For experimental demonstration, the proposed antenna operating at 2.45 GHz was implemented on an FR4 substrate. The topology using several patches has quite smaller size than the conventional patch antenna. Besides, a fairly omnidirectional radiation pattern was measured.     

OVSF code channel assignment with dynamic code set and buffering adjustment for UMTS

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) provides users variable data rate services, which adopts wide-band code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) as the radio access technology. In WCDMA, orthogonal variable spreading factor (OVSF) codes are assigned to different users to preserve the orthogonality between users' physical channels. The data rate supported by an OVSF code depends on its spreading factor (SF). An OVSF code with smaller SF can support higher data rate services than that with larger SFs. Randomly assigning the OVSF code with a large SF to a user may preclude a larger number of OVSF codes with small SFs, which may cause lots of high data rate call requests to be blocked. Therefore the OVSF code assignment affects the performance of the UMTS network significantly. In this paper, we propose two OVSF code assignment schemes CADPB1 and CADPB2 for UMTS. Both schemes are simple and with low system overhead. The simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performances for our schemes. Our study indicates that our proposed schemes outperform previously proposed schemes in terms of the weighted blocking probability and fairness index. Our schemes improve the call acceptance rate by slightly introducing call waiting time.