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Article
Publication date: 1 March 1990

ZAKEL, E., SIMON, J. and SCHULER, S., Verbindungstechnik in der Elektronik, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 53–57, June (1990) TAB is an attractive microconnecting technology for chips with a…

Abstract

ZAKEL, E., SIMON, J. and SCHULER, S., Verbindungstechnik in der Elektronik, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 53–57, June (1990) TAB is an attractive microconnecting technology for chips with a high number of I/Os. The principles of TAB technology and some new developments are presented. These are concerned with the problems of reducing pressure during gang bonding and the absence of the possibility of bumping single chips. The solutions presented are bonding with a liquid gold‐tin cushion for stress compensation and the application of selective electroless plating solutions for the bumping process. The possibilities of making TAB technology available for small and medium‐size companies are pointed out.

Details

Microelectronics International, vol. 7 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-5362

Article
Publication date: 1 March 1991

K.K.T. Chung, E. Avery, A. Boyle, G. Dreier, W. Koehn, G. Govaert and D. Theunissen

The complexity of microelectronic circuits, their scale of integration and clock speed requirements have been increasing steadily. All these changes have the effect of increasing…

Abstract

The complexity of microelectronic circuits, their scale of integration and clock speed requirements have been increasing steadily. All these changes have the effect of increasing the power density of the microcircuits. ICs with a power of several watts and an area of over a square centimetre are quite common. Thus, there is more heat generated per device at die, component and substrate‐attach levels of electronic packaging. In order to maintain reliability of finished products, the junction temperature of the constituent devices must be kept low. It has been demonstrated that thermal management can be one key to lowering the cost and increasing the performance life of microelectronic products. The cost‐effectiveness of lowering device temperature has been demonstrated to be dramatic compared with the cost of thermal management materials. Proper thermal management of advanced microelectronic devices has to be addressed at all levels. One should address the problem from the basic level of die‐attach, through component‐attach, and eventually substrate‐attach to thermal drains. Thermal management is almost invariably coupled with a thermally induced stress problem. The increase in temperature at the device level also means a larger fluctuation of temperature from the ambient. Each cycle of on‐off for the device represents one thermal cycle. Stress‐induced failure due to coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch is much more acute for higher power devices. In this paper, the authors address the issue of thermally induced stress on the microelectronic product at all levels of packaging, with major emphasis on component and substrate levels. Various ways and examples of reducing or eliminating this stress, which is a major cause of device failures, will be demonstrated. One of the proven methods is through the use of low Tg epoxies with high thermal stability.

Details

Microelectronics International, vol. 8 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-5362

Article
Publication date: 1 February 1993

O. Spalding

An important disadvantage of conducting adhesives is their inferior heat conductivity when compared with soft solder such as Sn60Pb40. Thermal simulations, however, show that, by…

Abstract

An important disadvantage of conducting adhesives is their inferior heat conductivity when compared with soft solder such as Sn60Pb40. Thermal simulations, however, show that, by using thinner layers of adhesive than of solder, the module's thermal resistance does not increase greatly. Test modules with four different silver filled epoxy adhesives and tin/lead solder were manufactured. These test modules contained power diodes, 30 A, 1000 V, die bonded onto Ag/Pt thick film conductors on alumina. The die bond adhesive layer thicknesses were typically 30 or 40 μm. For die bond solder layers the thickness was 90 μm. The alumina substrates were connected to 3 mm thick copper plates with filled epoxy or silicone adhesive. The thickness of these layers was 150 μm or 50 μm, respectively. Thermal resistance of the structures was measured. The results showed that good adhesion between joined surfaces is essential for optimised heat flow. The heat conductivity of an adhesive was only a secondary factor affecting the structure's thermal resistance. When the adhesive joint is of good quality, the replacement of solder with conductive adhesives does not increase the module's thermal resistance any more than as shown by the simulations. It should, however, be remembered that the printing of thin (< 20 μm) uniform layers is not always possible.

Details

Microelectronics International, vol. 10 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-5362

Article
Publication date: 23 November 2010

Nils Hoeller, Christoph Reinke, Jana Neumann, Sven Groppe, Christian Werner and Volker Linnemann

In the last decade, XML has become the de facto standard for data exchange in the world wide web (WWW). The positive benefits of data exchangeability to support system and…

Abstract

Purpose

In the last decade, XML has become the de facto standard for data exchange in the world wide web (WWW). The positive benefits of data exchangeability to support system and software heterogeneity on application level and easy WWW integration make XML an ideal data format for many other application and network scenarios like wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Moreover, the usage of XML encourages using standardized techniques like SOAP to adapt the service‐oriented paradigm to sensor network engineering. Nevertheless, integrating XML usage in WSN data management is limited by the low hardware resources that require efficient XML data management strategies suitable to bridge the general resource gap. The purpose of this paper is to present two separate strategies on integrating XML data management in WSNs.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper presents two separate strategies on integrating XML data management in WSNs that have been implemented and are running on today's sensor node platforms. The paper shows how XML data can be processed and how XPath queries can be evaluated dynamically. In an extended evaluation, the performance of both strategies concerning the memory and energy efficiency are compared and both solutions are shown to have application domains fully applicable on today's sensor node products.

Findings

This work shows that dynamic XML data management and query evaluation is possible on sensor nodes with strict limitations in terms of memory, processing power and energy supply.

Originality/value

The paper presents an optimized stream‐based XML compression technique and shows how XML queries can be evaluated on compressed XML bit streams using generic pushdown automata. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first complete approach on integrating dynamic XML data management into WSNs.

Details

International Journal of Web Information Systems, vol. 6 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1744-0084

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 June 2016

David Forbes and Pornpit Wongthongtham

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications…

Abstract

Purpose

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications services in many health services is limited, leaving enormous gaps in the broad understanding of its role in health care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to address a specific (intercultural) area of healthcare communications consumer disadvantage; and it examines the potential for ICT exploitation through the lens of a conceptual framework. The opportunity to pursue a new solutions pathway has been amplified in recent times through the development of computer-based ontologies and the resultant knowledge from ontologist activity and consequential research publishing.

Design/methodology/approach

A specific intercultural area of patient disadvantage arises from variations in meaning and understanding of patient and clinician words, phrases and non-verbal expression. Collection and localization of data concepts, their attributes and individual instances were gathered from an Aboriginal trainee nurse focus group and from a qualitative gap analysis (QGA) of 130 criteria-selected sources of literature. These concepts, their relationships and semantic interpretations populate the computer ontology. The ontology mapping involves two domains, namely, Aboriginal English (AE) and Type II diabetes care guidelines. This is preparatory to development of the Patient Practitioner Assistive Communications (PPAC) system for Aboriginal rural and remote patient primary care.

Findings

The combined QGA and focus group output reported has served to illustrate the call for three important drivers of change. First, there is no evidence to contradict the hypothesis that patient-practitioner interview encounters for many Australian Aboriginal patients and wellbeing outcomes are unsatisfactory at best. Second, there is a potent need for cultural competence knowledge and practice uptake on the part of health care providers; and third, the key contributory component to determine success or failures within healthcare for ethnic minorities is communication. Communication, however, can only be of value in health care if in practice it supports shared cognition; and mutual cognition is rarely achievable when biopsychosocial and other cultural worldview differences go unchallenged.

Research limitations/implications

There has been no direct engagement with remote Aboriginal communities in this work to date. The authors have initially been able to rely upon a cohort of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with relevant cultural expertise and extended family relationships. Among these advisers are health care practitioners, academics, trainers, Aboriginal education researchers and workshop attendees. It must therefore be acknowledged that as is the case with the QGA, the majority of the concept data is from third parties. The authors have also discovered that urban influences and cultural sensitivities tend to reduce the extent of, and opportunity to, witness AE usage, thereby limiting the ability to capture more examples of code-switching. Although the PPAC system concept is qualitatively well developed, pending future work planned for rural and remote community engagement the authors presently regard the work as mostly allied to a hypothesis on ontology-driven communications. The concept data population of the AE home talk/health talk ontology has not yet reached a quantitative critical mass to justify application design model engineering and real-world testing.

Originality/value

Computer ontologies avail us of the opportunity to use assistive communications technology applications as a dynamic support system to elevate the pragmatic experience of health care consultations for both patients and practitioners. The human-machine interactive development and use of such applications is required just to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare and the growing health knowledge transfer environment. In an age when the worldwide web, communications devices and social media avail us of opportunities to confront the barriers described the authors have begun the first construction of a merged schema for two domains that already have a seemingly intractable negative connection. Through the ontology discipline of building syntactically and semantically robust and accessible concepts; explicit conceptual relationships; and annotative context-oriented guidance; the authors are working towards addressing health literacy and wellbeing outcome deficiencies of benefit to the broader communities of disadvantage patients.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 29 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 February 2009

Tobias Buchner

This article starts with a brief overview of the history of housing for people with intellectual disability in Austria. The system of care and Austrian disability policy are also…

Abstract

This article starts with a brief overview of the history of housing for people with intellectual disability in Austria. The system of care and Austrian disability policy are also examined, focusing on implementation of deinstitutionalisation and community living. The following analysis of services provided in the field of housing for people with intellectual disabilities shows that support is provided in undistinguished, generalised service packages based on a competency model. Academic research on community living is quite rare in Austria, and fails to take into account the subjective perspective of people with intellectual disabilities.

Details

Tizard Learning Disability Review, vol. 14 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1359-5474

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 July 2013

Susanna Levina Middelberg

The purpose of this paper is to identify, present and compare agricultural production financing alternatives available to grain producers in South Africa. From the South African…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify, present and compare agricultural production financing alternatives available to grain producers in South Africa. From the South African perspective, agricultural land cannot always be utilised as collateral and therefore alternative financing has developed.

Design/methodology/approach

The study makes use of an exploratory study by applying qualitative techniques. The research population was agricultural finance providers in South Africa and semi‐structured interviews were conducted with representatives of the sample.

Findings

The production financing alternatives identified and presented include: grain contract financing; grain contract financing with additional collateral; and corporate farming. A comparison of these alternatives indicates that although the traditional balance sheet financing is a cheaper form of financing, using agricultural land as collateral has a number of limitations, especially within the South African context.

Practical implications

Using agricultural land as collateral to obtain production financing is not always viable considering the present South African agricultural environment. Commercial grain producers should therefore consider the identified alternative production financing.

Originality/value

Limited research on agricultural production finance from the South African perspective has been performed. Furthermore, no previous research on identifying production financing alternatives without utilising agricultural land as collateral has been performed. This paper therefore provides new knowledge by combining South African practice with theory.

Details

Agricultural Finance Review, vol. 73 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0002-1466

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 21 December 2018

Marcelle Harran and Howard William Theunissen

In 2004, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) required a curriculum responsiveness to the teaching and learning of literacies at the programme level, which needed to be…

300

Abstract

Purpose

In 2004, the Council for Higher Education (CHE) required a curriculum responsiveness to the teaching and learning of literacies at the programme level, which needed to be addressed across all disciplines. This study aims to describe a situated higher education (HE) collaboration project between mechanical engineering and the Department of Applied Language Studies (DALS) at Nelson Mandela University from 2010 to 2014. The collaboration project aimed to develop the literacies levels of engineering students, reduce the first-year attrition rate and prepare engineering students to meet the high graduate attribute expectations of a competitive workplace amid employer concerns that engineering graduate communication competencies were lacking and insufficient.

Design/methodology/approach

The collaboration study used a mixed-method approach, which included student and lecturer questionnaires, as well as an interview with one engineering lecturer to determine his perceptions of the collaboration practices instituted. As the sample was purposeful, two mechanical engineer lecturers and 32 second-year mechanical engineering students from 2012 to 2013 were selected as the study’s participants, as they met the study’s specific needs. From the questionnaire responses and transcribed interview data, codes were identified to describe the themes that emerged, namely, rating the collaboration practices, attitudes to the course, report feedback provided and report template use.

Findings

Most of the student participants viewed the collaboration practices positively and identified their attitude as “positive” and “enthusiastic” to the language/engineering report collaboration initiative. The report feedback practices were viewed as improving writing skills and enabling the students to relate report writing practices to workplace needs. The engineering lecturers also found that the collaboration practices were enabling and improved literacy levels, although time was identified as a constraint. During the four-year collaboration period, the language practitioner increasingly gained report content knowledge, as well as unpacking the specific rhetorical structures required to produce the report text by co-constructing knowledge with the mechanical engineering lecturers.

Research limitations/implications

Studies have shown that language practitioners and discipline lecturers need to change their conceptualisation of academic discourses as generic transferable skills and autonomous bodies of knowledge. Little benefit is derived from this model, least of all for the students who grapple with disciplinary forms of writing and the highly technical language of engineering. Discipline experts often tend to conflate understandings of language, literacy and discourse, which lead to simplistic understandings of how students may be inducted into engineering discourses. Therefore, spaces to nurture and extend language practitioner and discipline-expert collaborations are needed to embed the teaching and learning of discipline-specific literacies within disciplines.

Practical implications

For the collaboration project, the language practitioner and mechanical engineering lecturers focused their collaboration on discussing and negotiating the rhetorical and content requirements of the Design 3 report as a genre. To achieve the goal of making tacit knowledge and discourse explicit, takes time and effort, so without the investment of time and buy-in, interaction would not be sustained, and the collaboration would have been unproductive. As a result, the collaboration project required regular meetings, class visits and negotiations, as well as a language of description so that the often tacit report discourse conventions and requirements could be mutually understood and pedagogically overt to produce “legitimate texts” (Luckett, 2012 p. 19).

Social implications

In practice, peer collaboration is often a messy, complex and lengthy process, which requires systematic and sustained spaces to provide discourse scaffolding so that the criteria for producing legitimate design reports are not opaque, but transparent and explicit pedagogically. The study also describes the organisational circumstances that generated the collaboration, as establishing and sustaining a collaborative culture over time requires planning, on-going dialogic spaces, as well as support and buy-in at various institutional levels to maintain the feasibility of the collaboration practice.

Originality/value

Literacy and discourse collaboration tends to reduce role differentiation amongst language teachers and specialists, which results in shared expertise for problem-solving that could provide multiple solutions to literacy and discourse learning issues. This finding is important, especially as most studies focus on collaboration practices in isolation, whilst fewer studies have focused on the process of collaboration between language practitioners and disciplinary specialists as has been described in this study.

Details

Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, vol. 17 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1726-0531

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 August 2017

Diana C. Sisson and Shannon A. Bowen

Following a report released by the UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, multinational corporations like Starbucks, Google, and Amazon found themselves in a firestorm of…

5562

Abstract

Purpose

Following a report released by the UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, multinational corporations like Starbucks, Google, and Amazon found themselves in a firestorm of criticism for not paying or paying minimal taxes after earning significant profits in the UK for the past three years. Allegations of tax evasion led to a serious crisis for Starbucks in the UK, which played out in a public forum via social media. The researchers explored whether Starbucks’ corporate ethics insulated its reputation from negative media coverage of alleged tax evasion evidenced in its “hijacked” social media “#spreadthecheer” campaign. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

Using an exploratory case study analysis of news articles, Starbucks’ annual reports, #spreadthecheer Tweets, and David Michelli’s The Starbucks Experience, data collection helped to inform the discussion of authenticity and whether it helped to insulate Starbucks’ reputation during its crisis in the UK.

Findings

Authenticity is key when organizations face a turbulent environment and active publics and stakeholder groups. Findings from this study also suggested proactive reputation management strategies and tactics, grounded in the organization’s corporate culture and transparency, could have diffused some of the uproar from its key publics.

Originality/value

Authentic corporate cultures should align with corporate business practices in order to reduce the potential for crises to occur. It is possible that ethical core values and a strong organizational approach to ethics help to insulate its reputation among publics during a crisis.

Details

Journal of Communication Management, vol. 21 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1363-254X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 June 2022

Suk Chong Tong and Fanny Fong Yee Chan

With the prevailing use of online communication platforms, this study revisits the definitions of trust in an online context. By exploring organizational online communications…

Abstract

Purpose

With the prevailing use of online communication platforms, this study revisits the definitions of trust in an online context. By exploring organizational online communications from a practitioners' perspective, a conceptual framework that illustrates the nature of trust and its relationship with dialogic communication between organizations and organizations' stakeholders in the digital era is proposed.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 27 in-depth interviews were conducted with public relations and marketing practitioners involved in coordinating organizational online communications in Hong Kong.

Findings

From the practitioners' perspective, stakeholders' online trust toward an organization, which is a hybridity of initial and rapidly evolving trust, begins with stakeholders swift and initial judgment of the organization according to category-based cues (including knowledge-based attributes of the organization, institutional cues, and particular attributes of online dialogic communication) available on online platforms and further develops over time. Practitioners regard the integration of online and offline communication platforms to be the most effective way to build trust in organization–stakeholder relationships in the digital era, while dialectical tensions can hinder trust formed in online communication.

Originality/value

Along with the proposed conceptual framework, this study advances the discussion of online trust in public relations practices from the practitioners' perspective. A qualitative approach provides rich descriptions that may help to enrich theories in public relations and communication management regarding the interplay of trust and dialogic communication in organizational practices in the digital era.

Details

Journal of Communication Management, vol. 26 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1363-254X

Keywords

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