We summarize the recipes and describe the role of sputtering parameters in producing highly c-axis Aluminum Nitride (AlN) films for piezoelectric applications. The information is collated from the analysis of around 80 journal articles that sputtered this film on variety of substrate materials, processes and equipment. This review will be a good starting point to catch up with the state-of-the-arts research on the reactive sputtering of AlN (002) thin film, as well as its evolving list of piezoelectric applications such as energy harvesters.

We report on the radio frequency (RF) sputtering of c-axis oriented ZnO thin films on top of epitaxial 3C-SiC-on-Si (111) substrates, which were then subjected to post-annealing treatment at 400, 600 and 800 °C. Grazing incident X-ray Diffraction (XRD) data show that the Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) values for O₂/Ar ratios between 30% and 60% are consistent, with a mean of 0.325° and a standard deviation of 0.03°. This is largely attributed to the smaller lattice mismatch of 5% between the ZnO (002) and SiC (111) films. The quality of the ZnO films deteriorated at the post-annealing treatment of 800 °C, as demonstrated by the increasing value of FWHM diffraction peaks, the reducing value of the peak intensity, the reducing percentage of (002) oriented area under the curve, and the increasing value of biaxial stress. We propose a simple growth model to explain the result.

BackgroundTo control the environmental conditions of the living place and to use the electrical appliances and computers etc. are one of the major challenges for the physically disabled persons and elderly people. The surface electro myography (sEMG) is employed to detect the muscle movement and used for games therapy and various others applications. This paper presents a low-cost wearable muscle switch designed to acquire sEMG signal and process it to provides the control, gaming therapy and mode of communication to the physically disabled patients.ResultsThis paper proposes a wearable low-cost muscle activated switch to assist the physically challenged members of the society. The designed muscle activated switch consists of Myoware muscle sensors that is used for data acquisition and to detect the muscle activity from the target muscle using Electromyography (EMG) signals. The Arduino board provides the human-computer interface and control to the devices based on the muscle signal. The Bluesmirf bluetooth is used for the wireless connectivity to our designed system that assists the physically disabled persons to use the computer and to control the home appliances via commercially available Grid 3 software and wifi switches. The novelty of this muscle sensor switch is that it can be connected to any bluetooth compatible devices that can be controlled from any targeted muscle. The system was tested with Grid 3 software on laptop for environmental control and text to speech conversion.ConclusionsA low cost muscle sensor based Bluetooth switch system for the physically disabled patients has been presented in this paper. The designed switch can be connected to any Bluetooth enabled device as demonstrated in this paper. The physically disable persons can select any module from the Grid 3 software such as the environmental control (to control the environment via electrical appliances), text to speech converter (for Aphasia patients), gaming therapy etc. The designed system can also be utilized to use the Bluetooth enabled electric gadgets such as Mobile Phones, Ipad and android Tablets etc. in accessibility mode.