Seeking Shared Success: Business Model Innovation Through Mergers, Affiliations, and Alliances

Learn how alliances, affiliations, and mergers represent a path to enhanced sustainability and greater impact for community foundations. Hear perspectives from community foundation leaders, access tools for considering a new structure, and read case studies from six community foundations

Exchange coupling between silicon donors: the crucial role of the central cell and mass anisotropy

Donors in silicon are now demonstrated as one of the leading candidates for implementing qubits and quantum information processing. Single qubit operations, measurements and long coherence times are firmly established, but progress on controlling two qubit interactions has been slower. One reason for this is that the inter donor exchange coupling has been predicted to oscillate with separation, making it hard to estimate in device designs. We present a multivalley effective mass theory of a donor pair in silicon, including both a central cell potential and the effective mass anisotropy intrinsic in the Si conduction band. We are able to accurately describe the single donor properties of valley-orbit coupling and the spatial extent of donor wave functions, highlighting the importance of fitting measured values of hyperfine coupling and the orbital energy of the $1s$ levels. Ours is a simple framework that can be applied flexibly to a range of experimental scenarios, but it is nonetheless able to provide fast and reliable predictions. We use it to estimate the exchange coupling between two donor electrons and we find a smoothing of its expected oscillations, and predict a monotonic dependence on separation if two donors are spaced precisely along the [100] direction.Comment: Published version. Corrected b and B values from previous versio

Design Management Capability in Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of Xiaomi

In recent years, entrepreneurship has become a popular topic and attracted many young people to start their own companies. In entrepreneurship, design was generally viewed as essential to innovation, replacing the conventional role of the engineer. Unlike traditional businesses, which generally take a longer time to become established in the more stable economic context of mass-production, current start-ups have to face fierce competition and have the tendency to expand rapidly and accommodate the dynamic business environment. Consequently, design management is considered to be crucial to business growth, since it contributes to both competitive advantages and strategic flexibility. However, start-up companies are well-known for their high failure ratio. This triggered our initial research question: what is the role of design in a start-up to support it in achieving success? Through a case study of Xiaomi, a well-known successful entrepreneurship in China, the new capabilities of entrepreneurial design management were reported. It was further classified into three key topics in line with the three stages of entrepreneurial business development. Difference with design management capabilities reported in previous studies, the new capabilities show the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial design management

Efficient state reduction methods for PLA-based sequential circuits

Experiences with heuristics for the state reduction of finite-state machines are presented and two new heuristic algorithms described in detail. Results on machines from the literature and from the MCNC benchmark set are shown. The area of the PLA implementation of the combinational component and the design time are used as figures of merit. The comparison of such parameters, when the state reduction step is included in the design process and when it is not, suggests that fast state-reduction heuristics should be implemented within FSM automatic synthesis systems

Electron Exchange Coupling for Single Donor Solid-State Qubits

Inter-valley interference between degenerate conduction band minima has been shown to lead to oscillations in the exchange energy between neighbouring phosphorus donor electron states in silicon \cite{Koiller02,Koiller02A}. These same effects lead to an extreme sensitivity of the exchange energy on the relative orientation of the donor atoms, an issue of crucial importance in the construction silicon-based spin quantum computers. In this article we calculate the donor electron exchange coupling as a function of donor position incorporating the full Bloch structure of the Kohn-Luttinger electron wavefunctions. It is found that due to the rapidly oscillating nature of the terms they produce, the periodic part of the Bloch functions can be safely ignored in the Heitler-London integrals as was done by Koiller et. al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88,027903(2002),Phys. Rev. B. 66,115201(2002)], significantly reducing the complexity of calculations. We address issues of fabrication and calculate the expected exchange coupling between neighbouring donors that have been implanted into the silicon substrate using an 15keV ion beam in the so-called 'top down' fabrication scheme for a Kane solid-state quantum computer. In addition we calculate the exchange coupling as a function of the voltage bias on control gates used to manipulate the electron wavefunctions and implement quantum logic operations in the Kane proposal, and find that these gate biases can be used to both increase and decrease the magnitude of the exchange coupling between neighbouring donor electrons. The zero-bias results reconfirm those previously obtained by Koiller.Comment: 10 Pages, 8 Figures. To appear in Physical Review

The study on the integration of Activity Based Costing (ABC) system and six-sigma principle

Manufacturing organizations are facing much more challenges as compared to the earlier years. The important and crucial decisions have to be taken by the management in continuous basis in order to ensure the survival and competitiveness of company throughout the journey to become a successful organization. In order to make these decisions fast and correct, they need more accurate information related to financial and non-financial aspects. The conventional cost management systems, which were developed decades ago are unable to provide all information required to make right decision, justify the cost reduction and process improvements (Chen, 1996). This is because they were based on labor-intensive production system while today’s production processes are more sophisticated and faces constant changes. An alternative costing system, Activity Based Costing (ABC) has emerged to the new solution to costing system. It provides financial and non-financial information not only for product costing but also for each activity of manufacturing process. It can list and measure the cost of each activity individually in production and in supporting activities to deliver of a product or service right to customers (Sohal & Chung, 1998). ABC focuses on the activities performed to produce the products throughout the manufacturing process (Gunasekaran et al., 1999). By assigning other costs, such as marketing and administrative to cost object, ABC able to provide more accurate product costs. It helps to improve the operational performance by allocating overhead costs correctly. It provides cost information based on the actual consumption of the resources by each particular activity. The goal of ABC is to reveal cost allocation information by tracing the production costs accurately to activities and product (Gunasekaran et al., 1999). The implementation of ABC has provided many benefits, such as more accurate product costing, providing of cost behavior information and tracing resources consumptions. Realizing many benefits gain from implementation of ABC, many companies have embarked in applying ABC system. However, there are many problems and barriers they encountered during the implementation, which made some has decided to abort this system and not be able to exploit its advantages. It is the objective of this study to help foster the growth of Malaysian companies by helping them to provide better understanding,knowledge and skills to take advantage of using ABC as a tool to improve their manufacturing process. The title of the project is The Study on Integration of Activity-based Costing and Six-sigma Principle. The specific objective of the study is to determine success factors for ABC implementation in manufacturing companies based on Six-sigma process improvement principle. The focus of the study is to identify and understand the critical success factors in implementation of ABC, to identify and specified the problems and barriers and to understand their relationship with the ABC success. In order to identify, understand and formulate the proposed solution, this study will use a survey approach to get required data for further analysis. The survey will be based on mailed questionnaires to selected manufacturing industries in Malaysia. In order to formulate a comprehensive and relevant set of questionnaires, a comprehensive review of literature will be studied, followed by validation and verification process,which involved expert opinions and a pilot study. The next phase is where data from the study will be analyzed to identify areas related to the level of acceptance of ABC,the critical success factors and also to determine the relationship between the organization’s factors and the success of implementation of ABC system. The tangible outcome of this project is to provide a set of proposed guidelines and support tools for manufacturing organizations in applying Activity-based Costing for process improvement efforts as suggested by Six-sigma improvement principle

Finite time St\"uckelberg interferometry with nanomechanical modes

St\"uckelberg interferometry describes the interference of two strongly coupled modes during a double passage through an avoided energy level crossing. In this work, we experimentally investigate finite time effects in St\"uckelberg interference and provide an exact analytical solution of the St\"uckelberg problem. Approximating this solution in distinct limits reveals uncharted parameter regimes of St\"uckelberg interferometry. Experimentally, we study these regimes using a purely classical, strongly coupled nanomechanical two-mode system of high quality factor. The classical two-mode system consists of the in-plane and out-of-plane fundamental flexural mode of a high stress silicon nitride string resonator, coupled via electric gradient fields. The dielectric control and microwave cavity enhanced universal transduction of the nanoelectromechanical system allows for the experimental access to all theoretically predicted St\"uckelberg parameter regimes. We exploit our experimental and theoretical findings by studying the onset of St\"uckelberg interference in dependence of the characteristic system control parameters and obtain characteristic excitation oscillations between the two modes even without the explicit need of traversing the avoided crossing. The presented theory is not limited to classical mechanical two-mode systems but can be applied to every strongly coupled (quantum) two-level system, for example a spin-1/2 system or superconducting qubit