Het afschalen van het Afrikaans : een politieke stommiteit

Afrikaans is a partly creolised language, based on Dutch (dialects). It originated as the lingua franca of the dominated population of servants and slaves (the bruinmense), and was taken over by the dominant white population, which standardised it and developed it into a fully-fledged cultural language, comparable with other small Germanic languages such as Danish or Norwegian. It is the only example of a ‘creoloid’ that reached that level. Politically, it is a very bad idea to downgrade Afrikaans as a language of instruction at universities. This will lead to frustration and a renewed rise of Afrikaner nationalism. One should avoid unnecessary political tensions in a country that has to face matters that are far more urgent, such as the racially based inequality in wealth

Mechanical analysis of encapsulated metal interconnects under transversal load

Novel insights regarding the ability of encapsulated metal interconnections to deform due to bending are presented. Encapsulated metal interconnections are used as electric conductor or measurement system within a wide range of applications fields, e.g. biomedical, wearable, textile applications. Nevertheless the mechanical analysis remains limited to reliability investigation of these configurations. Different papers and research groups claim that meander-shaped metal interconnections are predisposed for these applications fields due to their deformability while, to the author’s knowledge, no reports are found about this ability. An analysis based on the work needed to bend interconnections to a certain curvature will be used to compare different interconnection configurations with each other. The experimental as well as the simulation setup is based on PDMS encapsulated PI-enhanced Cu tracks. The results and conclusions are specific for this type of interconnections, but can be extended to a global conclusion about stretchable interconnections. From the obtained insights it is proven that periodically meander-shaped interconnections need significant less work, up to more than 10 times less, to bend the interconnection to the same curvature compared to straight interconnection lines. Furthermore it shows out, for the meander-shaped interconnection, that per increase of 250µm encapsulation thickness the work raises with a factor 2. For straight interconnection lines the work in function of the encapsulation thickness is limited to 20%/250µm. The bendability of the straight interconnection lines is determined by the shape of the interconnection, where for meandered tracks the encapsulation will determine this factor, for an encapsulation thickness of maximum 1mm. For encapsulations > 1mm, the encapsulation thickness will become the predominant factor which determines the deformability for both interconnection shapes

Analytical expressions for the distortion of asynchronous sigma-delta modulators

This brief investigates the commonly used asynchronous sigma-delta modulator, which consists of a Schmitt trigger and a continuous-time loop filter. A detailed analysis is presented to accurately predict the distortion of such modulators. The extracted expressions are compared with simulation results, and they illustrate an excellent match. The results are also compared with a previous work by Roza, and they show a drastic improvement in accuracy

Self-Reconfigurable Analog Arrays: Off-The Shelf Adaptive Electronics for Space Applications

Development of analog electronic solutions for space avionics is expensive and lengthy. Lack of flexible analog devices, counterparts to digital Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), prevents analog designers from benefits of rapid prototyping. This forces them to expensive and lengthy custom design, fabrication, and qualification of application specific integrated circuits (ASIC). The limitations come from two directions: commercial Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA) have limited variability in the components offered on-chip; and they are only qualified for best case scenarios for military grade (-55C to +125C). In order to avoid huge overheads, there is a growing trend towards avoiding thermal and radiation protection by developing extreme environment electronics, which maintain correct operation while exposed to temperature extremes (-180degC to +125degC). This paper describes a recent FPAA design, the Self-Reconfigurable Analog Array (SRAA) developed at JPL. It overcomes both limitations, offering a variety of analog cells inside the array together with the possibility of self-correction at extreme temperatures