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This article reports on a project midway through a 2-year investigation of the pedagogical interactions that take place for 2 year olds in mixed-age early childhood education (ECE) settings. Teachers slowed down and scrutinised their practice by videoing, analysing, and theorising their dialogue with and about 2 year olds as a central form of teaching and learning. The primary aim of the project was to make explicit the nature of 2 year olds' dialogue in ECE settings traditionally oriented to 3 to 4 year olds. Fine-tuned coding of dialogue and their interpreted meanings by the teachers highlight the impact of different events in the ECE setting on the nature of dialogue that takes place and identified 12 different genre in which 2 year olds were found to engage (or disengage). The insights generated from this project support teachers to re-vision their pedagogy in ways that are inclusive of the specialised genre of this younger age group, and celebrate the many pedagogical provocations for dialogue in preschool settings.

A novel model and approach for obtaining improved electromigration short-length effects are reported. The results for a structure with Dual Damascene copper-based metallization and two width regions demonstrate that increasing the line width for a portion of the line length generates longer electromigration lifetimes. Moreover, the lifetimes are accurately characterized by introducing an equivalent length for the structure that depends on the width and length of each region. The results are explained in terms of a modulation of the stress profile in the structure with more than one width region. A consequence of these findings is increased design flexibility since more options are available to improve the electromigration reliability of short interconnects.

Electromigration results are described for a Dual Damascene structure with copper metallization and a low-k dielectric material. The failure times follow a bimodal lognormal behavior with early and late failures. Moreover, there is evidence of a threshold failure time such that each failure mode is represented by a 3-parameter lognormal distribution. It is found that the threshold failure time scales differently with current density from the median time to failure, which can be explained by considering two components of the electromigration lifetime: one controlled by void nucleation and the other controlled by void growth.

Failure analysts occasionally find themselves faced with the problem of having one of the various defect isolation techniques indicating a defect location, and yet no defect is readily visible through the various imaging methods available. Many common conventional imaging tools, such as scanning electron microscopes (SEM), display images in shades of gray. The human eye is inherently more sensitive to changes in color rather than changes in grayscale. As a result, subtle variations in grayscale which could indicate the defect location can go unobserved unless a careful examination of the image intensities is performed. One useful way to highlight these variations is through intensity profiling where a line scan is drawn through the region under investigation and compared to an identical reference location contained within the same image. Subtle variations in the intensity profiles can then be identified and defect locations can be pinpointed to specific locations for later cross sectioning and final root cause determination. This paper discusses the application of this methodology to two case studies: a resistive short and a resistive open.

The determination of triclabendazole (Fasinex) in milk is described. The excretion of triclabendazole and its two main metabolites was measured under field conditions in twenty-five cows. Triclabendazole was administered to cows in a dosage of approximately 12 mg kg-1. The maximum concentration of the main metabolites of triclabendazole (triclabendzole sulphone) measured in milk was 1.415 mg/l. Metabolites could be detected in milk during a ten-day-period. Only 1.5% (maximum) of the triclabendazole administered was eliminated as triclabendazole sulphone by way of milk.

Electromigration in 0.07 μm wide Cu interconnections has been investigated for sample temperatures from 213 to 300°C. The effect of atomic-layer- or physical-vapor-deposited TaN x and physical-vapor-deposited Ta liner layers in Cu damascene lines on electromigration was also studied. A lower lifetime and activation energy for electromigration was observed in tested lines with sidewall voids. Similar electromigration lifetime and activation energy observed from samples with either atomic-layer- or physical-vapor-deposited TaN, suggested that the dominant diffusion paths in the Cu lines were not sensitive to the TaN x layer and were along the Cu/dielectric interface and/or grain boundaries.