A. Di Nisio

ABSTRACT Reliability specifications for solder joints, as well as for all electronic components, become a fundamental element in the qualification of an electronic product. This importance increases if new lead-free alloys are considered and then under test. An accelerated thermal test is proposed for an early reliability evaluation and the definition of failure parameters is addressed. The traditional technique employed for failure monitoring of solder joints is the DC resistance measurement. This paper reviews and assesses the DC resistance monitoring during reliability tests of lead-free solder materials used for electronic boards production. Moreover through a failure prognosis measurement technique, considering wideband measurements, the possibility to identify the failure occurrence earlier than the DC resistance method is evaluated. An experimental study on a pass band filter soldered by a new lead free alloy is performed to evaluate reliability performance.

ABSTRACT A loop-back test is illustrated, where the outputs of a DAC are dithered by additive noise and digitized by an ADC. The samples are collected in a code occurrences table, which allows the measurement of the input/outputs characteristics of both the ADC and the DAC. The method is particularly suited for implementing self-calibration strategies. The measurement is performed by means of maximum likelihood estimation and is therefore statistically nearly optimal. After a description of the method, experimental data are illustrated for validating the proposed linearity test.

Abstract - Today, quality control is a nodal point in many industries, and in the glass one in particular; in most cases the human control does not catch up with the pressing market requirements, therefore computer vision inspection systems are preferable to reduce ...

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to realize an automatic form processing system for medical reports with a low computation cost; the proposed algorithm, simple and powerful, first detects the tables then extracts and interprets the data contained in the medical document. The method works well for typical documents with Manhattan layout which are commonly used by medical centers and it is suited for realizing a standard database containing clinical analyses. The final goal of the research is to automate the collection of medical data and to enable efficient maintenance and dissemination of the information. This work was carried out in collaboration with ApuliaBiotech under the supervision of nephrology medical center of Foggia (Italy). Medical investigation is conducted to extend the life of people and to improve quality of life for patients with severe diseases; today is common to run into doctors having a different specialization which work together towards the common goal of curing a disease. This requires a multidisciplinary research organization utilizing advanced medical technologies and medical research institutes of different universities. Besides, to generate innovative treatment studies, a sufficient number of clinical trials or medical examinations should be collected in order to guarantee their statistical significance. Following the paradigm above mentioned, the scientific community of medical nephrology is working on a standard database containing clinical analyses and laboratory tests useful to scientists for researches and medical investigations, epidemiological studies, and so on. Unfortunately, the absence of uniformity among various medical centers produces discrepancies and non uniformity of data; it was also noticed that the manual data entry in a standard database at the time of issue of the medical report takes a long time and often produces errors. Therefore, the automatic conversion of tables and graphic images into digital resources is an important and not trivial task that greatly contributes to the preservation and access to medical archives. In fact, an efficient and undistorted communications of results of medical research and hospital data is the true heritage of a scientific community.

ABSTRACT In this paper the theoretical expression of the uncertainty, which affects the estimation of the series and shunt resistances (namely Rs and Rsh) of a Photovoltaic cell, is derived. After a brief treatment about the double diode model, the new procedure to estimate the unknown parameters proposed by the authors is illustrated. Numerical results and a first discussion about the biases and standard deviations of Rs and Rsh estimators in a wide range of environmental conditions are given.

This paper deals with a Photovoltaic (PV) plants characterization technique based on the estimation of the electrical parameters of the double-diode equivalent circuit of each module. This effort was intended to predict the performance indexes of different photovoltaic technologies. The objectives of this work is to implement the methodology at the Photo Voltaic LABoratory (PV-LAB) to collect and analyze module

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this work was to analyze the digital radiographic methodologies used in diagnostic investigation, in order to reduce radiation dose to patients by assuring a good quality of the images. To this end, the main parameters influencing the absorbed dose during radiographic exams were investigated and a new methodology for a suitable optimized protocol was proposed.

ABSTRACT This paper describes the design and the implementation of a prototype for an Alternating Current (AC) energy monitoring device based on an open source concept. The measurement device aims to provide a remote monitoring interface useful for three-phase and single-phase AC power systems. The open-source philosophy has been adopted designing the software components in order to make all features easily customizable by the user. In this way one can easily develop new applications making cost- and time-effective the migration to future smart grid infrastructures.

ABSTRACT In this paper a method for estimating the spectral content of frequency modulated waveforms is presented. The method is intended to estimate harmonics and interharmonics of power line signals where, as known, the frequency of the fundamental component (50 Hz or 60 Hz) slightly changes over time. It is based on the non-uniform resampling of the harmonic functions that are usually used in the DFT as a base to analyze signals. The non-uniform sample period is provided by an instantaneous phase detector.

... on Instr. Meas., pp.891-898, 2004. [2] F. Adamo, F. Attivissimo, L. Fabbiano, N. Giaquinto, "Soil Moisture Measurement by using Seismic Waves", Proc. ... 1339-1368. [4] I. Flammer, A. Blum, A. Leiser, P. Germann, "Acoustic Assessment of Flow Patterns in Unsaturated Soil", Journ. ...

This paper reports the derivation of the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the estimation of the code transition levels of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and of the output levels of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Numerical results for the estimation of the integral nonlinearity are given. The converters are tested by sampling many times, with the ADC, each dithered output level of

Abstract This paper reports a linearity test in which an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) with the same resolution are tested at the same time. The output levels of the DAC are dithered by a sinewave plus Gaussian noise, and ...

The paper presents two methods (nonparametric and parametric) to measure the nonlinearity in presence of time base distortion, as usually happens in high-speed digitizers. Both simulation and experimental results are provided to illustrate the problems arising with traditional methodologies, and the accuracy of the proposed ones.

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the digital radiographic methodologies used in diagnostic investigation, in order to reduce radiation doses to the patients by assuring a good quality of the images. To this end, the main parameters influencing the absorbed dose during radiographic exams and the effect of the human body on X-ray attenuation were investigated. It is generally understood that radiographic techniques need an appropriate choice of the operative parameters as functions of patients' characteristics, with the aim of providing the minimum dose that is compatible with an image that satisfies the goal of the examination and has a good signal-to-noise ratio. In an effort to identify an optimized radiographic protocol, the correlation between body size and radiation dose was investigated.

... Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2010.2056091 ... Instrum. Meas., vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 756–763, Aug. 2002. [12] C. Morandi and L. Niccolai, “An improved code density test for the dynamic characterization of flash A/D converters,” IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 43, no. 3, pp. ...

A maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is derived for the problem of measuring the code transition levels of an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The proposed method is intended to test the linearity of the ADC in the static regime, using only constant test signals, except for a small amount of additive noise. The measurement data are employed in a nearly optimal manner,