Within the domain of analyzing powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) scans, manual examination of the recorded data is still the most popular method, but it requires some expertise and is time consuming. The usual workflow for the phase-identification task involves software for searching databases of known compounds and matching lists of d spacings and related intensities to the measured data. Most automated approaches apply some iterative procedure for the search/match process but fail to be generally reliable yet without the manual validation step of an expert. Recent advances in the field of machine and deep learning have led to the development of algorithms for use with diffraction patterns and are producing promising results in some applications. A limitation, however, is that thousands of training samples are required for the model to achieve a reliable performance and not enough measured samples are available. Accordingly, a framework for the efficient generation of thousands of synthetic XRD scans is presented which considers typical effects in realistic measurements and thus simulates realistic patterns for the training of machine- or deep-learning models. The generated data set can be applied to any machine- or deep-learning structure as training data so that the models learn to analyze measured XRD data based on synthetic diffraction patterns. Consequently, we train a convolutional neural network with the simulated diffraction patterns for application with iron ores or cements compounds and prove robustness against varying unit-cell parameters, preferred orientation and crystallite size in synthetic, as well as measured, XRD scans.

Conventional needle probecard techniques suffer from several problems: needles scratch the pads causing bonding problems, the maximum test speed is limited by the poor high frequency performance of the needle contacts. This contribution presents a new contactless method to inject test stimuli and to monitor the output. On chip photo diodes and simple receiver circuits transform light pulses to proper input signals, while a capacitively coupled probe with a very sensitive charge amplifier detects the output signal. The apparational overhead to conventional test system is small as well as the chip space required for photo diode and receiver circuit.

No abstract

No abstract