a b s t r a c tTitanium nitride (TiN) has been investigated as a heater material for microhotplates and microreactors. TiN is available in many CMOS processes, unlike many other microheater materials. In addition, TiN has a very high melting point (2950 • C) meaning that it is stable up to higher temperatures than platinum (Pt) and polysilicon. For the first time, TiN is tested inside a conventional membrane of LPCVD silicon nitride (SiN). Two types of sputtered TiN are considered: high stress and low stress. Their performance is compared with that of e-beam evaporated Pt. The maximum average temperature of TiN heaters is 11% higher than those of Pt, and reaches over 700 • C. Failure of the TiN heaters is due to rupture of the membrane. Failure of the Pt heater is due to electro-stress migration. For high-stress TiN, the temperature coefficient of resistance is almost constant and close to that of Pt, making the material very suitable for temperature sensing. In the case of low-stress TiN the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) becomes nonlinear and changes sign. The large differences between the materials are explained by the grain structure. The different grain structures are related to the sputtering parameters according to the Thornton model.

Glass microdevices for capillary electrophoresis (CE) gained a lot of interest in the development of micrototal analysis systems (microTAS). The fabrication of a microTAS requires integration of sampling, chemical separation and detection systems into a microdevice. The integration of a detection system into a microchannel, however, is hampered by the lack of suitable microfabrication technology. Here, a microfabrication method for integration of insulated microelectrodes inside a leakage-free microchannel in glass is presented. A combination of newly developed technological approaches, such as low-temperature glass-to-glass anodic bonding, channel etching, fabrication of buried metal interconnects, and deposition of thin plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) silicon carbide layers, enables the fabrication of a CE microdevice with an integrated contactless conductivity detector. The fabrication method of this CE microdevice with integrated contactless conductivity detector is described in detail. Standard CE separations of three inorganic cations in concentrations down to 5 microM show the viability of the new microCE system.

Abstract. -A new method of obtaining a sensitive noise filter for solar speckle masking reconstructions is presented below. This filter separates the true image information from noise most reliably. Its efficiency is demonstrated by some representative examples considering observed and artificial image data which were generated in a computer. The latter set of data also suffered realistic degradations by the influence of seeing and noise taken from suitable observations.

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Two sets of H, He, and Ca+ emission lines were observed in a quiescent prominence simultaneously with the VTT and the Gregory telescope on Tenerife. At the same time, SUMER took two scans of low-ionized EUV emission lines.The emission ratios of Ca+–to–Balmer lines from ground vary little in the prominence, indicating a largely constant gas-pressure. In contrast, the ratio of He–to–Balmer from the ground shows the (known) increase toward the prominence borders, indicating higher temperature there. Similarly, the two-dimensional distributions of the ratios S IV/N II and C III/He I show pronounced bright prominence rims.The reduced He 537Å and He 584Å line widths are 2.6 and 3.6 times larger, respectively, than those of He D3 and He 3888Å. Explaining this by the optical thickness yields τ0 = 104 and τ0 = 2 · 105 for the two EUV lines. The total He 584 emission amounts to 13 watt/m2 ster in the main prominence body where the D3 line yields 4 watt/m2 ster; existing models, however, predict a factor 0.18.The widths of simultaneously observed optical lines with different atomic weights yield thermal and non-thermal broadening parameters of Tkin ≈ 8000 K and 2.5 < ξ < 6.5 km/s. The EUV lines, however, show line widths which correspond to much higher temperatures and non-thermal velocities. Assuming for each ion the corresponding ionization temperature, the line widths require non-thermal velocities of 15–40 km/s which is similar to values for the quiet corona.