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Polysilicon fuses are one time programmable memory elements which allow the calibration of integrated circuits at wafer and package level. We present a zero dimensional lumped parameter model of the programming of fuses made from a combination of tungsten silicide and polycrystalline silicon. The components of the model are an electrical model, a thermal model and a flow model. The electrical model describes the temperature and geometry dependent resistance of the fuse. The thermal model describes the heating and melting of the fuse and its surroundings. The flow model describes the disconnection of the fuse by electromigration driven flow of silica. The model generates quantitatively accurate results and reproduces trends with applied voltage and fuse size., Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

An optimal estimation inverse method is presented which can be used to retrieve simultaneously vertical profiles of temperature and specific humidity, in addition to surface pressure, from satellite-to-satellite radio occultation observations of the Earth's atmosphere. The method is a non-linear, maximum {\it a posteriori} technique which can accommodate most aspects of the real radio occultation problem and is found to be stable and to converge rapidly in most cases. The optimal estimation inverse method has two distinct advantages over the analytic inverse method in that it accounts for some of the effects of horizontal gradients and is able to retrieve optimally temperature and humidity simultaneously from the observations. It is also able to account for observation noise and other sources of error. Combined, these advantages ensure a realistic retrieval of atmospheric quantities. A complete error analysis emerges naturally from the optimal estimation theory, allowing a full characterisation of the solution. Using this analysis a quality control scheme is implemented which allows anomalous retrieval conditions to be recognised and removed, thus preventing gross retrieval errors. The inverse method presented in this paper has been implemented for bending angle measurements derived from GPS/MET radio occultation observations of the Earth. Preliminary results from simulated data suggest that these observations have the potential to improve NWP model analyses significantly throughout their vertical range., Comment: 18 (jgr journal) pages, 7 figures

We present results of combining occultation refractivity profiles from GPS/MET with ECMWF global analyses in a 1DVar framework in order to separate the wet and dry contributions to refractivity and assess their impact on the analyzed temperature, surface pressure and specific humidity fields.