The technique of surface acoustic waves (SAWs) is a very promising method for determining film properties such as Young’s modulus, density and film thickness nondestructively and accurately. The dispersion property of SAWs is also affected largely from the adhesion property of films, which is revealed by the bonding spring assumption described. This SAW method could offer a quantitative evaluation of the film adhesion from the curvature of SAW dispersion lines affected by the normal and shear spring constants. The method is applied to numerically characterize the adhesion property of the typical ultra-large-scale integrated circuit interconnect layered structure of a thin Cu film deposited on the Si substrate as well as a SiO2 thin film on a Si substrate.

Ultra-wide band (UWB) imaging technique is very attractive for the early breast cancer detection based on the obvious contrast in the electrical properties of malignant tumor to the normal fatty breast tissue. The tumor can be detected by analyzing the reflecting and scattering behavior of the UWB microwaves propagating in the breast. In this study, the influence of the organism interfaces is investigated from different cases of breast configuration involving different gland shapes as well as the tumor locations. Results show that the gland structure and tumor status have large influences on the reconstructed images generated from the detected signals due to the interface varieties. The tumor information in the proposed configurations can be obtained by series signal processing including eliminating the early time response of the detected signals caused by the direct wave and the reflection from the interface between the skin and the breast fat, and compensating the path loss of the propagating signal due to the radial spreading and the attenuation in the lossy breast. The location and the number of emitters and detectors affect the quality of the reconstructed image.