<p><font face="Times-Roman"> <p align="left">The growth of the Internet has led to many interesting developments for both educational and commercial purposes. In this project an attempt was made to use the Internet for a research purpose to facilitate the determination of the thermal stability of diffusion barriers. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the teaching and training use of the Internet through the development of online interactive tools and activities as well as materials. The training aspects are mentioned as it is hoped that this thesis can serve as a form of documentation of the use of the Internet, while the central part was the determination of thermal stability of TiN, TaN and TiW diffusion <font face="Times-Roman">barriers on Ag.</font></p> </font></p>

Long resistive cables used in the operation of remote instrumentation impose fundamental limits on the amount of power delivered and create difficulties in voltage regulation at the remote-end (voltage at the end of the cable) with changing load conditions. This type of power delivery is used in many engineering systems such as in the operation of underwater remotely-operated vehicles, in oil drilling and mining industries, and in highly distributed systems (aircraft, submarines, and space stations, etc.). The focus of this research is to develop new approaches for power delivery in systems that have considerable voltage drops between the local and remote-ends.Two novel methods of power delivery based on state feedback control and parallel operation of switching and linear regulators to enhance stability and increase the power delivered at the remote-end are developed and validated experimentally.A system-level approach is developed to control the remote-end voltage for changing load conditions through the usage of a model inversion technique at the local-end along with a feedback of the local-end variables.

<p><font face="Times-Roman"> <p align="left">The growth of the Internet has led to many interesting developments for both educational and commercial purposes. In this project an attempt was made to use the Internet for a research purpose to facilitate the determination of the thermal stability of diffusion barriers. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the teaching and training use of the Internet through the development of online interactive tools and activities as well as materials. The training aspects are mentioned as it is hoped that this thesis can serve as a form of documentation of the use of the Internet, while the central part was the determination of thermal stability of TiN, TaN and TiW diffusion <font face="Times-Roman">barriers on Ag.</font></p> </font></p>

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The growth of the Internet has led to many interesting developments for both educational and commercial purposes. In this project an attempt was made to use the Internet for a research purpose to facilitate the determination of the thermal stability of diffusion barriers. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the teaching and training use of the Internet through the development of online interactive tools and activities as well as materials. The training aspects are mentioned as it is hoped that this thesis can serve as a form of documentation of the use of the Internet, while the central part was the determination of thermal stability of TiN, TaN and TiW diffusion barriers on Ag.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The growth of the Internet has led to many interesting developments for both educational and commercial purposes. In this project an attempt was made to use the Internet for a research purpose to facilitate the determination of the thermal stability of diffusion barriers. Another purpose of this thesis is to investigate the teaching and training use of the Internet through the development of online interactive tools and activities as well as materials. The training aspects are mentioned as it is hoped that this thesis can serve as a form of documentation of the use of the Internet, while the central part was the determination of thermal stability of TiN, TaN and TiW diffusion barriers on Ag. The fact that most advanced instruments are computer driven or can be interfaced with a computer was exploited to set up a virtual laboratory facility through which sophisticated and scarce instrumentation can be remotely accessed. The major piece of equipment that forms part of the laboratory is a four-point probe furnace at Arizona State University, Tempe, USA. The Internet made it possible to use the facility to perform an online experiment to determine the effectiveness of different diffusion barriers for silver metallisation. This was accomplished by measuring the resistance of the different samples remotely over the Internet through the control of the four-point probe furnace at Arizona State University. Four types of analysis were used to determine the thermal stability of the diffusion barriers, namely the Scanning Electron Microscopy, Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry, X-Ray Diffraction and resistivity measurements. Similar facilities exist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA, where a range of different electron microscopes can be accessed remotely via the Internet. The measurements of the diffusion barriers form the main part of this work. However, the other aspects required for the use of the Internet in such a system, such as the development of a website to receive and upload scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, the development of the virtual scanning electron microscope and the learning of the Virtual Reality Markup Language are also included.