Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this unit:
6.4 Choosing to distinguish between complex situations and complex systems Within some of the lineages of systems thinking and practice (Figure 7), the idea that system complexity is a property of what is observed about some ‘real-world’ system, is known as classical or type 1 complexity. Exploring type 1 complexity, Russell Ackoff (1981, pp.26–33) claimed for a set
5.7 Being ethical As outlined in Table 2, ethics within systemic practice are perceived as operating on multiple levels. Like the systems concept of hierarchy, what we perceive to be good at one level might be bad at another. Because an epistemological position must be chosen, rather than taken as a given, the choi
2.4 Review In working through this section, you have identified some of your initial expectations and I have explained some of what I think you will discover as you work through the unit. It would be appropriate at this point to look at some of the questions I asked you about your expectations again and note ways your expectations have changed. Spend a total of around 30 minutes on the next three activities. Introduction When you meet with a situation you experience as complex you need to think about yourself in relation to the process of formulating a system of interest. Only with this awareness, can you increase your range of purposeful actions in the situation which are ethically defensible. To do so is the hallmark of systemic thinking and practice compared to systematic thinking and practice. The metaphor of the systems practitioner as a juggler of four balls is introduced as a device to explore skill de 5.6 Identification We end Act 1 with a clear understanding that it is actually too late for Ned to pull out, even if he wanted to: the weapon has been designed. If he were concerned about the military technology, he should really have worried about that before he took on the job. But he does not, at the end of Act 1, want to pull out. He clearly wants to see the project through. Materialising this idea is what he lives for, and he says this is at the cutting edge, this is where technology is. These ideas are go 1.4 What is ethics? I'd like to introduce an idea of ethics based on the work of G. E. Moore, a Cambridge Don who died fifty years ago. Bearing in mind that concerns with ethics date back at least to the Ancient Greeks, you might not be surprised that I bring in some ideas from Moore's Principia Ethica, a text written over 100 years ago but articulated in a particularly clear and plain-speaking style. Moore's take on things is that when ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are involved, then we're in the realm of eth Introduction Ethics is an established area of academic interest, but it is only fairly recently that the relevance of ethics to Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) started to emerge clearly outside philosophical studies. Professional bodies in Engineering and ICS have begun to require, as a condition for accreditation, the study of ethics-related topics, and, partially in response to these requirements, new pedagogies for teaching and learning these topics are gradually emerging. This unit expl 6.10 Action plans 22. Does the action plan make the proposal concrete in terms of realistic time scales and budgets and identification of relevant milestones? A reasonably detailed action plan has four distinct functions in your proposal: 6.6 Risks 15. What are the risks associated with the change that might mean the intended benefits cannot be realised? 16. How can these risks be mitigated or eliminated? No plan for the future ever comes with a 100 per cen 6.5 Costs 11. What are the financial costs involved (capital and recurring)? 12. What additional non-financial resources will be needed? 13. When are the all the various financial and non-financial resources needed? 3.4 Managing across interfaces Increasingly, operations management is seen as an interface discipline (Voss, 1995). Managing across interfaces, both internal and external to the organisation, is a particular challenge for managers and this is discussed further in this section. Information and communications technology is an important means of linking across the various interfaces. Author(s): 3.1 Introduction The purpose of this section is to address the following interlinked questions: Just what do we mean by business operations? Why is it so important? Where does technology fit in? I begin answering these questions with a discussion of how best to represent operations activities, making the case for the process view of the organisation. This leads to discussion of the nature and scope of the operations managem 8.3.6 Deep silicon etching MEMS structures often require etching to a much greater depth than is needed for microelectronics. A rate of 1–2 μm min−1 may be quite sufficient for making transistors less than 1 mm deep, but to etch through 600 mm of silicon to form an accelerometer would take all day. The advent of MEMS and wafer-level packaging applications, therefore, brought a need for yet faster anisotropic etches, requiring advances both in the process and in the etching equipment. Capacitive co 8.2 Wet etches: acids and bases The simplest etches use a liquid solvent that converts the material into a soluble compound or a gas. Unfortunately, most materials used in micro-devices have few soluble compounds, so some very aggressive chemicals are needed to attack them. Here is a list of some of the most commonly used ones: Hydrofluoric acid (chemical formula HF) is used to convert silicon dioxide into water-soluble H2SiF6 (plus some hydrogen and water). It 7.4 Depositing compounds As well as conducting metal layers, device fabrication requires dielectric, insulating materials and these are mostly chemical compounds rather than simple elements or alloys. By far the most widely used of these is silicon oxide (either as a glass or as crystalline quartz), but other oxides and nitrides are also common, plus polymers and a selection of more exotic materials. Such compounds generally have very high melting points, or decompose under heating, so cannot be deposited by ev 7.3.2 Evaporation The simplest vacuum deposition technique is to heat an ingot of metal in a crucible under vacuum, releasing metal vapour that coats everything in its path. This can be done either under high vacuum (< 0.1 mbar), in which case only surfaces in a line of sight from the source will be coated, or in a low-pressure atmosphere, when the vapour is scattered by gas atoms and can go around corners, making batch processing of multiple wafers possible. This rather simple technique is fast and chea 7.3 Depositing metals and alloys Metal layers are used extensively in device fabrication: to carry current for both power and signals, to apply the voltages that control transistors and generate forces for MEMS, as mirrors and optical coatings, and in magnetic devices for recording media. Different applications might require a continuous film, a long track, multiple thin layers or a plug filling a ‘via hole’ through to a buried layer. The electrical properties resulting from micro structure and composition must be contro Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources: Figure 7 Adapted 3.1.2 Shutter The electronic shutter that freezes the frame for read-out adds more complexity, but can be based on the standard MOS fabrication steps. In effect, at the end of image capture, the charge at each pixel is first switched into another ‘blind’ MOS capacitor that sits in the read-out line for each row, as the middle of the three buckets per pixel. You should have already guessed that the switch is yet another MOS device. Once switched into the read-out line, the row data are isolated from the
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