The World Health Organization (WHO) has a global initiative to eliminate industrially produced trans fatty acids (iTFAs) from the food supply (1). Formed via the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils to create hardened vegetable fat, iTFAs can be found in processed foods including fried foods and baked goods. Even small amounts of iTFAs can increase the risk of coronary heart disease. These can be successfully eliminated from the food supply with the WHO recommending a ban on partially hydrogenated oils or to limit iTFA in food to a maximum of 2% of total fat (1). As of June 2024, over 50 countries had one of these regulatory measures in place. The trans-Tasman Food Regulation System is considering policy options to ensure iTFAs are eliminated or reduced as much as possible from the food supply in Australia and New Zealand. Up to date data on the presence of iTFAs in the New Zealand food supply is needed to inform this work as this was last measured in New Zealand in 2007/09 for packaged food and 2013 for fast food. The aim of this survey was to determine the presence and levels of iTFAs in the New Zealand food supply. Since it is not possible to analytically quantify iTFA separately from trans-fats that occur naturally in food products of ruminant origin, such as dairy, beef and lamb products, the sampling plan was designed to target products likely to contain predominately iTFA and adapted from the WHO global protocol for measuring trans fatty acid profiles of foods(2) to the New Zealand context. The survey analysed the trans-fat content of 627 products across national supermarkets (275 products), international supermarkets specialising in imported foods (149 products) and ready-to-eat food outlets (203 products from three regions). One hundred and six products (16.9%) contained trans-fat that exceeded 2% of total fat. Twenty-five (4%) of these products were likely to contain predominately iTFA. The 25 products predominately containing iTFA included eight products from national supermarkets (mostly bakery products), nine products from international supermarkets (mostly curry pastes and biscuits) and eight products from ready-to-eat food outlets (all fried foods). The median trans-fat content of these 25 products was 3.2% of total fat (assumed to be all iTFA). Over a third of these products contained more than double the recommended WHO limit, with five products containing over four times the limit and one product containing more than 16 times the WHO limit. The remaining 81 products may contain some iTFA, but we were unable to quantify the amount. The results from this survey will be used by New Zealand Food Safety to inform the consideration of regulatory options for reducing iTFAs in foods in New Zealand.

We investigated the performance of 65nm pFETs whereby the source and drain extensions (SDE) were implanted with Carborane, (C2B10H12) a novel form of molecular species. The high atomic mass of this molecule (146 a.m.u.) and the number of boron atoms transported per ion enables the productivity at low energy required for manufacturing of ultra shallow junctions for advanced scaling. In this investigation, Carborane was implanted at 13 keV to produce a Boron profile near equivalent to that produced by the reference BF2 implant. Results of electrical measurements did not exhibit any compromise in the I-V characteristics in terms of Id-Vg and Id-Vd and Ion-Ioff. External resistance and Vt roll-off shifted slightly with respect to the reference devices. This is attributed to a deeper junction with Carborane due to slight offset in the profile matching. It will be shown that with fully matched profiles, a perfect match of the device characteristics can be achieved.

Extensive monitoring of device characteristics in the manufacturing of ULSI with advanced LOCOS isolation revealed the strong dependence of device leakage currents on the process of patterning of silicon nitride films applied as a hard mask for local oxidation of silicon wafers. At the same time, the level of the leakage currents strongly correlated to stress-induced dislocation density in the device structures. Formation of microtrenches on the wafer surface at the nitride film edges was identified to have a major impact on the leakage currents. Surprisingly, structures having nitride film edge profiles with feet were consistently dislocation-free after the local oxidation. This showed that nitride etching process created surface damage that provided effective sites for crystal defect nucleation in silicon at the film edges. Computer simulations demonstrated that the feet at nitride edges substantially suppress stress growth during local oxidation.

Crystalline quality of locally oxidized silicon wafers has been studied. Wafers from different supply sources were found to be differently susceptible to stress-induced dislocation generation, although they had been produced to the same specification. On the basis of the analysis of a depth distribution of the dislocations, critical resolved shear stress of dislocation movement in the bulk areas of the wafers was determined. It varied from about 1.65 to 5.12 MPa and correlated positively to the surface defect density. The results show that uncontrollable variations of bulk silicon properties may significantly influence the stress-induced defect nucleation on the surface of wafers during processing.