The semiconductor gallium arsenide (GaAs) has many potential
advantages over the more widely used semiconductor silicon (Si).
These include higher low field mobility, semi-insulating substrates,
a direct band-gap, and greater radiation hardness. All these
advantages offer distinct opportunities for implementation of new
circuit functions or extension of the operating conditions...
Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), primarily indium doped tin oxide, have been widely used in numerous fields since decades ago, such as solar cells, displays, OLEDs and ‘smart windows’ etc. Owing to the scarcity of indium, there is a great demand for new alternative materials. Metal/insulator/metal (MIM) diodes are a critical...
Flexible electronics processing techniques were applied to integrate a glucose sensor with a hormone-delivery catheter in order to create a cheap and minimally invasive method for patients with type 1 diabetes to continually monitor and control their blood sugar levels. Ultimately, this work intends to move toward the development of...
It has become customary in electrical engineering to think of
signal processing in terms of voltage variables to the exclusion of
current variables. This tendency has resulted in voltage signal
processing circuits such as voltage-controlled voltage sources
(VCVS) and voltage-mode operational amplifiers. However, the VCVS
operational amplifier has several limitations...
The purpose of this study is to develop experimental techniques to
characterize typical interconnect discontinuities, including bends, steps, T
junctions, vias and pads, which are the most commonly encountered
interconnections in high speed digital integrated circuits, hybrid and
monolithic microwave circuits and electronic packages. The time domain
reflection response of...
The creation of new semi-interpenetrating polymer networks (semi-IPNs) was attempted using miscible blends of high molecular weight cellulose esters (CE) and low molecular weight polyvinylphenol (PVP) with various initiators for the crosslinking reaction. Blends of cellulose acetate (CA) or cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB), at 50/50, 70/30, and 90/10 wt%CE/wt% PVP...
This thesis will discuss two critical components of a digital system -- domino logic styles and flip-flops. In today's microprocessors, both domino logic and flip-flops are essential to high-performance and low-power design. Two new domino logic styles are presented and analyzed, Double Edge Triggered (DET) and Double Data Rate (DDR)...
The rhenium (V) complex Tp'ReO₂ (Tp' = hydrido-tris-(3,5-
dimethylpyrazolyl)borate), generated in situ from PPh₃ reduction of
Tp'Re0₃, reacts with small ring heterocycles such as epoxides and
episulf ides. The strained trans-cyclooctene ring provides an unusual
thermodynamic bias against direct atom transfer, but trans-cyclooctene
oxide still produces substantial amounts of trans-cyclooctene....
High speed photodetectors are a necessary element in
broad band digital and analog optical communication systems.
In this thesis easily integrable planar high speed
photodetectors made on undoped semi-insulating (SI) GaAs
substrates are modeled and tested. The fabrication process
of the detectors is fully compatible with GaAs
metal-semiconductor field effect...
Electron transport and relaxation may be substantially different in low-dimensional
systems compared to that observed in bulk material. In the present work, Monte Carlo
models are used for the solution to the Boltzmann transport equation, with scattering
rates calculated quantum mechanically for superlattice and quantum wells. Carrier
relaxation following optical...
Automation of computational chemistry, while only an engineering feat, has the potential to accelerating computational research be removing all by the science. The work in this thesis mainly discusses fundamental understanding of complex chemical systems. What is not obvious are the numerous tasks necessary for this fundamental understanding. Under the...
In this dissertation, the spectroscopic properties and thermodynamic stability of a class of materials known as metal oxo and hydroxo clusters are studied. In aqueous solutions, many metals can aggregate into discrete clusters of metals bridged by oxo or hydroxo ligands. These clusters are of particular interest to us for...
Amorphous metal thin films lack the grain boundaries and dislocations present in
crystalline metal films. As a result, amorphous metal films can be more mechanically robust, atomically smooth, and more resistant to chemical attack than crystalline metals. However, amorphous metals are meta-stable and subject to crystallization upon heating, thus limiting...
The subject of this PhD thesis is part of a research domain of great present interest in new semiconductor materials for photovoltaic and thermoelectric applications. This domain contains the elaboration and the study of both Cu-based chalcogenides bulk and thin-film samples, driven by materials design principles.
One of the most...
In this report, the optical characteristics of ZnS:Tb AC driven thin-film
electroluminescent devices are evaluated. Luminescence at low and room temperature
under a constant phosphor field is recorded in order to probe the hot electron energy
distribution. Samples fabricated by atomic layer epitaxy and by sputter deposition are
investigated and...
This work is concerned with the modeling and analysis of lossy planar dielectric
optical waveguides. Loss mechanisms which affect propagation characteristics are
reviewed, and various representations of the propagation constant in the lossy case
are defined. Waveguide structures which are susceptable to absorption and/or to
leakage loss, in particular silicon-based...
This thesis describes compensation techniques for cascaded delta-sigma A/D
converters (ADCs) and high-performance switched-capacitor (SC) circuits. Various
correlated-double-sampling (CDS) techniques are presented to reduce the effects of the
nonidealities, such as clock feedthrough, charge injection, opamp input-referred noise and
offset, and finite opamp gain, in SC circuits. A CDS technique...
The challenges prompted by miniaturization of chromatographic systems have led scientists to explore new avenues in the synthesis of stationary phases. Packed capillary columns have found limited application in routine analysis due to a number of technical difficulties, most of which are attributable to the frits. New column designs insure...
The use of an adjacency matrix to determine distant (not maximal or
minimal) subgroup and supergroup relationships between crystallographic spacegroup
types is described. Full lists of space-group types that are supergroups and
subgroups for every space-group type were compiled. A list of the space-group
types connected to each space-group type...
The two sulfur isotopomers of sulfur trioxide, ³²S¹⁶O₃ and ³⁴S¹⁶O₃, have been studied via high resolution infrared and Coherent anti-Stokes Raman (CARS) spectroscopy. The v₁ symmetric SO stretching Q-branches observed by the latter are quite different, being especially complex for ³²S¹⁶O₃ Understanding this band structure required analysis of infrared-active hot...
The chemistry of hafnium oxide based and materials are described in the context of ion exchange and lithography. HafSOx, represented by the composition HfO₂₋[subscript x](SO₄)x, is described to possess a significant capacity towards ion exchange in acidic and basic solutions, enabling films of HafSOx to be cleanly and readily be...
New transparent p- and n-type semiconductors and luminescent materials have been prepared and characterized. Synthesis, structures, optical and electrical properties of new chalcogenide fluoride p-type transparent semiconductors MCuQF (M=Ba, Sr; Q=S, Se, Te) are described. Band-gap tuning and improvement in conductivity through p-type doping are demonstrated in the family. The...
This dissertation outlines two approaches for improving the efficiency and reducing the cost of photovoltaic energy generation. First, the structures of known binary copper and iron compounds are used to choose the promising compositions Fe₂XS₄ (X = Si, Ge), Cu₃TaQ₄ (Q = Se, Te), and BaCuQ'F (Q' = S, Se,...
The preparation and characterization of thin film oxides and chalcogenides by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) is presented. An overview of fundamental PLD concepts are presented and are followed by a description implementation and development of the PLD systems at OSU. We present the results of thin film growth of high...
Patterning of metal oxides typically involves a multi step process, involving
depositing a resist, patterning that resist with some form of lithography, etching the
oxide through the resist, and finally removing. This process can be simplified if the
resist is removed and replaced with a metal oxide that can be...
Solid state luminescent sulfides are prepared as powders in order to elucidate the relationship between structure and light emission. While the sulfides studied in this dissertation are known phosphors, materials are investigated in a variety of new ways. Elementary properties and structures of MgS are reviewed, and preparation of MgS...
Thin films of wide band-gap semiconductors are deposited by the pulsed laser deposition method. Optimal deposition parameters for the individual compounds are reported. A family of p-type BaCuQF (Q = S, Se, Te) ceramics with a layered crystalline structure is investigated for active and passive device applications.
Epitaxial films of...
The work presented here is focused on applying basic principles of solid-state chemistry to the study and development of new wide band-gap semiconductors and insulators for photovoltaic and electronic-device applications. Analysis of crystal structure, band structure, optical band gap, morphology and transport properties provides fundamental insight into materials performance as...
The general emphasis of this work has been synthesis, characterization, and applications of n- and p-type inorganic oxide thin films that are deposited from solutions. In particular, a study of n-type transparent semiconductor films of tin (IV) oxide and zinc-doped tin (IV) oxide has been performed by spin coating. Solution...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of transparent electronics, SnO₂ transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) and transparent circuits. Both depletion- and enhancement-mode SnO₂ TTFTs are realized. The maximum effective mobility for the depletion- and enhancement-mode devices are 2 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹ and 0.8 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹, respectively. A variety of techniques to decrease the carrier...
Oxo-hydroxo Group 5 metal clusters are an untapped resource to study and advance aqueous solution processing of metal oxide thin films. The tetramethylammonium (TMA) hexatantalate salt (TMA6[H2Ta6O19]) yields dense Ta2O5 films (~95% of the bulk ß-Ta2O5 density) with atomically smooth surfaces (<4 Å root mean square surface roughness). This same...
Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel devices have been proposed for high speed applications such as hot electron transistors, IR detectors, optical rectennas for IR energy harvesting, and backplanes for LCDs. The majority of these applications require highly asymmetric and non-linear current versus voltage (I-V) behavior at low applied voltages and ultra-high frequencies....
Transition metal oxides exhibit potential in various application fields due to the special d-electrons. Solid state chemistry focuses on discovering the structure-property relationships. The work in this thesis mainly discusses compounds with hexagonal or brownmillerite-type structure and their practical properties.
Hexagonal YIn[subscript 1-x]Fe[subscript x]O₃ (x = 0-0.3, 0.7-1.0) phases have...