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...
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)...
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...