Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Commons^™

Kinetic Control Of Nucleic Acid Strand Displacement Reactions, Xiaoping Olson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Nucleic acids are information-dense, programmable polymers that can be engineered into primers, probes, molecular motors, and signal amplification circuits for computation, diagnostic, and therapeutic purposes. Signal amplification circuits increase the signal-to-noise ratio of target nucleic acids in the absence of enzymes and thermal cycling. Amplification is made possible via toehold mediated strand displacement – a process where one nucleic acid strand binds to a nucleation site on a complementary helix, which then displaces one of the two strands in a nucleic acid complex. When compared to polymerase chain reactions (PCR), the sensitivity and stability of toehold-mediated strand displacement reactions suffer …

Analog Spiking Neuromorphic Circuits And Systems For Brain- And Nanotechnology-Inspired Cognitive Computing, Xinyu Wu

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Human society is now facing grand challenges to satisfy the growing demand for computing power, at the same time, sustain energy consumption. By the end of CMOS technology scaling, innovations are required to tackle the challenges in a radically different way. Inspired by the emerging understanding of the computing occurring in a brain and nanotechnology-enabled biological plausible synaptic plasticity, neuromorphic computing architectures are being investigated. Such a neuromorphic chip that combines CMOS analog spiking neurons and nanoscale resistive random-access memory (RRAM) using as electronics synapses can provide massive neural network parallelism, high density and online learning capability, and hence, paves …

Design, Synthesis, And Characterization Of Nanoscale Optical Devices Using Dna Directed Self-Assembly, William Peter Klein

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Near-field energy transfer has great potential for use in nanoscale communications, biosensing, and light harvesting photonic devices. However, the light collecting and energy transferring efficiency of current devices is poor, resulting in few commercially available applications. Current human-made light harvesting devices lack the benefits of natural selection. Natural systems are typically highly optimized and highly efficient. For example, transfer efficiency in photosynthesis is greater than 90%.

In this work, two classes of optical devices were designed, synthesized, and characterized: Plasmonic waveguides and FRET-based photonic devices. In the case of plasmonic waveguides, a multi-scaffold DNA origami synthesis method was developed to …