Digital Commons Network^™

Study Of Interaction Between Indium Species And Dna In The Formation Of Dna -Templated Nanowires, Shivashankar Suryanarayanan

Doctoral Dissertations

A primary goal of semiconductor industry is to improve device performance and capability by downscaling feature size and upscaling packaging density. As optical-lithography, the mainstream technology for microfabrication, is being stretched to its limit, new unconventional fabrication techniques are being explored as alternatives. A "Bottom-up" approach for manufacturing is emerging as an answer to limitations posed by the traditional "Top-down" approach. Nanowires, bearing the potential of being the basic building blocks for such an approach, are gaining tremendous attention in nanoelectronics. Metal nanowires fabricated using DNA as templates have potential for precise control of length, diameter and positioning. However, wires …

Design And Development Of Microcantilever As A Platform For Moisture Sensing, Qi Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Ultra-sensitive and selective moisture sensors are needed in various industries for processing control or environmental monitoring. As an outstanding sensor platform, microcantilevers have potential application in moisture detection due to their advantages, such as low-level moisture detection limits, high accuracy, quick response time, high reproducibility, good recovery rate and low in cost. Our research results will lead to the first of its kind for the commercialization of a microcantilever-based moisture sensor used for industrial and household applications. The novelty of the present work is the development of SiO2 and Si cantilevers, which were fabricated using developed processes and modified with …

Polymer Light Emitting Diodes Based On Polyfluorenes, Quishu Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is devoted to the study on Polymer Light-Emitting Diodes (PLEDs) based on polyfluorenes (PFs), a promising class of semiconductive polymers for Light-Emitting Diode (LED) applications. Recently Light Emitting Polymers (LEPs) have clearly made their entry into display technology by virtue of their potential application for large-area flat-panel displays with the advantages of low cost, wide viewing angle, fast switching time, high efficiency, low driving voltage, as well as their flexibility and adaptability. Compared to inorganic materials, the efficiency of PLEDs is, however, still low. And for the application of PFs in PLEDs, an undesired longwavelength emission band is …

Fabrication And Application Of Conducting Polymer Micro- And Nano-Patterns, Anirban Chakraborty

Doctoral Dissertations

Conducting polymers, since their discovery, have attracted significant attention due to their promise of replacing silicon and metals in building devices. They have been shown to have wide applications for biological and chemical sensing as well as for electronic devices. Previous and current efforts have concentrated on building devices of a specific function. When multiple micropatterns of different conducting polymers are fabricated on a common substrate, a versatile microsystem can be envisioned. The existing conducting polymer patterning techniques present some technical challenges of degradation, low throughput, low resolution, depth of field, and residual layer in producing conducting polymer microstructures. To …

Nonlinear Dynamical Analysis Of Brain Electrical Activity Due To Exposure To Weak Environmentally Relevant Electromagnetic Fields, Erik Alfonso Nilsen

Doctoral Dissertations

The reports dealing with the effects of weak electromagnetic fields (EMFs) on brain electrical activity have been inconsistent. We suspected that the use of linear models and their associated methods accounted for some of the variability, and we explored the issue by using a novel approach to study the effects of EMFs on the electroencephalogram (EEG) from rabbits and humans. The EEG was embedded in phase space and local recurrence plots were calculated and quantified to permit comparisons between exposed and control epochs from individual subjects. Statistically significant alterations in brain activity were observed in each subject when exposed to …

Computer Simulation And Human Experiment On The Laplacian Electrocardiogram (Ecg), Ting Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

The electrocardiogram (ECG) provides useful global temporal assessment of cardiac activity, but has limited spatial capabilities. Laplacian electrocardiogram (LECG) and body surface Laplacian mapping (BSLM), improvements over ECG provides high spatiotemporal distributed information about cardiac electrical activation.

This project was divided into two parts: computer simulation and human experiment. In the computer simulation, a comparison of the performance of the tripolar and bipolar as well as spline LECG and BSLMs for localizing and imaging the cardiac electrical activation has been investigated. A simple planar surface model and a simplified eccentric heart-torso sphere-cylinder homogeneous volume conductor model were developed. Multiple dipoles …

An Intermediate-Layer Lithography Method For Producing Metal Micron/Nano Patterns And Conducting Polymer-Based Microdevices, Xinchuan Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Metals have been widely used in the areas of integration circuit (IC) and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fields as materials for gates, contact pads, interconnects, corrosion resistance coatings, rectifying contacts, redundancy memories, heating elements, mechanical parts, magnetic component, etc. due to their good properties, such as high electrical conductivity and good thermal conductivity. Conducting polymers, because of their promising potential to replace silicon and metals in building devices, have attracted great attention in recent decades.

Traditional photolithography methods are often used to pattern metals and conducting polymers. However, it cannot be used to fabricate nano patterns because the minimum feature size …