Photodetectors convert light signals into electrical signals and are indispensible components in most optoelectronic applications. These devices comprise various designs and materials. In recent years...
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Semiconductor nanowire lasers are promising building blocks in state-of-the-art photonic and optoelectronic devices due to their advantageous properties – including ultracompact size, efficient wave...
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Label-free sensing methods could enable detection and characterization of chemical species at the single molecule level without the aid of probes or modifications to the target of interest. Such capab...
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Electronic waste management remains an ongoing challenge both domestically and abroad. Scrap components of electronics such as computers, cellphones and refrigerators contain high amounts of heavy met...
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Diamond is considered a good material candidate for power electronics, offering reliability, low weight and power switching efficiency. Single-crystalline diamond (SCD) has the best overall properties...
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Graphene is atomically thin carbon film with unrivaled high tech potential. One of the strongest and most conductive materials known, it is stronger than diamond but capable of bending like rubber and...
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Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have exceptional properties that make them useful in a variety of semiconducting applications such as field effect transistors (FETs), solar cells and gas senso...
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The demand for smaller wireless communication devices that use less power is growing. In particular, radio frequency identification (RFID) systems require small, low-power transmitters to label or &ld...
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The creation and replication of nanoscale patterns is becoming increasingly important for the development of new electromechanical, chemical and biological devices at the micro- and nanoscale.  F...
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Distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) are found in photodetectors, solar cells and other optical sensors. Stacks of DBRs are incorporated in vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), which are a...
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Flexible electronics such as pliant displays, wearable electronics and new biomedical devices have gained popularity in recent years. Such devices are mounted on a supple plastic support layer and off...
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Semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (s-SWCNTs) are key building blocks for nanoscale technologies given their interesting physical and chemical properties. They are especially promising for ...
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Single molecule spectroscopy and microscopy – a popular tool for biological, biophysical and chemical characterization – generally requires the use of fluorescent molecules. Researchers at UW–M...
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Zinc oxide (ZnO) is an inorganic semiconductor with applications in large area photovoltaics and transparent electronics. Producing zinc oxide thin films with excellent electronic properties is challe...
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Complex integrated circuits must be individually tested during manufacturing. System-on-chip (SoC) circuits combine multiple functional elements on a single substrate. For example, such systems may co...
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The semiconductor industry constantly is seeking new methods to improve memory speed and efficiency that are compatible with large-scale fabrication processes and environmentally-friendly. Currently,...
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Germanium (Ge), a group-IV semiconductor material, is crucial to many established and potential technologies. In optoelectronics, Ge has been used as a photodetector material for on-chip data distribu...
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A whispering gallery mode (WGM) is a type of electromagnetic wave that travels around a concave surface. Such waves can propagate at the edge of a very small structure called an optical microcavity. W...
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Future advances in semiconductor electronics for computers will require three-dimensional (3-D) integrated circuits that are not limited by the physics of thin film processing. In addition, flexible e...
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Chips made of strained silicon (Si) have higher electron mobility than chips made of unstrained Si, enabling the fabrication of faster semiconductor devices. Current methods of producing strained Si r...
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In magnetic recording bit patterned media (BPM), each magnetic bit is physically isolated in the form of nanometer-scale islands. These features can be fabricated by nano-imprint lithography in which ...
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Polymer brushes are a broad class of materials made of polymer chains tethered at one end to a substrate. These brushes are able to tune and modify surface properties like bioadhesion and wettability....
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Block copolymers (BCPs) self-assemble into well-defined, highly regular and dense nanostructures. Such BCP arrays are useful for fabricating electronic devices like magnetic storage media, quantum dot...
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The lithographic process is one of the most powerful technologies of the digital electronics era. Lithography allows hundreds of millions of components to be fabricated on a single chip with pattern f...
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‘Virtual substrates’ comprise an underlying growth substrate and one or more metamorphic buffer layers (MBLs) made of semiconductor alloy. The MBL is graded so that its lattice constant in...
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