1,721,373 research outputs found
How to talk with nano things: the Micro for Nano approach
No full textThe nano or low-dimensional material is the key and in the meantime the start of a path that must conduct to the final product. The presented Micro4Nano (M4N) architecture was conceived with this path in mind, thinking that the information from the nano/low dimensions can be extracted with a distributed sensor array on chip, that reads electrical parameters in various locations directly from the device surface, where for example arrays of nanostructured materials are grown. The use of an on-die array sensor has several advantages: the direct growth of the nanomaterial on device surface permits the minimization of the stray capacitance as well as the noise issues it is related to; it improves the macrometric inspection of the material, that usually is clustered and not homogeneous at its first realization phase; enables a flexible and robust test-bed for electrical properties inspection on nanodevices, suitable for most of the available and new emerging nanostructured materials
Procedimento per produrre tracce conduttive e/o piezoresistive su di un substrato polimerico
No full textLa presente invenzione si riferisce ad un procedimento per produrre tracce elettricamente conduttive e/o piezoresistive su di un substrato polimerico tramite l'utilizzo di un fascio laser.
Un procedimento di scrittura tramite laser di tracce conduttive su un substrato polimerico è descritto in EP 0 230 128 A e in WO0223962 A. Le tracce risultanti comprendono carbonio elettricamente conduttivo, prodotto dalla decomposizione termica del materiale superficiale del substrato a seguito del riscaldamento laser localizzato. I materiali utilizzabili come substrato sono materiali polimerici suscettibili di carbonizzazione, quali ad esempio resine fenolo-formaldeide, poliimmidi, polimeri di alcol furfurilico, o qualsiasi altro polimero suscettibile di decomporsi per produrre elevate rese di carbonizzazione; i substrati polimerici possono inoltre comprendere cariche disperse che migliorano l'assorbimento della luce alla lunghezza d'onda del laser, come ad esempio, carbonio, talco,
cotone o farina di legno.
Lo scopo della presente invenzione è quello di fornire un procedimento atto a permettere la produzione di tracce elettricamente conduttive su substrati polimerici che non costituiscono
substrato idoneo alla carbonizzazione ("non char forming polymers")
When bio-Nanotechnology meets Microelectronics
No full textDuring the last years, material science was focusing on the exploration of the material characteristics at nanoscale. To completely exploit the ultra-small dimension and high sensitivity of these materials, researchers addressed the development of nanodevices including only a single nanostructured element, such as nanowires (NWs), nanotubes, molecules or nanoparticles. These nanomaterials can also be considered the basis for a new generation of bio-sensors able to interact with gas, molecules (e.g., DNA molecules) or other bio-substances at nanoscale. To electrically connect the nano-element, we use planar gold nanogaps (<10nm) organized in arrays and obtained through electromigration process controlled by a full custom PCB-based modular system. During first experiments, monolayers of conductive Thiophene molecules have been self-assembled onto the nanogap resulting in a gold-molecules-gold molecular junction. Even functionalized NWs can be placed in the nanogap using dielectrophoresis. The I/V characteristic of a Metal- Molecular-Metal junction shows that a plausible resistance is in the range 10MΩ – 10GΩ but it strongly depends on the size of NWs or on the type, the number and the length of bonded molecules on the nanogap. Basically, these new generation sensors rely on changes of electrical properties (R, C) of nanodevices that have to be converted into electrical signals with an ad-hoc interfacing circuit fabricated in a standard low-cost technology. The CMOS process satisfies these requirements. The design of the read-out circuit has to garantee: – large R and C read-out range, due to process variation of nanodevices; – high SNR, to measure ultra-low current flowing through molecular nanodevices; – low power consumption to support high densitity integration of nanosensors organized in array; A quasi-digital Resistance to time-domain converter (e.g., Resistance-to-Frequency(R2F), Resistance-to-Time(R2T), PWM) can be an adaptive and effective solution. The proposed R2F converter shows low measurement error (<1%) within the 50kΩ – 3GΩ range and consumes 142μW. Moreover, the last R2T prototype consumes only 8.5μW, it has higher linearity in the whole range with maximum measurement error of 0.8%
Tackling Technical Research
No full textAt the end of their studies, master's degree students can get very close to solving research problems, but sometimes they can be very easily discouraged, dropping the option to earn a Ph.D. degree. Their listlessness and disorientation might be due to their lack of knowledge of what is research, science, and engineering (and innovation). The lack of understanding combined with 1) the impact of deal ing with heavy research subjects (the analysis of the state of the art, the understanding of the problem, and the project development) and 2) the memory of their just-finished, often-boring laboratory sessions, reporting activities can be disappointing and cause students to lose interest, especially if some basic ideas are not clea
A 130-nm CMOS 0.007 mm2 Ring-Oscillator-Based Self-Calibrating IR-UWB Transmitter Using an Asynchronous Logic Duty-Cycled PLL
No full textWe present a 0.007 mm2 impulse-radio ultrawide- band transmitter (TX) based on a ring oscillator capable of synthesizing pulses with both controlled center frequency and bandwidth using a single duty-cycling/trigger reference input. The TX embeds a single-phase charge-pump phase-locked loop (PLL), implemented with asynchronous logic, with 55 logic elements overall. The system, including radio frequency output buffers, consumes measured 30-45 pJ/pulse with a measured efficiency of ∼47% at 285 MHz center frequency and Vdd in the range of 0.97-1.17 V. At 1.2V supply, the 130 nm CMOS TX tolerates ±10% Vdd variation, maintaining robust lock and controlled power spectral density (PSD) at 300 MHz center frequency, −19 dBm radiated power at 1 MHz pulse-repetition frequency, and a fractional bandwidth of 0.23. At 300 MHz, the system achieves a measured 100 ps RMS jitter, and without output buffers, the sole PLL logic occupies an active silicon area of 0.0045 mm
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