Various sizes and morphologies of noble metal/zinc oxide hybrid materials have promising applications in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Generally, organic agents used during the synthesis of metal nanoparticles will inexorably induce organic pollution on the surface of SERS substrate, resulting in a negative effect on detection sensitivity. Herein, a stable and clean 3D flower-like ZnO/Ag hierarchical microstructure SERS substrate was designed and fabricated via a simple photocatalytic method. This synthetic strategy does not involve usage of any organic agents, which ensures the cleanness and free of impurities interferences. As anticipated, the as-fabricated 3D flower-like ZnO/Ag SERS substrates with high surface-to-volume ratio increased numerous hot spots, and exhibited excellent detection sensitivity to Rhodamine 6G. A linear relationship between the Raman intensity and the concentration of Rhodamine 6G ranging from 10⁻¹¹ to 10⁻⁴ M was realised. This work demonstrated a performance-enhanced SERS sensor based on microflower-like [email protected] hybrids, which provides a potential method to develop highly sensitive and stable SERS sensor for organic molecules detection.

A novel material of Ag₃PO₄–Ag–Bi₂WO₆ Z-scheme heterojunction has been successfully synthesised using a simple deposition–precipitation method. In this work, the authors used diverse techniques to characterise the structure, catalytic performance, and morphology of the prepared materials. Meanwhile, the catalytic performance of prepared materials was evaluated by degrading organic pigment. The excellent catalytic performance of the material is according to the collaboration of Ag nanoparticles in the Ag₃PO₄–Ag–Bi₂WO₆ heterojunction. Ag nanoparticles enhance the stableness and activeness of the catalyst by acting as a charge transfer bridge between Ag₃PO₄ and Bi₂WO₆, which results in improving electron–hole pairs’ separation. Compared with pure Bi₂WO₆ and Ag₃PO₄–Bi₂WO₆ materials, Ag₃PO₄–Ag–Bi₂WO₆ has higher decomposition effectiveness of methylene blue under the same conditions. The photocatalytic mechanism was put forward and the process of the hole–electron pair's separation is discussed in detail, which is due to the formation of the Z-scheme heterojunction with Ag nanoparticles acted as a charge transfer bridge.

The suppression of leakage current via surface passivation plays a critical role for GaSb-based optoelectronic devices. In this Letter the authors carefully optimise the sulfur passivation parameters for improving the performance of GaSb p–i–n devices. Two competing processes are evaluated during the sulfur passivation process: the hydrolysis of HS^– ions that aide surface passivation and the re-oxidation, respectively. Upon the optimisation of sulfur passivation parameters and subsequent encapsulation with atomic layer deposition Al₂O₃, the surface resistivity significantly increased from 4.3 kΩ.cm to 28.6 kΩ.cm, leading to a 19.1 times drop in dark current at room temperature for the GaSb p–i–n structure. This Letter provides a repeatable and stable passivation approach for improving the optoelectronic performance of GaSb-based devices.

In this Letter, the authors report a flexible CMOS chip converted by a novel chip transformation process. To realise a truly flexible CMOS chip, a two-step etching process was employed in the transformation process: (i) vapour etching to remove inter-dielectric layers followed by polymer encapsulation and (ii) plasma etching to remove the substrate of the chip. The I–V results measured after the chip transformation process show a voltage variance of <0.8% compared to the rigid chip. The bending test also revealed very small changes (0.6%) under strain conditions. Their results offer a viable route to use the foundry-fabricated CMOS chip for flexible chips; thus, a high-performance flexible chip can be realised. This technology will enable us to utilise various foundry-processed chips for future flexible applications such as health and environment monitoring, advanced mobile communication systems, and wearable electronics via a simple post-transformation process.

Dual-channel thin-film transistors (TFTs) show excellent effective mobility (μ _eff) and reliability, including negative-bias-illumination stability. To enhance the performance of these devices, post-thermal annealing in air is performed for 2 h at the low temperature of 250°C. To investigate the effects of low-temperature thermal annealing, indium–zinc-oxide/gallium–indium–zinc-oxide (IZO/IGZO) dual-channel TFTs with various IZO thicknesses are fabricated and examined. The observed parameters are μ _eff, saturation mobility (μ _sat), subthreshold slope (SS), and threshold voltage (V _TH). The interface quality may be improved by low-temperature thermal annealing, which was confirmed by the improvement in μ _eff and SS. However, these performance enhancements are intensively observed only in the channels with an IZO thickness below 10 nm. When the IZO thickness becomes 10 nm or more, the improvement in μ _eff due to low-temperature thermal annealing hardly occurs. This is because μ _eff is greatly influenced by the interface quality due to Coulomb scattering when the IZO thickness is <10 nm. However, for an IZO thickness above 10 nm, as phonon scattering also has a significant effect on μ _eff, the improvement in interface quality by thermal annealing is small. This is also supported by low-frequency noise measurements, which are sensitive to interface quality.

In this study, a method for fine adjustment of Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) routing delays is proposed and applied to improve the linearity of an unbalanced multi-measurement time-to-digital converter (TDC). The delay control method increases load capacitances of interconnect points of switch matrices by small amounts using additional connections to unused interconnects in the FPGA fabric. The novel delay control method uses the tool command language (TCL) scripting feature available in the Xilinx Vivado tool to automatically add wires into a fully placed and routed design. A total of 61 additional wires were successfully and automatically added to reduce the differential and integral non-linearities of the target TDC from 0.51 and −0.54 LSB to 0.05 and 0.06 LSB, respectively (reduction factors of 10.2 and 9) for an LSB equal to 333 ps.

This study evaluated the biochemical, molecular, and histopathological mechanisms involved in the hypoglycaemic effect of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnONPs) in experimental diabetic rats. ZnONPs were prepared by the sol–gel method and characterised by scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM). To explore the possible hypoglycaemic and antioxidant effect of ZnONPs, rats were grouped as follows: control group, ZnONPs treated group, diabetic group, and diabetic + ZnONPs group. Upon treatment with ZnONPs, a significant alteration in the activities of superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, and the levels of insulin, haemoglobin A1c, and the expression of cluster of differentiation 4+ (CD4+), CD8+ T cells, glucose transporter type-4 (GLUT-4), tumour necrosis factor, and interleukin-6 when compared to diabetic and their control rats. ZnONPs administration to the diabetic group showed eminent blood glucose control and restoration of the biochemical profile. This raises their active role in controlling pancreas functions to improve glycaemic status as well as the inflammatory responses. Histopathological investigations showed the non-toxic and therapeutic effect of ZnONPs on the pancreas. TEM of pancreatic tissues displayed restoration of islets of Langerhans and increased insulin-secreting granules. This shows the therapeutic application of ZnONPs as a safe anti-diabetic agent and to have a potential for the control of diabetes.

In recent past, the cross-coupling crosstalk becomes a dominating factor due to the closer proximity of wire that reduces the performance of coupled interconnects at lower technology. To overwhelm interconnect problems, this work demonstrates a comprehensive study of unshielded and active shielded spatially arranged mixed carbon nanotube (CNT) bundle (SMCB) and randomly distributed mixed CNT bundle (RMCB) interconnects at 10 nm technology. Using a driver-interconnect-load setup, a unique multi-conductor transmission line and an equivalent single conductor model is proposed considering the impact of different CNT diameters with their associated line and coupling parasitics. A resistive and CNT field-effect transistor (CNTFET) driver model is considered at 10 nm technology to demonstrate the impact of single line delay, cross-coupling delay, and power dissipation for the densely packed bundle at global lengths. It is observed that a CNTFET-based realistic RMCB exhibits on an average 29.19 and 39.56% reduced single line delay and power dissipation, respectively compared to different SMCB configurations at 700 µm interconnect lengths. Moreover, a shielded RMCB encouragingly provides an improved immunity of cross-coupling impact for the on-chip interconnects at 10 nm technology. Therefore, from fabrication and modelling aspects, a randomly distributed MCB can be proved as emerging interconnect for next-generation on-chip applications.

Although the sources of soft errors are device-level interactions, the generated errors could propagate and cause system-level failures. As a result, it is very important to analyze the impact of soft errors using a device to system-level approach. Therefore, an efficient soft error vulnerability estimation technique has to be able to accurately model the error generation at device-level as well as the masking behavior at higher abstraction levels. The proposed cross-layer Soft Error Rate (SER) analysis platform employs a combination of empirical models at the device level, error site analysis at chip layout, analytical Error Propagation (EP) at logic level, and fault simulation/emulation at the architecture/application level to provide the detailed contribution of each component (flip-flops, combinational gates, and memory arrays) to the overall SER. At each stage in the modeling hierarchy, an appropriate level of abstraction is used to propagate the effect of errors to the next higher level.

Fe₃O₄ with different shapes are reported herein to modify the glassy carbon electrode and then they are used to detect dopamine (DA), a member of the catecholamine and phenethylamine families. Cyclic voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, differential pulse voltammetry and linear sweep voltammetry are all chosen to characterise the sensor's performance to DA. Under the optimal conditions, the modified sensor (N-rGO/Fe₃O₄ NRs/GCE) had some good performance, followed as short response time (∼3 s), wide linear range (0.2–176 μM), low detection limit (0.05 μM, S/N = 2), good stability and reproducibility. The fabricated DA biosensor was further investigated for DA determination in human blood serum, suggesting its great potential in biological samples.