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With more than thirty years of research and development until commercialization, performance, reliability, and robustness of silicon carbide (SiC) based devices have been improved significantly due to drastic reduction in crystal defects from the well-controlled processes of crystal growth and device fabrication. It is crucial to investigate the effects of SiC crystal defects on the electrical characteristics of devices. Here, an up-to-date development of the correlation between crystal defects of SiC with electrical performance of the devices has been reviewed. The effect of defects on the electrical parameters of the device and the failure mechanism are discussed, and the development of SiC in recent years is prospected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Lanthanum cerium oxide thin films have been deposited on n-type (100) silicon wafers using the spin coating technique. The post-deposition annealing was performed over spin-coated films. The compositional studies were conducted by performing Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction. Ellipsometry was used to determine the thickness and atomic force microscopy was performed to understand the surface morphology of the deposited thin films. The effect of rapid thermal annealing at different temperatures over the structural and chemical properties of the LaCeO2 thin films was observed. The FTIR spectra show the formation of silicates at the interface of the oxide and semiconductor, while XRD results show that the films become crystalline with increased annealing temperature. The refractive index was observed to be reduced with an increase in the annealing temperature and a minor reduction in the physical thickness as per the sample standard deviation of 0.2981 nm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Bio-organic, as one of the sustainable and bioresorbable materials, has been used as an active thin film in producing resistive switching random access memory (RRAM) due to its specialized properties. This type of nonvolatile memory consists of a simple unit structure with the processed and solidified bio-organic-based thin film sandwiched between two electrodes. Its memory characteristics are significantly affected by the resistive-switching mechanism. However, to date, the reported mechanisms are very diverse and scattered, and to our best knowledge, there is no literature that reviewed comprehensively the mechanisms of resistive switching in bio-organic-based thin films. Therefore, the objective of this article is to critically analyze data related to the mechanisms of the bio-organic-based RRAM since it was first reported. Based on the pool of literature, three types of mechanisms are categorized, namely electronic, electrochemical, and thermochemical, and the naming is well justified based on the principle of operation. The determining factors and roles of bio-organic material and the two electrodes in governing the three mechanisms have been analyzed, reviewed, discussed, and compared. more...

Filtration is a critical step during wastewater treatment, in which the catalyst must be separated from the aqueous system for the next treatment. For effective separation of the catalyst, a proper strategy is demanded to overcome the filtration issue in the suspended catalyst system. Therefore, an innovative photocatalytic system with C,N-TiO2 NPs immobilized on floating alginate beads was designed via the ionotropic gelation method to treat diazinon as a model pollutant under solar light irradiation. The synthesized C,N-TiO2 NPs showed unique features including an anatase phase with a crystallite size of 11 ± 2.1 nm, active under the visible light region with a lower bandgap energy of 2.94 eV than 3.2 eV of bulk anatase TiO2, and has slower recombination of electron–hole pairs than the bulk anatase TiO2. The XPS analysis also confirmed that C and N were codoped into TiO2 from the shift of binding energy for Ti 2p. SEM analysis provided evidence that many accumulated powders of the synthesized C,N-TiO2 NPs were dispersed onto the alginate bead surface. The designed C,N-TiO2 NP/alginate bead floating photocatalyst achieved the excellent removal of diazinon of 80.61% and a mineralization degree of 60.08% with the presence of dominant ROS (·O2– radicals) under solar light for 8 h. The degradation kinetics followed first-order kinetics, whereas the Langmuir isotherm model was fitted for the adsorption isotherm. It could be reused for five cycles with 76.84% diazinon removal, reflecting the great reusability of the floating photocatalyst during photodegradation. Thus, this work creates a novel designation of C,N-TiO2 NP/alginate bead floating photocatalysts that have great potential for application in photocatalytic wastewater treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

In this work, different annealing ambient (nitrogen-oxygen-nitrogen (N2-O2-N2), forming gas-oxygen-forming gas (FG-O2-FG), and argon-oxygen-argon (Ar-O2-Ar)) were explored to investigate the feasibility of employing the annealed ternary GaxCeyOz passivation layer (PL) for development of Si-based metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) capacitors. The impact of nitrogen and/or hydrogen in hindering the growth of silicon dioxide (SiO2) interfacial layer (IL) was quantitatively evaluated. The combination of effects brought by nitrogen attached to oxygen vacancies, nitrogen-silicon bonding, and nitrogen accumulation at the GaxCeyOz/Si interface effectively minimized the formation of SiO2 IL. Consequently, among all the samples, the GaxCeyOz PL annealed in N2-O2-N2 ambient exhibited superior MOS characteristics in terms of low effective oxide charge, slow trap density, interface trap density, and interface state density, which have translated into good leakage current density-electric field characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...