Weon-Guk Kim

On-Chip Curing by Microwave for Long Term Usage of Electronic Devices in Harsh Environments

Microwave-induced thermal curing is demonstrated to improve the reliability and to prolong the lifetime of chips containing nanoscale electron devices. A film containing graphite powder with high microwave absorbing efficiency was fabricated at low cost. The film is flexible, bendable, foldable, and attachable to a chip. A commercial off-the-shelf chip and a representative 3-dimensional (3D) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), known as FinFET, were utilized to verify the curing behaviors of the microwave-induced heat treatment. The heat effectively cured not only total ionizing dose (TID) damage from the external environment, but also internal electrical stress such as hot-carrier injection (HCI), which are representative sources of damages in MOSFET insulators. Then, the characteristics of the pre- and post-curing electron devices are investigated using electrical measurements and numerical simulations.

Triboelectric energy harvester with an ultra-thin tribo-dielectric layer by initiated CVD and investigation of underlying physics in the triboelectricity

A thickness effect of a tribo-dielectric layer (TDL) made of ultra-thin polymer in a triboelectric energy harvester (TEH) is experimentally and comprehensively studied. The TDL was deposited by the initiated chemical vapor deposition (i-CVD) method and its thickness was precisely controlled to analyze the thickness effect. The correlation between the thickness of the TDL and the output performance is experimentally determined and analytically understood with the aid of the dynamic contact-separation model. In contrast to the conventional static contact-separation model, in this case the output performance increases as the thickness of the TDL increases owing to the dynamic behavior of the electron, which includes drift and recombination phenomenon in the TDL.