• Journal of the Microelectronics and Packaging Society
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2013

Recently flexible electronic devices have attracted a great deal of attention because of new application possibilities including flexible display, flexible memory, flexible solar cell and flexible sensor. In particular, development of flexible memory is essential to complete the flexible integrated systems such as flexible smart phone and wearable computer. Research of flexible memory has primarily focused on organic-based materials. However, organic flexible memory has still several disadvantages, including lower electrical performance and long-term reliability. Therefore, emerging research in flexible electronics seeks to develop flexible and stretchable technologies that offer the high performance of conventional wafer-based devices as well as superior flexibility. Development of flexible memory with inorganic silicon materials is based on the design principle that any material, in sufficiently thin form, is flexible and bendable since the bending strain is directly proportional to thickness. This article reviews progress in recent technologies for flexible memory and flexible electronics with inorganic silicon materials, including transfer printing technology, wavy or serpentine interconnection structure for reducing strain, and wafer thinning technology.

• Journal of Semiconductor Engineering
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.38-45
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• 2020

With the recent emergence of foldable electronic devices, interest in flexible organic memory is significantly growing. There are three types of flexible organic memory that have been researched so far: floating-gate (FG) memory, ferroelectric field-effect-transistor (FeFET) memory, and resistive memory. Herein, performance parameters and operation mechanisms of each type of memory device are introduced, along with a brief summarization of recent research progress in flexible organic memory.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.115-116
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• 2012

The demand for flexible electronic systems such as wearable computers, E-paper, and flexible displays has increased due to their advantages of excellent portability, conformal contact with curved surfaces, light weight, and human friendly interfaces over present rigid electronic systems. This seminar introduces three recent progresses that can extend the application of high performance flexible inorganic electronics. The first part of this seminar will introduce a RRAM with a one transistor-one memristor (1T-1M) arrays on flexible substrates. Flexible memory is an essential part of electronics for data processing, storage, and radio frequency (RF) communication and thus a key element to realize such flexible electronic systems. Although several emerging memory technologies, including resistive switching memory, have been proposed, the cell-to-cell interference issue has to be overcome for flexible and high performance nonvolatile memory applications. The cell-to-cell interference between neighbouring memory cells occurs due to leakage current paths through adjacent low resistance state cells and induces not only unnecessary power consumption but also a misreading problem, a fatal obstacle in memory operation. To fabricate a fully functional flexible memory and prevent these unwanted effects, we integrated high performance flexible single crystal silicon transistors with an amorphous titanium oxide (a-TiO2) based memristor to control the logic state of memory. The $8{\times}8$ NOR type 1T-1M RRAM demonstrated the first random access memory operation on flexible substrates by controlling each memory unit cell independently. The second part of the seminar will discuss the flexible GaN LED on LCP substrates for implantable biosensor. Inorganic III-V light emitting diodes (LEDs) have superior characteristics, such as long-term stability, high efficiency, and strong brightness compared to conventional incandescent lamps and OLED. However, due to the brittle property of bulk inorganic semiconductor materials, III-V LED limits its applications in the field of high performance flexible electronics. This seminar introduces the first flexible and implantable GaN LED on plastic substrates that is transferred from bulk GaN on Si substrates. The superb properties of the flexible GaN thin film in terms of its wide band gap and high efficiency enable the dramatic extension of not only consumer electronic applications but also the biosensing scale. The flexible white LEDs are demonstrated for the feasibility of using a white light source for future flexible BLU devices. Finally a water-resist and a biocompatible PTFE-coated flexible LED biosensor can detect PSA at a detection limit of 1 ng/mL. These results show that the nitride-based flexible LED can be used as the future flexible display technology and a type of implantable LED biosensor for a therapy tool. The final part of this seminar will introduce a highly efficient and printable BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator on plastic substrates. Energy harvesting technologies converting external biomechanical energy sources (such as heart beat, blood flow, muscle stretching and animal movements) into electrical energy is recently a highly demanding issue in the materials science community. Herein, we describe procedure suitable for generating and printing a lead-free microstructured BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator on plastic substrates to overcome limitations appeared in conventional flexible ferroelectric devices. Flexible BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator was fabricated and the piezoelectric properties and mechanically stability of ferroelectric devices were characterized. From the results, we demonstrate the highly efficient and stable performance of BaTiO3 thin film nanogenerator.

• Transactions of the Society of Information Storage Systems
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.36-40
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• 2015

The demand for flexible devices including solar cells, memories and batteries has increased rapidly over the past decades. In most flexible devices, polymer-based materials are used to enable the mechanical deformations such as bending or folding. Shape Memory Polymers (SMPs) is a high molecular compound polymer with flexibility and shape recovery characteristics. In this work, flexible shape memory device was fabricated by simply coating the conducting material, carbon nano-tube (CNT), on a shape memory polymer. Furthermore, durability of the device under various type of mechanical deformations was assessed. It is believed that the result of this work will aid in realization of a stretchable and wearable electronic device for practical applications.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.808-818
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• 2013

Programmable memory built-in self-test (PMBIST) is an attractive approach for testing embedded memory. However, the main difficulties of the previous works are the large area overhead and low flexibility. To overcome these problems, a new flexible PMBIST (FPMBIST) architecture that can test both single-port memory and dual-port memory using various test algorithms is proposed. In the FPMBIST, a new instruction set is developed to minimize the FPMBIST area overhead and to maximize the flexibility. In addition, FPMBIST includes a diagnostic scheme that can improve the yield by supporting three types of diagnostic methods for repair and diagnosis. The experiment results show that the proposed FPMBIST has small area overhead despite the fact that it supports various test algorithms, thus having high flexibility.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.9-9
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• 2011

There has been strong demand for novel nonvolatile memory technology for low-cost, large-area, and low-power flexible electronics applications. Resistive memories based on metal oxide thin films have been extensively studied for application as next-generation nonvolatile memory devices. However, although the metal oxide-based resistive memories have several advantages, such as good scalability, low-power consumption, and fast switching speed, their application to large-area flexible substrates has been limited due to their material characteristics and necessity of a high-temperature fabrication process. As a promising nonvolatile memory technology for large-area flexible applications, we present a graphene oxide-based memory that can be easily fabricated using a room temperature spin-casting method on flexible substrates and has reliable memory performance in terms of retention and endurance. The microscopic origin of the bipolar resistive switching behaviour was elucidated and is attributed to rupture and formation of conducting filaments at the top amorphous interface layer formed between the graphene oxide film and the top Al metal electrode, via high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and in situ x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. This work provides an important step for developing understanding of the fundamental physics of bipolar resistive switching in graphene oxide films, for the application to future flexible electronics.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2010.05a
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• pp.579-580
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• 2010

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2011.06a
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• pp.789-790
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• 2011

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2015.08a
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• pp.192.1-192.1
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• 2015

We demonstrated the nonvolatile memory functionality of nano-crystalline silicon (nc-Si) and InGaZnOxide (IGZO) thin film transistors (TFTs) using mobile protons that are generated by very short time hydrogen neutral beam (H-NB) treatment in gate insulator (SiO2). The whole memory fabrication process kept under $50^{\circ}C$ (except SiO2 deposition process; $300^{\circ}C$). These devices exhibited reproducible hysteresis, reversible switching, and nonvolatile memory behaviors in comparison with those of the conventional FET devices. We also executed hydrogen treatment in order to figure out the difference of mobile proton generation between PECVD and H-NB CVD that we modified. Our study will further provide a vision of creating memory functionality and incorporating proton-based storage elements onto a probability of next generation flexible memorable electronics such as low power consumption flexible display panel.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.663-682
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• 2016

Continuum manipulators as a kind of mechanical arms are useful tools in special robotic applications. In medical applications, like colonoscopy, a maneuverable thin and flexible manipulator is required. This research is focused on developing a basic module for such an application using shape memory alloys (SMA). In the structure of the module three wires of SMA are uniformly distributed and attached to the circumference of a flexible tube. By activating wires, individually or together, different rotation regimes are provided. SMA model is used based on Brinson work. The SMA model is combined to model of flexible tube to provide a composite model of the module. Simulating the model in Matlab provided a platform to be used to develop controller. Complex and nonlinear behavior of SMA make the control problem hard especially when a few SMA actuators are active simultaneously. In this paper, position control of the two degree of freedom module is under focus. An experimental control strategy is developed to regulate a desired position in the module. The simulation results present a reasonable performance of the controller. Moreover, the results are verified through experiments and show that the continuum module of this paper would be used in real modular manipulators.