• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.205-208
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• 2006

We report the recent progress and future prospects of flexible, large-area sensors and actuator using organic thin-film transistors (TFTs). In particular, we describe printing technologies to manufacture electronic artificial skins (e-skins) for robots, sheet image scanners suitable for mobile applications, and Braille sheet display with plastic actuator arrays. We also present recent progress of reliability and stability issues.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.242-242
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• 2012

Transparent oxide semiconductors are increasingly becoming one of good candidates for high efficient channel materials of thin film transistors (TFTs) in large-area display industries. Compare to the conventional hydrogenated amorphous silicon channel layers, solution processed ZnO-TFTs can be simply fabricated at low temperature by just using a spin coating method without vacuum deposition, thus providing low manufacturing cost. Furthermore, solution based oxide TFT exhibits excellent transparency and enables to apply flexible devices. For this reason, this process has been attracting much attention as one fabrication method for oxide channel layer in thin-film transistors (TFTs). But, poor electrical characteristic of these solution based oxide materials still remains one of issuable problems due to oxygen vacancy formed by breaking weak chemical bonds during fabrication. These electrical properties are expected due to the generation of a large number of conducting carriers, resulting in huge electron scattering effect. Therefore, we study a novel technique to effectively improve the electron mobility by applying environmental annealing treatments with various gases to the solution based Li-doped ZnO TFTs. This technique was systematically designed to vary a different lithium ratio in order to confirm the electrical tendency of Li-doped ZnO TFTs. The observations of Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy were performed to investigate structural properties and elemental composition of our samples. In addition, I-V characteristics were carried out by using Keithley 4,200-Semiconductor Characterization System (4,200-SCS) with 4-probe system.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.28 no.12
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• pp.748-757
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• 2018

Inorganic semiconductor compounds, e.g., CIGS and CZTS, are promising materials for thin film solar cells because of their high light absorption coefficient and stability. Research on thin film solar cells using this compound has made remarkable progress in the last two decades. Vacuum-based processes, e.g., co-evaporation and sputtering, are well established to obtain high-efficiency CIGS and/or CZTS thin film solar cells with over 20 % of power conversion. However, because the vacuum-based processes need high cost equipment, they pose technological barriers to producing low-cost and large area photovoltaic cells. Recently, non-vacuum based processes, for example the solution/nanoparticle precursor process, the electrodeposition method, or the polymer-capped precursors process, have been intensively studied to reduce capital expenditure. Lately, over 17 % of energy conversion efficiency has been reported by solution precursors methods in CIGS solar cells. This article reviews the status of non-vacuum techniques that are used to fabricate CIGS and CZTS thin films solar cells.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.407.1-407.1
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• 2016

Electrochromism is defined as a phenomenon which involves persistently repeated change of optical properties between bleached state and colored state by simultaneous injection of electrons and ions, sufficient to induce an electrochemical redox process. Due to this feature, considerable progress has been made in the synthesis of electrochromic (EC) materials, improvements of EC properties in EC devices such as light shutter, smart window and variable reflectance mirrors etc. Among the variable EC materials, solid-state inorganics in particular, metal oxide semiconducting materials such as nickel oxide (NiO) have been investigated extensively. The NiO that is an anodic EC material is of special interest because of high color contrast ratio, large dynamic range and low material cost. The high performance EC devices should present the use of standard industrial production techniques to produce films with high coloration efficiency, rapid switching speed and robust reversibility. Generally, the color contrast and the optical switching speed increase drastically if high surface area is used. The structure of porous thin film provides a specific surface area and can facilitate a very short response time of the reaction between the surface and ions. The large variety of methods has been used to prepare the porous NiO thin films such as sol-gel process, chemical bath deposition and sputtering. Few studies have been reported on NiO thin films made by using sol-gel method. However, compared with dry process, wet processes that have the questions of the durability and the vestige of bleached state color limit the thin films practical use, especially when prepared by sol-gel method. In this study, we synthesis the porous NiO thin films on the fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) glass by using sputtering and anodizing method. Also we compared electrical and optical properties of NiO thin films prepared by sol gel. The porous structure is promised to be helpful to the properties enhancement of the EC devices.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.25 no.7
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• pp.558-562
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• 2012

As an alternative energy, Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have received much attention due to low cost manufacturing procedure and high energy consumption rate. Incorporating scattering centers in the nanocrystalline photoanode or additional scattering layers on the nanocrystalline photoanode is an effective way to enhance the light harvest efficiency of the photoanode and the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). The light scattering abilities of these scattering layers also depend on the relative sizes and phase of the particles in the layers. A higher surface area is normally obtained using large particle sizes. Therefore, transparent high surface area $TiO_2$ layers and an additional scattering layer consisting of $TiO_2$-Rutile 500 nm paste with relatively larger particles are attractive. In this work, we investigates the applicability of a hybrid $TiO_2$ electrode (or a working electrode with a light scattering layer) in a DSSCs. We fabrication various thin film using $TiO_2$ paste 20 nm and $TiO_2$ paste 500 nm. As a result, the efficiency of the a single structure thin film was 3.35% and the efficiency as scattering layer of hybrid structure thin film was 4.36%, 4.73%.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.43 no.2 s.285
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• pp.85-91
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• 2006

Electron Beam Physical Vapor Deposition (EB-PVD) was applied to fabricate a thin film YSZ electrolyte with large area on the porous NiO-YSZ anode substrate. Microstructural and thermal stability of the as-deposited electrolyte film was investigated via SEM and XRD analysis. In order to obtain an optimized YSZ film with high stability, both temperature and surface roughness of substrate were varied. A structurally homogeneous YSZ film with large area of $12\times12\;cm^2$ and high thermal stability up to $900^{\circ}C$ was fabricated at the substrate temperature of $T_s/T_m$ higher than 0.4. The smoother surface was proved to give the better film quality. Precise control of heating and cooling rate of the anode substrate was necessary to obtain a very dense YSZ electrolyte with high thermal stability, which affords to survive after post heat treatment for fabrication a cathode layer on it as well as after long time operation of solid oxide fuel cell at high temperature.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.267-272
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• 2008

Energy harvesting from the vibration through the piezoelectric effect has been studied for powering the small wireless sensor nodes. As piezoelectric uni-morph cantilever structure can transfer low vibration to large displacement, this structure was commonly deployed to harvest electric energy from vibrations. Through our previous results, when stress was applied on the cantilever, stress was concentrated on the certain point of the ceramic of the cantilever. In this study, for miniaturing the energy harvester, we investigated how the size of ceramics and the stress distribution in ceramic affects energy harvester characteristics. Even though the area of ceramic was 28.6 % decreased from $10{\times}35{\times}0.5mm^3$ to $10{\times}25{\times}0.5mm^3$, both samples showed almost same maximum power of 0.45 mW and the electro-mechanical coupling factor ($K_{31}$) of 14 % as well. This result indicated that should be preferentially considered to generate high power with small size energy harvester.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.351-355
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• 2010

Transparent conducting aluminum-doped ZnO thin films were deposited using a sol-gel process. In this study, the important deposition parameters were investigated thoroughly to determine the appropriate procedures to grow large area thin films with low resistivity and high transparency at low cost for device applications. The doping concentration of aluminum was adjusted in a range from 1 to 4 mol% by controlling the precursor concentration. The annealing temperatures for the pre-heat treatment and post-heat treatment was $250^{\circ}C$ and 400-$600^{\circ}C$, respectively. The SEM images show that Al doped and undoped ZnO films were quite uniform and compact. The XRD pattern shows that the Al doped ZnO film has poorer crystallinity than the undoped films. The crystal quality of Al doped ZnO films was improved with an increase of the annealing temperature to $600^{\circ}C$. Although the structure of the aluminum doped ZnO films did not have a preferred orientation along the (002) plane, these films had high transmittance (> 87%) in the visible region. The absorption edge was observed at approximately 370 nm, and the absorption wavelength showed a blue-shift with increasing doping concentration. The ZnO films annealed at $500^{\circ}C$ showed the lowest resistivity at 1 mol% Al doping.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.430-430
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• 2007

In this study, the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) alignment effects treated on the ZnO thin film layers using ion beam irradiation were successfully studied for the first time. The ZnO thin films were deposited on indium-tin-oxide (ITO) coated glass substrates by rf-sputter and The ZnO thin films were deposited at the three kinds of rf power. The used DuoPIGatron type ion beam system, which can be advantageous in a large area with high density plasma generation. The ion beam parameters were as follows: energy of 1800 eV, exposure time of 1 min and ion beam current of $4\;mA/cm^2$ at exposure angles of $15^{\circ}$, $30^{\circ}$, $45^{\circ}$, and $60^{\circ}$. The homogeneous and homeotropic LC aligning capabilities treated on the ZnO thin film surface with ion beam exposure of $45^{\circ}$ for 1 min can be achieved. The low pretilt angle for a NLC treated on the ZnO thin film surface with ion beam irradiation for all incident angles was measured. The good LC alignment treated on the ZnO thin film with ion beam exposure at rf power of 150 W can be measure. For identifying surfaces topography of the ZnO thin films, atomic force microscopy (AFM) was introduced. After ion beam irradiation, test samples were fabricated in an anti-parallel configuration with a cell gap of $60{\mu}m$.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.441-445
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• 2007

In this paper we demonstrated the applications of OTFTs (organic thin film transistors) to flexible displays such as AM-EPD (active matrix electrophoretic display) and AM-OLED (active matrix organic light emitting diode), and also to integrated circuits. The OTFTs using pentacene semiconductor layer and PVP gate dielectric and Au S/D electrodes exhibited good performance for AM-EPD with the mobility of $0.59\;cm^{2}/V.sec,$ and with also good uniformity over 2.5" diagonal area. However, it is nor enough for AM-OLED requiring the mobility larger than $1\;cm^{2}/V.sec$ for large area displays. The integrated circuits also worked, producing the operating frequency of 1MHz. We need to develop a fabrication process to reduce parasitic capacitance for high frequency operation.