• Clean Technology
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.6-23
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• 1998

Recently, semiconductor industry has grown rapidly because of the large demand for electronic devices and equipment. The semiconductor industries have also played an important role on the economic growth in Korea. As the environmental regulations become strict, the proper environmental management and the well-developed waste minimization technologies in semiconductor industries are two of urgent problems to be solved. The semiconductor manufacturing process consists of a series of continuous chemical processes, such as cleaning, oxidation, diffusion, photolithography, etching and film deposition. During the processes, various environmentally hazardous wastes are produced. The wastes may be classified as wastewater, gaseous pollutants, and solid wastes. For waste minimization, the substitution of raw materials and process optimization techniques are used, while the selective destruction technologies of toxic chemicals contained in the wastes have been reported. Also, new technologies have been developed for source reduction and waste reduction, such as reduction of toxic chemical use and substitution of hazardous liquids with gaseous reactants or solvent.

• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.444-449
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• 2023

As electronic devices become smaller and more integrated, the demand for manufacturing thin, flexible printed circuit boards (FPCBs) has increased. Although FPCBs are conventionally manufactured by a photolithography method using dry film resist, this process is complicated, and the mask is specifically designed to obtain the precision of the desired circuit line width. In this regard, manufacturing FPCBs with fine patterns through the direct printing method of photocurable inks has gained growing attention. Since the manufacturing process of FPCBs is based on the direct printing method that includes etching and stripping processes utilizing acid and basic chemicals, controlling the adhesion strength, the etching resistance, and the strippability of photocured inks has drawn a lot of attention for the fabrication of fine patterns through photocurable inks. In this study, acrylic ink with various types and contents of the photoinitiator was prepared, and the curing behavior was analyzed. Also, the adhesion strength, etching resistance, and strippability were analyzed to evaluate the applicability of developed photocurable etching resist inks.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.18-21
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• 2005

A new technology for reducing photolithography process from a four step to a three step process in the fabrication of TFT LCD is introduced. The core technology for 3-mask-TFT processes is the lift-off process [1], by which the PAS and PXL layers can be formed simultaneously. A different method of the lift-off process was developed in order to enhance the performance of efficiency with conventional positive and not negative PR which is the generally used in other lift-off process. In addition, the removal capacity of the ITO/PR in lift-off process was evaluated. The evaluation results showed that the new process can be run in conventional TFT production condition. In order to apply this new process in existing TFT process, several tests were conducted to ensure stability of the TFT process. It was found that the outgases from PR on the substrate in ITO sputtering chamber do not raise any problem, and the deposited ITO film beside the PR has conventional ITO qualities. Furthemore, the particles that were produced due to the ITO chips in PR strip bath could be reduced by the existing filtering system of stripper. With the development of total process and design of the structure for TFT using this technology, 3-mask-panels were achieved in TN and IPS modes, which showed the same display performances as those with the conventional 4mask process. The applicability and usefulness of the 3-mask process has already verified in the mass production line and in fact it currently being used for the production of some products.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.20-25
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• 2010

An integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric sensor operating at 632.8 nm was designed and fabricated by the technology of planar rib waveguides. Rib waveguide based on silica system ($SiO_2-SiO_xN_y-SiO_2$) was geometrically designed to have single mode operation and high sensitivity. It was structured by semiconductor fabrication processes such as thin film deposition, photolithography, and RIE (Reactive Ion Etching). With the power observation, propagation loss measurement by cut-back method showed about 4.82 dB/cm for rib waveguides. Additionally the chromium mask process for an etch stop was employed to solve the core damaging problem in patterning the sensing zone on the chip. Refractive index measurement of water/ethanol mixture with this device finally showed a sensitivity of about $\pi$/($4.04{\times}10^{-3}$).

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.241.2-241.2
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• 2014

We present highly transparent liquid crystal displays (LCDs) using hybrid films based on carbon nanomaterials, metal grid, and indium-tin-oxide (ITO) grid. Carbon based nanomaterials are used as transparent electrodes because of high transmittance. Despite of their high transmittance they have relatively high sheet resistance. To solve this problem, we applied grid and made hybrid conductive films based on carbon nanomaterials. Conventional photolithography processes were used to make a grid pattern of metal and ITO. To fabricate transparent conductive films, carbon nanotube (CNT) ink was spin coated on the grid pattern. The transparency of the conductive film was controlled by shape and size of the grid pattern and the thickness of CNT films. The optical transmittance of CNT-based hybrid films is 92.2% and sheet resistance is also reduced to $168{\Omega}/square$. These substrates were used for the fabrication of typical twisted nematic (TN) LCD cells. From the characteristics of LCD devices such as transmittance, operating voltage, voltage holding ratio our devices were comparable to those of pristine ITO substrates. The result shows that the hybrid conductive films based on carbon nanomaterials could be alternative of ITO for the highly transparent LCDs.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.374-377
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• 2008

Due to the environmental concerns, especially the greenhouse effect and GWP (Global Warming Potential), the carbon dioxide was investigated as an alternative natural refrigerant to replace HFCs (HydroFluoroCarbons) in refrigerator or air conditioning systems. Because new compressor with carbon dioxide is going to be operated under the high pressure, the tribology of sliding surfaces in the compressor becomes very important. To improve of wear resistance in compressor parts, especially rotary type, the friction and wear characteristics of improved sliding surfaces between vane and flange were evaluated in this paper. The method of reformed sliding surface, such as micro-dimple processes, was applied on surfaces in order to improve the tribological characteristics, and their performances were evaluated experimentally. The vane-on-flange type lubricated sliding tests were performed with a high pressure wear tester using carbon dioxide. Test results showed that the reformed surfaces were very effective to reduce the friction and the wear amounts of vane surfaces. The method of improved surfaces showed good tribological properties at vane and flange.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.890-895
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• 1999

The recent important issue in solar cell fabrication is to adopt thin film silicon solar cells on cheap substrates. However, thin cells demand new grid design concept that all the contacts(to the emitter and base) be located on the front surface. Hence, the aim of the investigation presented in this paper was to determine the potential and the basic limitation of the design. With this concept, an interdigitated front grid structure was realized and cells were fabricated through a set of photolithography processes. Confirmed efficiencies of up to 11.5% were achieved on bonded SOI wafers with a cell thickness of 50$\mu\textrm{m}$ in the case of finger spacing more than $\mu\textrm{m}$ and a base width of 35$\mu\textrm{m}$. It was also shown from the results that the design rules for optimizing the base fraction and reducing the shadowing fraction are noted as an important technique to realize high-efficiency thin silicon solar cells.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.444-444
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• 2011

Recently, patterned magnetic films and elements attract a wide interest due to their technological potentials in ultrahigh-density magnetic recording and spintronic devices. Among those patterned magnetic structures, magnetic anti-dot patterning induces a strong shape anisotropy in the film, which can control the magnetic properties such as coercivity, permeability, magnetization reversal process, and magneto-resistance. While majority of the previous works have been concentrated on anti-dot arrays with a single magnetic layer, there has been little work on multilayered anti-dot arrays. In this work, we report on study of the magnetic properties of bilayered anti-dot system consisting of upper perforated Co layer of 40 nm and lower continuous Ni layer of 5 nm thick, fabricated by photolithography and wet-etching processes. The magnetic hysteresis (M-H) loops were measured with a superconducting-quantum-interference-device (SQUID) magnetometer (Quantum Design: MPMS). For comparison, investigations on continuous Co thin film and single-layer Co anti-dot arrays were also performed. The magnetic-domain configuration has been measured by using a magnetic force microscope (PSIA: XE-100) equipped with magnetic tips (Nanosensors). An external electromagnet was employed while obtaining the MFM images. The MFM images revealed well-defined periodic domain networks which arise owing to the anisotropies such as magnetic uniaxial anisotropy, configurational anisotropy, etc. The inclusion of holes in a uniform magnetic film and the insertion of a uniform thin Ni layer, drastically affected the coercivity as compared with single Co anti-dot array, without severely affecting the saturation magnetization ($M_s$). The observed changes in the magnetic properties are closely related to the patterning that hinders the domain-wall motion as well as to the magneto-anisotropic bilayer structure.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.5
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• pp.508-513
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• 2015

A capacitive-type touch screen panel (TSP) composed of silver nanowire (AgNW) crossing electrodes and transparent bridge structures was fabricated on a polycarbonate film. The transparent bridge structure was formed with a stack of Al-doped ZnO (AZO) electrodes and SU-8 insulator. The stable and robust continuity of the bridge electrode over the bridge insulator was achieved by making the side-wall slope of the bridge insulator low and depositing the conformal AZO film with atomic layer deposition. With an extended exposure time of photolithography, the lower part of the SU-8 layer around the region uncovered by the photomask can be exposed enough to the UV light scattered from the substrate. This leads to the low side-wall slope of the bridge insulator. The fabricated TSP sample showed a large capacitance change of 22.71% between with and without touching. Our work supplies the technological clue for ensuring long-term reliability to the highly flexible and transparent TSP made by using conventional fabrication processes.

• Composites Research
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.264-268
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• 2021

In this study, we propose a method for fabricating hydrophobic coatings/films with three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical nanostructured organic/inorganic composite surfaces. An epoxy-based, large-area 3D ordered nanoporous template is first prepared through an advanced photolithography technique called Proximity-field nanoPatterning (PnP). Then, a hierarchically structured surface is generated by densely impregnating the template with silica nanoparticles with an average diameter of 22 nm through dip coating. Due to the coexisting micro- and nano-scale roughness on the surface, the fabricated composite film exhibits a higher contact angle (>137 degrees) for water droplets compared to the reference samples. Therefore, it is expected that the materials and processes developed through this study can be used in various ways in the traditional coating/film field.