Hysteresis in the current-voltage characteristics of a ZnO thin-film transistor (TFT) has been studied. Electric dipoles at the interface of the dielectric and the channel have been proposed as the agents responsible for the hysteresis. From experimental results and theoretical analysis, the water diffusing into the active layer is found as the main origin of the hysteresis. Based on this finding, devices free of hysteresis were obtained by using heat treatment and a passivation layer to control water diffusion in the fabrication process. Conversely, the hysteresis characteristics can be engineered so as to benefit the application of electronic memory. The function of the TFT device that serves as a memory element was also investigated and demonstrated in this paper. Owing to its low temperature process and simplified structure (compared with the FeRAM), 3-D stacked or even transparent nonvolatile memory would be its potential application.

Transparent radio frequency identification (RFID) integrated circuits based on ZnO thin film transistors were developed by using ratioed logic gates with depletion loads. The fabrication of these logic gates employed a simple deuterium plasma treatment to adjust the threshold voltages of the load transistors. Inverters were realized with full swing (0.02 ~ 4.99V), high gain of -48V/V, large noise margin, and small area. RFID circuits based on such logic gates exhibited ultra-low power dissipation of 8.28 μW at a supply voltage of 2.4 V and a considerably high data rate of 1.6 kb/s, which may open up possibilities for applications including transparent, low-cost RFID tags.

MoS ₂ -graphene heterostructure nanopores can prolong the dwell time of BSA molecules up to more than 100 ms compared with other kinds of nanopores.

Top-gate zinc oxide thin-film transistors have been fabricated by thermal atomic layer deposition, and the effective process steps to improve the device stability have been investigated in detail. In particular, the incorporation of triple rapid thermal annealing steps in oxygen ambient has been proposed to shift the turn-ON voltage toward the positive direction, reduce interface defects, and suppress gate leakage current. Such devices exhibited near zero turn-ON voltage and significantly enhanced electrical and environmental stability. Repeated ${I} _{D}$ – ${V} _{\text {GS}}$ sweeping over 900 times in air ambient only caused a shift of the transfer characteristics as low as 0.08 V. Both positive and negative gate bias stress tests on such devices exhibited superior stability performance. Furthermore, ring oscillators based on these devices were found to be capable of highly stable continuous operation over 10 000 s, indicating the devices’ suitability for practical circuits-on-glass applications.