Fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) is a commonly used transparent conducting oxide in optoelectronic device applications. The work function of FTO is commonly cited as 4.4 eV, which is incommensurate with recent device performance results. Using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, the authors measured the work function of commercial FTO to be 5.0±0.1 eV. UV ozone treatment was found to increase the work function by ∼0.1 eV due to surface band bending. The origins of the much lower work function previously reported are also discussed and are found to be a result of carbon contamination and UV induced work function lowering.

Molybdenum trioxide $\left({\text{MoO}}_3\right)$ is commonly used as a buffer layer in organic electronic devices to improve hole-injection. However, stoichiometric ${\text{MoO}}_3$ is an insulator, and adds a series resistance. Here it is shown that a ${\text{MoO}}_3$ buffer layer can be reduced to form a metallic oxide buffer that exhibits more favorable energy-level alignment with $\text{N},{\text{N}}^{\prime }$ -diphenyl-$\text{N},{\text{N}}^{\prime }$ -bis-(1-naphthyl)-$1\text{-}{1}^{\prime }$ -biphenyl-$4,4^{\prime }$ -diamine $\left(\alpha \text{-NPD}\right)$ than does ${\text{MoO}}_3$ . This buffer layer thus provides the conductivity of a metal with the favorable energy alignment of an oxide. Photoemission shows the reduced oxide contains ${\text{Mo}}^{4+}$ and ${\text{Mo}}^{5+}$ , with a metallic valence band structure similar to ${\text{MoO}}_2$ .

The electrochemical reactions of SiC film with Li⁺ have been investigated by electrochemical characterization and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

This paper reviews the studies on La-based high-k dielectrics for metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) applications in recent years. According to the analyses of the physical and chemical characteristics of La₂O₃, its hygroscopicity and defects (oxygen vacancies, oxygen interstitials, interface states, and grain boundary states) are the main problems for high-performance devices. Reports show that post-deposition treatments (high temperature, laser), nitrogen incorporation and doping by other high-k material are capable of solving these problems. On the other hand, doping La into other high-k oxides can effectively passivate their oxygen vacancies and improve the threshold voltages of relevant MOS devices, thus improving the device performance. Investigations on MOS devices including non-volatile memory, MOS field-effect transistor, thin-film transistor, and novel devices (FinFET and nanowire-based transistor) suggest that La-based high-k dielectrics have high potential to fulfill the high-performance requirements in future MOS applications.

The effects of Ta incorporation in La₂O₃ gate dielectric of amorphous InGaZnO thin-film transistor are investigated. Since the Ta incorporation is found to effectively enhance the moisture resistance of the La₂O₃ film and thus suppress the formation of La(OH)₃, both the dielectric roughness and trap density at/near the InGaZnO/dielectric interface can be reduced, resulting in a significant improvement in the electrical characteristics of transistor. Among the samples with different Ta contents, the one with a Ta/(Ta + La) atomic ratio of 21.7% exhibits the best performance, including high saturation carrier mobility of 23.4 cm²/V·s, small subthreshold swing of 0.177 V/dec, and negligible hysteresis. Nevertheless, excessive incorporation of Ta can degrade the device characteristics due to newly generated Ta-related traps.

Research is currently being carried out to develop high-performance solid-state supercapacitors (SCs) with high energy density. One effective method to improve the energy density of the solid-state SC devices is enlarging their operating voltage. Organic electrolytes and asymmetric structure have been employed in supercapacitors to increase their operating voltage. However, they usually suffer from high cost, high toxicity, poor ionic conductivity and complicated manufacturing processes. Herein, a simple oxidation and annealing method is introduced to fabricate functionalized carbon fabric (FCF) electrodes. The as-prepared FCF electrode exhibits a high areal capacitance of 155.8 mF cm⁻² and 143.4 mF cm⁻² at negative potential and positive potential, respectively. Furthermore, a high-performance and flexible solid-state supercapacitor with high operating voltage (1.6 V) is successfully developed using functionalized carbon fabric as both positive and negative electrode. The FCF-based device has a high capacitance of 134.8 F cm⁻² (or 2.41 F cm⁻³). The maximum volumetric energy density and volumetric power density are 0.83 mW h cm⁻³ and 1.58 W cm⁻³, respectively, which are higher than most previously reported CF-based SCs. The proposed FCF electrodes demonstrate exciting possibilities of developing high-performance solid-state supercapacitors with high operating voltage for efficient energy storage.