This study proposes a two-photomask process for fabricating amorphous indium–gallium–zinc oxide (a-IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) that exhibit a self-aligned structure. The fabricated TFTs, which lack etching-stop (ES) layers, have undamaged a-IGZO active layers that facilitate superior performance. In addition, we demonstrate a bilayer passivation method that uses a polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon) and SiO₂ combination layer for improving the electrical reliability of the fabricated TFTs. Teflon was deposited as a buffer layer through thermal evaporation. The Teflon layer exhibited favorable compatibility with the underlying IGZO channel layer and effectively protected the a-IGZO TFTs from plasma damage during SiO₂ deposition, resulting in a negligible initial performance drop in the a-IGZO TFTs. Compared with passivation-free a-IGZO TFTs, passivated TFTs exhibited superior stability even after 168 h of aging under ambient air at 95% relative humidity.

Minimizing the parasitic capacitance and the number of photo-masks can improve operational speed and reduce fabrication costs. Therefore, in this study, a new two-photo-mask process is proposed that exhibits a self-aligned structure without an etching-stop layer. Combining the backside-ultraviolet (BUV) exposure and backside-lift-off (BLO) schemes can not only prevent the damage when etching the source/drain (S/D) electrodes but also reduce the number of photo-masks required during fabrication and minimize the parasitic capacitance with the decreasing of gate overlap length at same time. Compared with traditional fabrication processes, the proposed process yields that thin-film transistors (TFTs) exhibit comparable field-effect mobility (9.5 cm²/V·s), threshold voltage (3.39 V), and subthreshold swing (0.3 V/decade). The delay time of an inverter fabricated using the proposed process was considerably decreased.

In this study, a novel gold-coated test strip for blood glucose measurement has been designed. Such gold-coated test strip is feasible for mass production to achieve economies of scale. Cyclic voltammetry was applied to test strips to undergo electrochemical reaction under a potential range of ±0.4 V. Glucose oxidase (GOD) was added into K₃[Fe(CN)₆]. When glucose oxidase undergoes electrochemical reaction, the medium, K₃[Fe(CN)₆], will act as an electron acceptor, causing the electrodes on the test strip to generate a pair of clear anodic and reductive peaks. The maximum of the anodic and reductive peaks can be used as reference to adjust the resistance of the blood glucose meter. The experimental results show that by adjusting the resistance of the blood glucose meter, the accuracy of blood glucose meter reading can be tuned and blood glucose reading can be stabilized. Therefore, when the resistance of the blood glucose meter is at 2.4 KΩ, the standard deviation (STD) and coefficient of variation (CV) of the test strip are lower than those of the test strips measured at resistances of 2.2 KΩ and 2.6 KΩ. It has been proved in this study that adjusting the resistance of the blood glucose meter can optimize the chemical reaction on gold-coated test strips as well as its reading. This method can also be applied to tune the accuracy of readings for test strips coated with other materials.

In this work, a novel electronic lock that can encode and decode optical signals, modulated using Morse code conventions, was developed to build a smart home security system based on the Internet of Things (IoT). There are five topics of interest in this research: (1) optical Morse code encoder; (2) optical Morse code decoder; (3) ambient light sensor circuit; (4) fuzzy controller; (5) cloud monitoring system. We take advantage of the light-emitting components as the encoder, which are readily available in hand-held mobile devices (e.g., Smart phones) and photoresistors and a microcontroller as the decoder. By Wi-Fi transferring, even without a personal computer, real-time information about this lock can be uploaded to the cloud service platform, and helps users to ensure home safety on the remote monitoring system. By using the ambient light sensor and fuzzy controller in this novel optical Morse code-based electronic lock, experimental results show that the reliability of this system is much improved from 65% to 100%. That means that it is highly resistant to different illumination conditions in the work environment, and therefore all functions, including coding, emitting, receiving, decoding, uploading and cloud monitoring, can work well. Furthermore, besides the convenience and cost reduction, by incorporating traditional keys into smart phones, as a consumer electronics, our proposed system is suitable for users of all ages because of a user-friendly operation interface.

In this study, a proposed Microwave-Induction Heating (MIH) scheme has been systematically studied to acquire suitable MIH parameters including chamber pressure, microwave power and heating time. The proposed MIH means that the thin indium tin oxide (ITO) metal below the Poly(4-vinylphenol) (PVP) film is heated rapidly by microwave irradiation and the heated ITO metal gate can heat the PVP gate insulator, resulting in PVP cross-linking. It is found that the attenuation of the microwave energy decreases with the decreasing chamber pressure. The optimal conditions are a power of 50 W, a heating time of 5 min, and a chamber pressure of 20 mTorr. When suitable MIH parameters were used, the effect of PVP cross-linking and the device performance were similar to those obtained using traditional oven heating, even though the cross-linking time was significantly decreased from 1 h to 5 min. Besides the gate leakage current, the interface trap state density (Nit) was also calculated to describe the interface status between the gate insulator and the active layer. The lowest interface trap state density can be found in the device with the PVP gate insulator cross-linked by using the optimal MIH condition. Therefore, it is believed that the MIH scheme is a good candidate to cross-link the PVP gate insulator for organic thin-film transistor applications as a result of its features of rapid heating (5 min) and low-power microwave-irradiation (50 W).