Roll-to-roll printed resistive WORM memory on a flexible substrate.

The fabrication process and the operation characteristics of a fully roll-to-roll printed resistive write-once-read-many memory on a flexible substrate are presented. The low-voltage (<10 V) write operation of the memories from a high resistivity '0' state to a low resistivity '1' state is based on the rapid electrical sintering of bits containing silver nanoparticles. The bit ink is formulated by mixing two commercially available silver nanoparticle inks in order to tune the initial square resistance of the bits and to create a self-organized network of percolating paths.

Substrate-facilitated nanoparticle sintering and component interconnection procedure.

Room temperature substrate-facilitated sintering of nanoparticles is demonstrated using commercially available silver nanoparticle ink and inkjet printing substrates. The sintering mechanism is based on the chemical removal of the nanoparticle stabilizing ligand and is shown to provide conductivity above one-fourth that of bulk silver. A novel approach to attach discrete components to printed conductors is presented, where the sintered silver provides the metallic interconnects with good electrical and mechanical properties.

Wireless ferroelectric resonating sensor.

This paper presents a passive wireless resonating sensor that is based on a ferroelectric varactor. The sensor replies with its data at an intermodulation frequency when a reader device illuminates it at 2 closely located frequencies. The paper derives a theoretical equation for the response of such a sensor, verifies the theory by simulations, and demonstrates a temperature sensor based on a ferroelectric varactor.

Electrical sintering of nanoparticle structures.

A method for sintering nanoparticles by applying voltage is presented. This electrical sintering method is demonstrated using silver nanoparticle structures ink-jet-printed onto temperature-sensitive photopaper. The conductivity of the printed nanoparticle layer increases by more than five orders of magnitude during the sintering process, with the final conductivity reaching 3.

Electrostatic transducers for micromechanical resonators: free space and solid dielectric.

Three electrostatic transduction methods are analyzed for a micromechanical, longitudinal mode, beam resonator. The conventional parallel plate transducer placed at the location of maximum displacement is compared to two solid, dielectric transducers internal to the resonator. Although the solid dielectric offers higher permittivity than the free-space-filled transducers, the unfavorable locations of the internal transducers reduce or even remove the performance advantage of the higher permittivity.

Phase noise in capacitively coupled micromechanical oscillators.

Phase noise in capacitively coupled microresonator-based oscillators is investigated. A detailed analysis of noise mixing mechanisms in the resonator is presented, and the capacitive transduction is shown to be the dominant mechanism for low-frequency 1/f-noise mixing into the carrier sidebands. Thus, the capacitively coupled micromechanical resonators are expected to be more prone to the 1/f-noise aliasing than piezoelectrically coupled resonators.