Energy challenges for ICT

The energy consumption from the expanding use of information and communications technology (ICT) is unsustainable with present drivers, and it will impact heavily on the future climate change. However, ICT devices have the potential to contribute signi - cantly to the reduction of CO2 emission and enhance resource e ciency in other sectors, e.g., transportation (through intelligent transportation and advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles), heating (through smart building control), and manu- facturing (through digital automation based on smart autonomous sensors). To address the energy sustainability of ICT and capture the full potential of ICT in resource e - ciency, a multidisciplinary ICT-energy community needs to be brought together cover- ing devices, microarchitectures, ultra large-scale integration (ULSI), high-performance computing (HPC), energy harvesting, energy storage, system design, embedded sys- tems, e cient electronics, static analysis, and computation. In this chapter, we introduce challenges and opportunities in this emerging eld and a common framework to strive towards energy-sustainable ICT

Fully Integrated Biochip Platforms for Advanced Healthcare

Recent advances in microelectronics and biosensors are enabling developments of innovative biochips for advanced healthcare by providing fully integrated platforms for continuous monitoring of a large set of human disease biomarkers. Continuous monitoring of several human metabolites can be addressed by using fully integrated and minimally invasive devices located in the sub-cutis, typically in the peritoneal region. This extends the techniques of continuous monitoring of glucose currently being pursued with diabetic patients. However, several issues have to be considered in order to succeed in developing fully integrated and minimally invasive implantable devices. These innovative devices require a high-degree of integration, minimal invasive surgery, long-term biocompatibility, security and privacy in data transmission, high reliability, high reproducibility, high specificity, low detection limit and high sensitivity. Recent advances in the field have already proposed possible solutions for several of these issues. The aim of the present paper is to present a broad spectrum of recent results and to propose future directions of development in order to obtain fully implantable systems for the continuous monitoring of the human metabolism in advanced healthcare applications

Fabrication and nano-scale characterisation of ferroelectric thin films

PhD ThesisThis thesis focuses on the fabrication and characterisation of BaTiO3 thin films. One of the aims is to deposit amorphous BaTiO3 films on conductive thin films through sputtering at temperatures compatible with semiconductor manufacturing, followed by post deposition annealing to crystallise these films. However, rapid thermal processing (RTP) is known to create pinholes and cracks due to thermal mismatches between the electrode and insulator, causing degradation of the film quality. Initial focus was to develop thin film electrodes which can withstand process temperatures above 800 C. Deposition conditions, including the nitrogen flow rate relative to that of argon during deposition were optimised to obtain TiNx with least resistivity and excellent material properties through reactive sputtering. TiNx films deposited at various nitrogen flow rates were then annealed in a non-oxidising condition and their properties were thoroughly studied. Films deposited at the highest nitrogen flow rate (95%) showed least variation in resistivity and showed excellent material properties even after a high temperature anneal. BaTiO3 films of varying thicknesses were deposited on TiNx using RF-sputtering and subjected to RTP at various temperatures. It was found that there exists a critical thickness for each RTP temperature below which BaTiO3 films are pinhole free. A process was then developed by depositing and annealing multiple layers of BaTiO3 films, with the thickness of each deposition less than the critical thickness. It was observed that the multi-layered films are stable and pinhole free with a smooth surface while the single layers of equivalent thicknesses showed cracked surfaces. Current-atomic force microscopy studies showed leakage current through large pinholes in single-layered films, whereas the pinholes were not the leakage path for multi-layered films. Metal-insulator-metal capacitor structures were also fabricated using BaTiO3 with TiNx top and bottom electrodes and the fringing effects in leakage characteristics were studied. Finally, the polarisation reversal mechanism in BaTiO3 was investigated using piezoresponse force spectroscopy (PFS). It was experimentally demonstrated that the polarisation reversal in these materials is a two-step process, which involves polarisation rotation and switching when the applied electric field is not parallel to the crystallographic orientation of the grain. However, it is a single step switching when the polarisation and the electric field are parallel, as widely perceived. The two step polarisation reversal was found to help [101] and [111] oriented grains to switch at a lower electric field compared to [001] grains.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK: Intel Ireland

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Growth and Oxidation of Graphene and Two-Dimensional Materials for Flexible Electronic Applications

The non-volatile storage of information is becoming increasingly important in our data-driven society. Limitations in conventional devices are driving the research and development of incorporating new materials into conventional device architectures to improve performance, as well as developing an array of emerging memory technologies based on entirely new physical processes. The discovery of graphene allowed for developing new approaches to these problems, both itself and as part of the larger, and ever-expanding family of 2D materials. In this thesis the growth and oxidation of these materials is investigated for implementing into such devices, exploiting some of the unique properties of 2D materials including atomic thinness, mechanical flexibility and tune-ability through chemical modification - to meet some challenges facing the community. This begins with the growth of graphene by chemical vapour deposition for a high quality flexible electrode material, followed by oxidation of graphene for use in resistive memory devices. The theme of oxidation is then extended to another 2D material, HfS2, which is selectively oxidised for use as high-k dielectric in Van der Waals heterostructures for FETs and resistive memory devices. Lastly, a technique for fabrication of graphene-based devices directly on the copper growth substrate is demonstrated for use in flexible devices for sensing touch and humidity