Near-thermal limit gating in heavily-doped III-V semiconductor nanowires using polymer electrolytes

Doping is a common route to reducing nanowire transistor on-resistance but has limits. High doping level gives significant loss in gate performance and ultimately complete gate failure. We show that electrolyte gating remains effective even when the Be doping in our GaAs nanowires is so high that traditional metal-oxide gates fail. In this regime we obtain a combination of sub-threshold swing and contact resistance that surpasses the best existing p-type nanowire MOSFETs. Our sub-threshold swing of 75 mV/dec is within 25% of the room-temperature thermal limit and comparable with n-InP and n-GaAs nanowire MOSFETs. Our results open a new path to extending the performance and application of nanowire transistors, and motivate further work on improved solid electrolytes for nanoscale device applications.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, supplementary available at journa

Boundary conditions and Berry phase in magnetic nanostructures

The effect of micromagnetic boundary conditions on the Berry curvature and topological Hall effect in granular nanostructures is investi- gated by model calculations. Both free surfaces and grain boundaries between interacting particles or grains affect the spin structure. The Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions yield corrections to the Erdmann-Weierstrass boundary conditions, but the Berry curvature remains an exclusive functional of the local spin structure, which greatly simplifies the treatment of nanostructures. An explicit example is a model nanostructure with cylindrical symmetry whose spin structure is described by Bessel function and which yields a mean-field-type Hall-effect contribution that can be related to magnetic-force-microscopy images

Footsteps in the fog: Certificateless fog-based access control

The proliferating adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has fuelled the need for more efficient and resilient access control solutions that aim to prevent unauthorized resource access. The majority of existing works in this field follow either a centralized approach (i.e. cloud-based) or an architecture where the IoT devices are responsible for all decision-making functions. Furthermore, the resource-constrained nature of most IoT devices make securing the communication between these devices and the cloud using standard cryptographic solutions difficult. In this paper, we propose a distributed access control architecture where the core components are distributed between fog nodes and the cloud. To facilitate secure communication, our architecture utilizes a Certificateless Hybrid Signcryption scheme without pairing. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by providing a comparative analysis of its performance in comparison to the commonly used cloud-based centralized architectures. Our implementation uses Azure – an existing commercial platform, and Keycloak – an open-source platform, to demonstrate the real-world applicability. Additionally, we measure the performance of the adopted encryption scheme on two types of resource-constrained devices to further emphasize the applicability of the proposed architecture. Finally, the experimental results are coupled with a theoretical analysis that proves the security of our approach

An Invariant Dual-beam Snowflake Antenna for Future 5G Communications

A broadband snowflake antenna for future 5G and millimeter-wave communications is presented. The proposed antenna has a size of 8 × 5 mm 2 . The antenna consists of a central hexagon surrounded by a series of symmetrically placed smaller hexagons around it, resulting in broadband characteristics. The impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna ranges from 25.284-29.252 GHz. The antenna has a gain of 3.12 dBi at 28 GHz and is more than 98% efficient. A distinct feature of the proposed antenna is its dual-beam radiation pattern. The two beams remain fixed at ±50° even if the frequency is varied with in its operating band. The proposed antenna is modelled on thin Rogers substrate which makes it very useful for future 5G smart phones

The influence of atmosphere on the performance of pure-phase WZ and ZB InAs nanowire transistors

We compare the characteristics of phase-pure MOCVD grown ZB and WZ InAs nanowire transistors in several atmospheres: air, dry pure N$_2$ and O$_2$, and N$_2$ bubbled through liquid H$_2$O and alcohols to identify whether phase-related structural/surface differences affect their response. Both WZ and ZB give poor gate characteristics in dry state. Adsorption of polar species reduces off-current by 2-3 orders of magnitude, increases on-off ratio and significantly reduces sub-threshold slope. The key difference is the greater sensitivity of WZ to low adsorbate level. We attribute this to facet structure and its influence on the separation between conduction electrons and surface adsorption sites. We highlight the important role adsorbed species play in nanowire device characterisation. WZ is commonly thought superior to ZB in InAs nanowire transistors. We show this is an artefact of the moderate humidity found in ambient laboratory conditions: WZ and ZB perform equally poorly in the dry gas limit yet equally well in the wet gas limit. We also highlight the vital role density-lowering disorder has in improving gate characteristics, be it stacking faults in mixed-phase WZ or surface adsorbates in pure-phase nanowires.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nanotechnolog