Robin L. Michael v. Rodney C. Michael : Brief of Appellant

ON APPEAL FROM THE THIRD JUDICIAL DISTRICT COURT IN AND FOR SALT LAKE COUNTY, STATE OF UTAH HONORABLE TIMOTHY R. HANSON, DISTRICT COURT JUDG

Integrated STEM in secondary education: A case study

Despite many opportunities to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) in Flemish secondary education, only a minority of pupils are actually pursuing STEM fields in higher education and jobs. One reason could be that they do not see the relevance of science and mathematics. In order to draw their pupils’ interest in STEM, a Belgian school started a brand new initiative: the school set up and implemented a first year course that integrates various STEM disciplines, hoping to provide an answer to the question pupils often ask themselves about the need to study math and science. The integrated curriculum was developed by the school’s teachers and a STEM education research group of the University of Leuven. To examine the pupils’ attitude towards STEM and STEM professions and their notion of relevance of STEM at the end of this one-year course, a post-test was administered to the group of pupils who attended the integrated STEM course (the experimental group) and to a group of pupils that took traditional, non-integrated STEM courses (the control group). The results reveal that attending the integrated STEM course is significantly related to pupils’ interest in STEM and notion of relevance of STEM. Another post-test was administered only to the experimental group to investigate pupils’ understanding of math and physics concepts and their relation when taught in an integrated way. The results reveal that the pupils have some conceptual understanding and can, to a certain extent, make a transfer of concepts across different STEM disciplines. However, the test results did point out that some additional introductory training in pure math context is needed

Integration of highly crystalline C8-BTBT thin-films into simple logic gates and circuits

Highly crystalline organic thin films possess the charge carrier mobilities needed for high-performance, low-cost flexible electronics. However, only few reports exist that show the integration of these films into short-channel organic circuits. This work describes the integration of highly crystalline layers of the thermally and chemically fragile small molecule C8-BTBT. Thin films of this material are processed by a combination of zone-casting and homoepitaxial vacuum evaporation and display an average charge carrier mobility of 7.5 cm2/V in long channel transistors. The integration of these films into a circuit technology based on a 5 μm channel-length bottom-gate bottom-contact transistor topology results in inverters with gains up to 40 as well as a robust 19-stage ring oscillator. This circuit requires the simultaneous operation of 80 TFTs and displays a stage delay of 40 μs, resulting in an operating frequency of 630 Hz at an operating voltage of 10 V. With the help of circuit modelling, we quantify the relationship between the speed of ring oscillators and the contact resistance of individual transistors. Indeed, the successful integration of highly-crystalline layers with high intrinsic mobility stresses the need for advances in contact engineering

Material-Device-Circuit Co-Design of 2-D Materials-Based Lateral Tunnel FETs

In this paper, the 2-D materials-based lateral TFETs are holistically assessed by co-optimizing the material parameters, device designs, and digital circuit figure-of-merits, e.g., energy consumption and delay. Effect of material parameters such as effective mass and bandgap are studied using a two-band quantum simulation approach in the ballistic regime. The selection of 2-D material parameters is discussed from the energy-delay perspective. Single-gate and double-gate 2-D TFETs are compared with the optimum material parameters. Using a simple analytical model for 2-D TFETs, the quantum simulation results for different materials and device designs are analyzed. We show that the gate-to-source fringing fields play a significant role in 2-D TFETs performance. To mitigate the effect of fringing fields on tunneling lengths, an interfacial layer (IL) is introduced between high- $\kappa$ and 2-D material, resulting a 3– $4\times$ increase in ON current. Using circuit-level metrics, we show that a tri-layer black phosphorus (BP) TFET using IL can outperform monolayer BP MOSFETs for the supply voltages below 0.5 V