Fabrication of bifacial poly-Si solar cells with copper-plating metallization

Carrier-selective passivating contacts (CSPC) have been proven to be effective in suppressing recombination losses at metal-silicon interface in high-efficiency crystalline silicon solar cells. The poly-Si-based CSPCs consisting of SiOX/poly-Si stacks are used in this thesis due to their compatibility with high thermal budgets. CSPCs with thin...

Design and Fabrication of a Thin Film Optogenetic ECoG Array with Individually Addressable micro-LEDs

Optogenetics is a neuromodulation technique that uses light to control genetically modified cells to express light sensitive ion channels. Optogenetics allows stimulation of only the specific cells in the region that have been genetically modified and thus results in a high resolution of stimulation.<br/>Currently optogenetic implants are used...

mm-Wave Heatsink Antenna Array Design for Low-Sidelobe and Low-Temperature

The development of fifth-generation (5G) technology is the beginning of a rapid transition in the world of wireless communications. Gbps data rates, minimal latency, and good connectivity are the ultimate aims of 5G. To achieve them, 5G systems employ the mm-Wave frequency band which has a frequency range above 24GHz and so allows for higher...

Sound Zones with a Cost Function based on Human Hearing

With the aid of an array of loudspeakers, sound zone algorithms seek to reproduce multiple distinct zones of audio inside an enclosure. Typical approaches determine the loudspeaker inputs by optimizing over a cost function that models the sound pressure inside the enclosure. However, recent methods propose cost functions that include a...

Polyimide Encapsulation for Implantable Medical Devices

The application of implantable medical devices (IMDs) is increasing rapidly due to the many health benefits they provide in diagnosing and treating diseases. However, these devices have to be able to survive harsh body conditions to ensure their reliability and functionality. Bodily fluids initiate chemical degradation and corrosion in the...

Ultrasound Energy Transfer using Charged CMUTs

Implantable medical devices (IMDs) such as cardiac pacemakers, cochlear implants, and neurostimulators improve millions of people’s lives every day. Over the years, IMDs have significantly improved in function, increased in lifetime, and decreased in size. However, further miniaturisation is limited by the batteries used to power these devices,...

Towards CMUT for Neurostimulation: The Development of an Experimental Model for the Validation of Ultrasound Neuromodulation and Back-side Vent Etching for Low-Frequency CMUT Devices

Ultrasound (US) neurostimulation, the non-pharmacological, reversible excitation or inhibition of the nervous system using ultrasonic waves, is emerging as a high interest topic in neurostimulation research. In the current project, an attempt was made to demonstrate US neuromodulation in a Lumbricus Terrestris model of evoked compound action...

A THz Lens Antenna fed by a Photoconductive Connected Dipole Array

Photoconductive antennas have been used extensively for THz radiation the last few years. In this thesis, we propose a photoconductive connected dipole array consisting of 36x36 elements that is used as a feed in a THz silicon lens and radiates in a band ranging from 100 GHz to 5 THz. Specifically, we compute theoretically the radiated field...

Dielectric spectroscopy for hydration monitoring, from application to portable sensors

Due to the earth’s population growth and the increased living age of a person, more and more people could deal with medical problems. Early detection of health related problems in both healthy and people with medical problems, will catch problems early and prevent the need for more costly procedures. One of these medical problems is concerning...

Direct Bonding of NbN for 3-D Chip Integration of quantum processors

3-D chip integration is considered to be the best way for further increasing the number of qubits on chip, and also for integration of qubits and readout electronics. Works have been done to stack two wafers with superconductive interconnections as a demonstration for feasibility of 3-D qubit integration.But all of them use an extra layer of...

A CMOS process compatible charge-modulated FGFET based ion sensor for integration into Organ-on-Chip platforms

Drug development is an entire area of research that partly exploits the developments from biomedical research. Understanding the diseases that affect humanity fatally is critical to our existence. Researchers have studied various molecules and genetic compounds that are responsible for the proliferation of these diseases in the human body. For...

Trap assisted tunneling modelling for aSi contact stacks in IBC-SHJ

Interdigitated back contact silicon heterojunction (IBC-SHJ) solar cells have demonstrated 26.6\% world record efficiency by combining outstanding passivation of Si thin film layers with the absence of front shading contact in the crystalline silicon (c-Si) absorber bulk. Furthermore, this type of solar cell merges advantages of c-Si with Si...

Multiscale 3D-printing of a suspended hollow microfluidic device

Suspended hollow micro-cantilevers have been employed for zeptogram (10^-21 g) mass measurements, pipetting of femtoliter<br/>(10^-15 L) volumes, and studies on mechanical interaction with single cells. The main fabrication method of these devices is by standard clean room micro/nano fabrication techniques, however, they are inherently planar,...

Manufacturing of a polymeric membrane with integrated porous electrode

A manufacturing technology is proposed to manufacture polymeric membrane scaffolds for culturing of cells, tissues, and organoids with integrated sensor capabilities and fluidic functionalities. A multilayer substrate is imprinted with a soft mold to manufacture polymeric membrane scaffolds for culturing of cells, tissues, and organoids with...

High Efficiency SHJ/Poly-Si Hybrid Solar Cells

High efficiency silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells have already reached more than 26% (Yoshikawa et al., 2017) efficiency when tunnel oxide passivated contacts solar cells just broke the 26% barrier at the beginning of February 2018 (ISFH, 2018). For such devices, major losses occur at both the front and rear contacts where parasitic...