Today there is a strong interest in the scientific and industrial community concerning the use of biopolymers for electronic applications, driven mainly by low-cost and disposable applications. Adding to this interest, we must recognise the importance of the dream of wireless auto-sustained and low-energy-consumption electronics. This dream can be fulfilled by cellulose paper, the lightest and the cheapest known substrate material, as well as the Earth's major biopolymer and of tremendous global economic importance. Most of the paper used up to now is optimised in terms of the required mechanical and physical properties to be used as the support of inks of different origins. In the future, specific electronic heterogeneous paper sheets should be fabricated aiming to get paper fibers with required bulk and surface functionalities, proper water/vapour barrier, size and diameter/thickness of the fibrils and full paper thickness. This will be the function of components/devices to be incorporated/integrated such as thin-film transistors, complementary metal oxide semiconductor devices, passive electronic components (resistances, inductors and capacitors), memory transistors, electrochromics and thin-film paper batteries. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

In this paper, we report the environmental, optical, and gate bias stress stability of amorphous zinc-tin-oxide (ZTO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) fabricated by sol-gel spin-coating method. The ZTO TFTs showed excellent environmental and optical stability. The threshold voltage stability of ZTO TFTs was sensitive to both positive and negative gate bias stress. Maximum threshold voltage shifting of +1.9 and -3.2 V was observed under a gate bias stress of +10 and -10 V, respectively, with no significant change to subthreshold swing value. © 2006 IEEE.

An equivalent model and electromechanical characteristics for the disk motor was obtained based on the Steinmetz parameters. This paper describes a series of tests conducted on an axial flux motor, equipped with an aluminum rotor disc and an YBCO high temperature superconducting rotor disc, at liquid nitrogen temperature (77 K). The rotating magnetic field was produced by a four-pole, three-phase stator winding, at 50 Hz. At asynchronous permanent regime, Steinmetz-type models are able to describe both motors' behavior. From the performed tests, the parameters of both motors' models were deduced. A variable load was used to obtain both motor's characteristics (conventional and superconducting). Experimental obtained characteristics of both motors are compared with the ones predicted from parameters' calculation. The HTS motor provides high efficiency then the conventional ones.

Interdigital electrodes (IE) are one of the most used transducers in different technical and analytical applications with the particular importance in the field of chemical and biological sensors. With the recent demand for lab-on-a-chip devices and the need for sensors miniaturization it becomes common the use of such transducers in structures with several dielectric layers (either substrates or superstrates). In a previous a work we proposed a model for the computation of the capacitance of these multi-layered structures using the techniques of conformal mapping and partial capacitance. Until now, that model has been used in applications where the permittivity of consecutive layers monotonically decreases from layer to layer (as we move away from the electrodes plane) giving excellent results. New applications, such as the use of Si/SiO2 substrates (to promote very smooth surfaces for electrodes deposition) or the use of passivation layers for the protection of electrodes (e.g. from liquids), among others, represent a new challenge for the computation of the overall capacitance since in these devices the permittivity can decrease from layer to layer. Under these conditions the original partial capacitance technique needs to be modified to include these new configurations. In this work we will discuss a new approach, splitting the concept of partial capacitance in parallel partial capacitance and serial partial capacitance where new conformal mapping transformations are proposed for the latter case. Hence this novel approach will extend our previous analytical model in order to account for the cases where there is a decrease in the permittivity from layer to layer. The results are compared with finite element simulation and experimental results. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.