A 4H-SiC CMOS Oscillator-Based Temperature Sensor Operating from 298 K up to 573 K.

In this paper, we propose a temperature sensor based on a 4H-SiC CMOS oscillator circuit and that is able to operate in the temperature range between 298 K and 573 K. The circuit is developed on Fraunhofer IISB's 2 µm 4H-SiC CMOS technology and is designed for a bias voltage of 20 V and an oscillation frequency of 90 kHz at room temperature. The possibility to relate the absolute temperature with the oscillation frequency is due to the temperature dependency of the threshold voltage and of the channel mobility of the transistors. An analytical model of the frequency-temperature dependency has been developed and is used as a starting point for the design of the circuit. Once the circuit has been designed, numerical simulations are performed with the Verilog-A BSIM4SiC model, which has been opportunely tuned on Fraunhofer IISB's 2 µm 4H-SiC CMOS technology, and their results showed almost linear frequency-temperature characteristics with a coefficient of determination that was higher than 0.9681 for all of the bias conditions, whose maximum is 0.9992 at a VDD = 12.5 V. Moreover, we considered the effects of the fabrication process through a Monte Carlo analysis, where we varied the threshold voltage and the channel mobility with different values of the Gaussian distribution variance. For example, at VDD = 20 V, a deviation of 17.4% from the nominal characteristic is obtained for a Gaussian distribution variance of 20%. Finally, we applied the one-point calibration procedure, and temperature errors of +8.8 K and -5.8 K were observed at VDD = 15 V.

Conductive Adhesive Based on Mussel-Inspired Graphene Decoration with Silver Nanoparticles.

Decoration with silver nanoparticles was obtained by coating graphene with a polydopamine layer, able to induce spontaneous metallic nanoparticles formation without any specific chemical interfacial modifier, neither using complex instrumentation. The choice of dopamine was inspired by the composition of adhesive proteins in mussels, related to their robust attach to solid surfaces. The synthesis procedure started from graphite and involved eco-friendly compounds, such as Vitamin C and glucose as reducing agent and water as reaction medium. Silver decorated graphene was inserted as secondary nanofiller in the formulation of a reference conductive adhesive based on epoxy resin and silver flakes. A wide characterization of the intermediate materials obtained along the step procedure for the adhesive preparation was carried out by several techniques. We have found that the presence of nanofiller yields, in addition to an improvement of the thermal conductivity (up to 7.6 W/m · K), a dramatic enhancement of the electrical conductivity of the adhesive. In particular, starting from 3 · 102 S/cm of the reference adhesive, we obtained a value of 4 · 104 S/cm at a nanofiller concentration of 11.5 wt%. The combined double filler conductivity was evaluated by Zallen's model. The effect of the temperature on the resistivity of the adhesive has been also studied.