IEEE Nanotechnology Magazine

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is a powerful instrument for studying and exploring the nanoworld [1]. AFM can obtain ultrahigh-resolution images at the subnanoscale level. However, AFM has a very significant drawback of slow imaging speed, which is due to its working principle. A conventional AFM conducts a raster scan of an entire area to generate a topography image. Therefore, the frame rate is l... View full abstract»

Nanotechnology's economic and societal benefits have continued to attract significant research and development (R&D) attention from governments and industries worldwide. Over the past two decades, nanotechnology has seen quasi-exponential growth in the numbers of scientific papers and patent publications produced. New research topics and application areas are continually emerging, and investme... View full abstract»

The semiconducting material silicon forms the heart of the current complimentary metal?oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Over the last four decades, the productivity of silicon technology has increased by a factor of more than a billion [1]. This growth in silicon technology was made possible by a steady reduction in the feature size, which helps pack more functionality per cost in a micropro... View full abstract»

Electronic packaging technology has advanced in the direction of integrating diverse components into one package to satisfy market demands for multifunctionality as well as portability. For this reason, various packaging structures have been introduced, such as multichip modules, package on package, package in package, and eventually three-dimensional (3-D)-chip stacks. All of these approaches req... View full abstract»

Transforming microfluidics-based biosensing systems from laboratory research into clinical reality remains an elusive goal despite decades of intensive research. A fundamental obstacle in the development of fully automated microfluidic diagnostic systems is the lack of an effective strategy for combining multiple pumping, sample preparation, and detection modules into an integrated platform. In th... View full abstract»