Review on biomass metallurgy:Pretreatment technology,metallurgical mechanism and process design

The metallurgy industry consumes a considerable amount of coal and fossil fuels,and its carbon dioxide emissions are increasing every year.Replacing coal with renewable,carbon-neutral biomass for metallurgical production is of great significance in reducing global carbon consumption.This study describes the current state of research in biomass metallurgy in recent years and analyzes the concept and scientific principles of biomass metallurgy.The fundamentals of biomass pretreatment technology and biomass metallurgy technology were discussed,and the industrial application framework of biomass metallurgy was proposed.Furthermore,the economic and social advantages of biomass metallurgy were analyzed to serve as a reference for the advancement of fundamental theory and industrial application of biomass metallurgy.

EUV Lithography: State-of-the-Art Review

Although several years delayed than its initial plan, extreme UV lithography (EUVL) with 13.5nm wavelength has been finally implemented into high volume manufacture (HVM) of mainstream semiconductor industry since 2018. With the delivery and installation of ASML EUV scanners in those giant Fab players like Samsung, TSMC and Intel, EUV lithography is becoming a sort of industry standard exposure metrology for those critical layers of advanced technology nodes beyond 7nm. Although ASML NXE EUVL scanner is the only commercialized EUV exposure system available on the market, its development is the concentration of all essence from worldwide industrial and academic collaboration. It is becoming more and more important not only for fab runners but also for main stream fabless design houses to understand and participate the progress of EUVL. In this review, working principles, module structures and technical challenges have been briefly discussed regarding each EUV subsystem, including light source, reflection mirrors and system, reticle module as well as photoresist development. EUV specific issues of light intensity, defectivity within reflection system, line edge roughness (LER) and mask 3D effects have been focused respectively and promising solutions have been summarized as well.

A controllable fabrication improved silicon nanowire array sensor on(111)SOI for accurate bio-analysis application

Silicon nanowire field-effect transistor(SiNW-FET)sensors possess the ability of rapid response,real-time,and label-free detection with high sensitivity and selectivity in the analysis of charged molecules.Their nano-scale size makes them well suited for ultralow detection of charged molecules,but also brings the uniformity fabrication challenging,thus limiting their large-scale application.By a horizontal control approach,highly controllable silicon nanowires arrays at the top of the silicon-on-insulator(SOI)wafer(T-SiNW)were developed in our previous work.To further improve the device uniformity,here a novel SiNW fabricated approach was carefully designed by the combination of horizontal and vertical control.The new silicon nanowires appeared at the bottom of the top silicon layer(B-SiNW).The B-SiNW has a relatively low requirement on the fabrication process and better device uniformity compared to T-SiNW.These improvements resulted in the B-SiNW device with a lower current fluctuation(4.1 nA with 5.1%variations)in the flowing liquid,compared to the T-SiNW device(4.4 nA with 11%variations).Further,in quantitative detection of 40 ng/mL MMP-9,the B-SiNW sensors provided larger signals and lower fluctuation(normalized average response value:0.57 with 4.2%variations),compared to the T-SiNW sensors(0.41 with 12.1%variations),thus indicating a more accurate bio-analysis application of the B-SiNW sensor.This work advances the nanowire sensor technology a step closer toward large-scale application to create stable sensing platforms in disease diagnosis and monitoring.