Liwei Lin (Advisor)

The three-dimensional thermal ground plane was developed in response to the needs of high-power density electronics applications in which heat must be removed as close to the chip surface as possible. The novel design for this planar cooling device was proposed with three key innovations in the evaporator, wick, and reservoir layer, which provided enhanced and reliable cooling performance without wick dryout and back flows. For the evaporator and reservoir layer, a combination of a tapered channel and a triple-spike microstructure was designed to break up the pinned meniscus at the...

With the rising demands for small, lightweight, and long-lasting portable electronics, the need for energy storage devices with both large power and large eneergy densities become vitally important. From their usage in hybrid electric vehicles to wearable electronics, supercapacitors, and rechargeable batteries have been the focus of many previous works. Electrode materials with large specific surface areas can enhance the charning speed and total amount of stored energy. To this end, vertically self-aligned conductivities as well as high mechanical stregth and large specific surface areas...

Supercapacitors are electrochemical energy storage devices characterized by rapid charge- discharge speeds, high power densities, and long cycle lifetimes compared to batteries.1,2 Supercapacitors have many promising applications as energy storage devices in electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, grid energy management, as well as stationary and portable electronics.2 A current limitation of supercapacitors is their low energy density compared to batteries, which hinders their application as stand-alone energy storage systems...

Integrated circuits consists of building blocks called transistors. A transistor is a switch that enables logic operations to perform computing. Since the invention of the first integrated circuit, transistors have been scaled down in their dimensions to increase the density of transistors per unit area to enable more functionality. Transistor scaling is continued by introducing novel device structures and materials at each technology node. Due to the challenges such as short channel effects and the power consumption issues, novel materials are investigated as a candidate for next...