Silicon nanowires with programmable conductivity which utilized sensitivity of conductance to surface charging have been investigated in terms of complementary operation of p-and n-type devices. The device fabricated from a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer consists of a nanowire (width % 30 nm) and side gates for control of surface charging onto the nanowire. The wire current clearly exhibited hysteresis by sweeping the side gate voltage at a constant rate. The transistor characteristics obtained using the SOI substrate as a back gate also exhibited programmable threshold voltage by applying a pulse bias to the side gate. Surface potential imaging of the nanowire by means of scanning Maxwell-stress microscopy (SMM) has been carried out for correlating the programmability to surface charging. The SMM images clearly explained the origin of the programmability and the complementary operation of the p-and n-type nanowires.

The optomechanical effect and photoinduced anisotropic deformation induced by illumination of linearly polarized light have been comparatively studied for glassy As 2 S 3 and Se films. The two materials show qualitatively the same behaviors in the mechanical effect and the deformation, which suggests that these photoinduced phenomena are inherent to the covalent chalcogenide glass. But, the two phenomena show different dependences upon intensity, spectrum and exposure time of excitation light, which imply different underlying mechanisms.

In this paper, a stylus type MEMS texture sensor covered with a corrugated palylene diaphragm, which prevent debris from jamming into the sensor without significant degradation of sensitivity and bandwidth, was reported. A new fabrication process using a lost-foil method to make the corrugated diaphragm on a 3-axis piezoresistive force sensor at wafer level has been developed. The texture sensor could detect the surface microstructure as small as about 10 in lateral direction and 1.7 in vertical direction. The output signals from the sensor were repeatable, and the Z-axis signal was almost the same regardless of the moving direction, indicating that the hysteresis was small enough. In addiiton, the bandwidth as wide as 1.1 kHz and 500 Hz in lateral and vertical directions, respectively, were confirmed. The surface roughness and friction coefficient of various materials were successfully detected by the fabricated texture sensor.