Urchin-structured zinc oxide(ZnO) nanorod(NR) gas sensors were successfully demonstrated on a polyimide(PI) substrate, using single wall carbon nanotubes(SWCNTs) as the electrode. The ZnO NRs were grown with ZnO shells arranged at regular intervals to form a network structure with maximized surface area. The high surface area and numerous junctions of the NR network structure was the key to excellent gas sensing performance. Moreover, the SWCNTs formed a junction barrier with the ZnO which further improved sensor characteristics. The fabricated urchin-structured ZnO NR gas sensors exhibited superior performance upon NO2 exposure with a stable response of 110, fast rise and decay times of 38 and 24 sec, respectively. Comparative analyses revealed that the high performance of the sensors was due to a combination of high surface area, numerous active junction points, and the use of the SWCNTs electrode. Furthermore, the urchin-structured ZnO NR gas sensors showed sustainable mechanical stability. Although degradation of the devices progressed during repeated flexibility tests, the sensors were still operational even after 10000 cycles of a bending test with a radius of curvature of 5 mm.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method. Information such as identification, logistics history, and specification of products are written and stored into the memory of RFID tags (that is, transponders), and retrieved through RF communication between RFID reader device and RFID tags. RFID systems have been applied to many fields of transportation, industry, logistics, environment, etc in order to improve business efficiency and reduce maintenance cost as well. Recently, some research results are announced in which RFID devices are combined with other sensors for mobile robot localization. In this paper, design of multi-protocol baseband for RFID reader device is proposed, and the baseband modem is implemented into SoC (System On a Chip). The baseband modem SoC for multi-protocol RFID reader is composed of several IP (Intellectual Property) blocks such as multi-protocol blocks, CPU, UART(Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter), memory, etc. As a result, the SoC implemented with FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array) is applied to real product. It is shown that the size of RFID Reader module designed with the FPGA becomes smaller, and the SoC chip price for the same function becomes cheap. In addition, operation performance could be the same or better than that of the product with no SoC applied.