In this study, the effects of an annealed buffer layer with different thickness on heterojunction diodes based on the ZnO/ZnO/p-Si(111) systems were reported. The effects of an annealed buffer layer with different thickness on the structural, optical, and electrical properties of zinc oxide (ZnO) films on p-Si(111) were also studied. Before zinc oxide (ZnO) deposition, different thicknesses of ZnO buffer layer, 10 nm, 30 nm, 50 nm and 70 nm, were grown on p-Si(111) substrates using a radio-frequency sputtering system; samples were subsequently annealed at 700˚C for 10 minutes in N2 in a horizontal thermal furnace. Zinc oxide (ZnO) films with a width of 280nm were also deposited using a radio-frequency sputtering system on the annealed ZnO/p-Si (111) substrates at room temperature; samples were subsequently annealed at 700˚C for 30 minutes in N2. In this experiment, the structural and optical properties of ZnO thin films were studied by XRD (X-ray diffraction), and room temperature PL (photoluminescence) measurements, respectively. Current-voltage (I-V) characteristics were measured with a semiconductor parameter analyzer. The thermal tensile stress was found to decrease with increasing buffer layer thickness. Among the ZnO/ZnO/p-Si(111) diodes fabricated in this study, the sample that was formed with the condition of a 50 nm thick ZnO buffer layer showed a strong c-axis preferred orientation and I-V characteristics suitable for a heterojunction diode.

The amorphous alloy strip was pulverized to get a flake-shaped powder after annealing at for 90 min and subsequently ground to obtain finer flake-shaped powder by using a ball mill. The powder was mixed with polyimide-based binder of , and then the mixture was cold compacted to make a toroidal powder core. After crystallization treatment for 1 hour at , the powder was transformed from amorphous to nanocrystalline with the grain size of . Soft magnetic characteristics of the powder core was optimized at with the insulating binder of 3wt%. As a result, the powder core showed the outstanding magnetic properties in terms of core loss and permeability, which were originated from the optimization of the grain size and distribution of the insulating binder.