Abstract
The introduction of an ambient-temperature route for integrating high-mobility semiconductors on flexible substrates could enable the development of novel electronic and photonic devices with the potential to impact a broad spectrum of applications. Here we review our recent studies demonstrating that high-quality single-crystal nanowires (NWs) can be assembled onto flexible plastic substrates under ambient conditions to create FETs and light-emitting diodes. We also show that polymer substrates can be patterned through the use of a room temperature nanoimprint lithography technique for the general fabrication of hundred-nanometer scale features, which can be hierarchically patterned to the millimeter scale and integrated with semiconductor NWs to make high-performance FETs. The key to our approach is the separation of the high-temperature synthesis of single-crystal NWs from room temperature solution-based assembly, thus enabling fabrication of single-crystal devices on virtually any substrate. Silicon NW FETs on plastic substrates display mobilities of 200 cm2-V-1-s-1, rivaling those of single-crystal silicon and exceeding those of state-of-the-art amorphous silicon and organic transistors currently used for flexible electronics. Furthermore, the generality of this bottom-up assembly approach suggests the integration of diverse nanoscale building blocks on a variety of substrates, potentially enabling far-reaching advances in lightweight display, mobile computing, and information storage applications.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1357-1363 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Proceedings of the IEEE |
Volume | 93 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2005 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Manuscript received July 31, 2004; revised March 22, 2005. This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Award N-00014-01-1-0651 and in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Award F49620-03-1-0063. The work of M. C. McAlpine was supported by the National Science Foundation under a predoctoral fellowship.
Keywords
- Flexible electronics
- Light-emitting diodes
- Nanoimprint lithography (NIL)
- Nanoscale patterning
- Nanowire (NW) transistors
- Plastic substrates
- Silicon nanowires (NWs)