All-2D Material Inkjet-Printed Capacitors: Toward Fully Printed Integrated Circuits

Abstract

A well-defined insulating layer is of primary importance in the fabrication of passive (e.g. capacitors) and active (e.g. transistors) components in integrated circuits. One of the most widely known 2-Dimensional (2D) dielectric materials is hexagonal boron nitride (hBN).Solution-based techniques are cost-effective and allow simple methods to be used for device fabrication. In particular, inkjet printing is a low-cost, non-contact approach, which also allows for device design flexibility, produces no material wastage and offers compatibility with almost any surface of interest, including flexible substrates.In this work we use water-based and biocompatible graphene and hBN inks to fabricate all-2D material and inkjet-printed capacitors. We demonstrate an areal capacitance of 2.0 ± 0.3 nF cm -2 for a dielectric thickness of ~3 µm and negligible leakage currents, averaged across more than 100 devices. This gives rise to a derived dielectric constant of 6.1 ± 1.7. The inkjet printed hBN dielectric has a breakdown field of 1.9 ± 0.3 MV cm -1 . Fully printed capacitors with sub-µm hBN layer thicknesses have also been demonstrated. The capacitors are then exploited in two fully printed demonstrators: a resistor-capacitor (RC) low-pass filter and a graphene-based field effect transistor.

Stumbling through the Research Wilderness, Standard Methods To Shine Light on Electrically Conductive Nanocomposites for Future Healthcare Monitoring

“…Over the past decade, nanoscience has dominated the landscape of research. From electronics [1][2][3][4], energy storage [5][6][7][8] to bioengineering [9][10][11][12], its profound influence in driving forward innovation has been felt in every corner of science. Recently, nanoscience and more specifically composites filled with nanomaterials, has drawn the attention of many researchers as tactile and health sensors due to them possessing sensitivities which far surpass that of current commercial sensing devices.…”

Ink‐Based Additive Nanomanufacturing of Functional Materials for Human‐Integrated Smart Wearables

“…[165,166] Due to attributes such as non-contact, maskless, and additive patterning, inkjet printing has been widely applied to fabricate flexible devices, such as thin-film transistors, [167][168][169] solar cells, [170][171][172] and supercapacitors (SCs). [107,173,174] Printing resolution is critical for practical applications, especially for printed electronics, where a high printing resolution could minimize the device footprint for enhanced performance and integration complexity. [74,133,150] The printing resolution of an inkjet printing process is primarily limited by how a droplet spreads on a substrate during the solvent evaporation and how such spreading changes with the overlap of adjacent drops to form continuous features.…”

Desolvation‐Triggered Versatile Transfer‐Printing of Pure BN Films with Thermal–Optical Dual Functionality

“…On the other hand, liquid phase deposition techniques such as inkjet‐printing and spray‐coating using dispersion of nanosheet‐type 2D BN were also considered. [ 25,26 ] These methods offer good thickness scalability, substrate variety, low processing temperature, and cost effectiveness. However, solution‐deposited BN films usually lack sufficient uniformity and adhesion quality due to the solute redistribution [ 27,28 ] and morphology distortion of the BN nanosheets.…”