Fabricating nanowire devices on diverse substrates by simple transfer-printing methods

Abstract

The fabrication of nanowire (NW) devices on diverse substrates is necessary for applications such as flexible electronics, conformable sensors, and transparent solar cells. Although NWs have been fabricated on plastic and glass by lithographic methods, the choice of device substrates is severely limited by the lithographic process temperature and substrate properties. Here we report three new transfer-printing methods for fabricating NW devices on diverse substrates including polydimethylsiloxane, Petri dishes, Kapton tapes, thermal release tapes, and many types of adhesive tapes. These transfer-printing methods rely on the differences in adhesion to transfer NWs, metal films, and devices from weakly adhesive donor substrates to more strongly adhesive receiver substrates. Electrical characterization of fabricated NW devices shows that reliable ohmic contacts are formed between NWs and electrodes. Moreover, we demonstrated that Si NW devices fabricated by the transfer-printing methods are robust piezoresistive stress sensors and temperature sensors with reliable performance.S emiconductor nanowires (NWs), because of their unique physical and chemical properties, have great potential for applications in the areas of electronics (1-3), photonics (4-7), and bio/chemical sensors (8-13), and the current state of the art of NW devices has been reviewed in refs. 14 and 15. In particular, when semiconductor NW devices are fabricated on flexible substrates, they function as versatile building blocks for high performance flexible and/or transparent electronics (16, 17) with possible extension to flexible displays, touch screens, flexible solar cells, and conformable sensors (8,16,17). To realize these NWbased applications, great efforts have been devoted to the fabrication of NW devices on flexible/transparent substrates with methods including conventional photo-and electron beam lithography (6)(7)(8)17). Although NW devices have been successfully fabricated on plastics, glass, and 17,18), the choice of device substrates is generally restricted because many useful flexible/transparent substrates, such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and tapes, suffer from problems such as shrinkage or degradation at the processing temperature, poor adhesion to NWs and metal electrodes, incompatibility with solvents and acids, and being too flexible to be handled for the lithography step.Here we report three simple transfer-printing methods to fabricate NW devices on diverse substrates including PDMS, Petri dishes, Kapton tapes, thermal release tapes, and many types of adhesive tapes. The three transfer-printing methods basically rely on the differences in adhesion to transfer NWs, metal films, and even entire NW devices from weakly adhesive donor substrates to more strongly adhesive receiver substrates when these two substrates are brought into close physical contact. Previously reported transfer-printing methods, such as microcontact printing, nanoscale-transfer printing, and metal transfer printing (16,(19)(20)(21)(22)(23), have been used...

Analytical solutions for bonded elastically compressible layers

“…Compression of elastic layers can also be found in microfabrication. For instance, elastomeric stamps are widely used in the transfer-printing of nanowires (Lee et al, 2010), nanoribbons (Khang et al, 2006) and nanomembranes (Kim et al, 2008) due to their moldability and appropriate surface adhesion. When the stamp is compressed between a rigid backing layer and the nanomaterials on a rigid donor wafer, the deformation of the stamp and the shear stress on the stamp-nanomaterial interface will dictate the quality of the transfer-printing, i.e.…”

Multifunctional three-dimensional macroporous nanoelectronic networks for smart materials

“…The semiconductor nanowire elements can display multiple sensory functionalities, including photon (24), chemical, biochemical, and potentiometric (17,22) as well as strain (25,26) detection, which make them particularly attractive for preparing hybrid active materials as described below. We have first characterized photoconductivity changes (i.e., photon detection) of nanowire elements while imaging the nanoelectronic networks with a confocal microscope by recording conductance as a function of xyz coordinates and overlapping with simultaneously acquired fluorescence images (Materials and Methods; Fig.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that Si nanowires have a high piezoresistance response (25), making them good candidates for strain sensors (26). To explore the potential of Si nanowire device arrays to map strain within materials, we have prepared and characterized 3D macroporous nanoelectronic network/elastomer hybrid materials (Materials and Methods).…”

Thermal Release Transfer Printing for Stretchable Conformal Bioelectronics

“…TRT is a kind of thin, flexible and roll‐to‐roll compatible tape, which shows large, switchable and irreversible change in adhesion strength when it is heated to around 100 °C. Although several successful applications of TRT in transferring monolayer 2D materials (e.g., graphene55, 56, 57 or MoS 2 58), ink,59 and silicon60 have been demonstrated by controlling adhesion strength of TRT via varying the temperature, the principle of thermal release transfer printing with TRT has not been discussed in details. In this study, the mechanism of this approach is analyzed by studying the peeling velocity and temperature dependence of energy release rate with experiments and fracture‐mechanics models.…”