High-performance thin-film transistors using semiconductor nanowires and nanoribbons

Abstract

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are the fundamental building blocks for the rapidly growing field of macroelectronics. The use of plastic substrates is also increasing in importance owing to their light weight, flexibility, shock resistance and low cost. Current polycrystalline-Si TFT technology is difficult to implement on plastics because of the high process temperatures required. Amorphous-Si and organic semiconductor TFTs, which can be processed at lower temperatures, but are limited by poor carrier mobility. As a result, applications that require even modest computation, control or communication functions on plastics cannot be addressed by existing TFT technology. Alternative semiconductor materials that could form TFTs with performance comparable to or better than polycrystalline or single-crystal Si, and which can be processed at low temperatures over large-area plastic substrates, should not only improve the existing technologies, but also enable new applications in flexible, wearable and disposable electronics. Here we report the fabrication of TFTs using oriented Si nanowire thin films or CdS nanoribbons as semiconducting channels. We show that high-performance TFTs can be produced on various substrates, including plastics, using a low-temperature assembly process. Our approach is general to a broad range of materials including high-mobility materials (such as InAs or InP).

Fabrication of fully transparent nanowire transistors for transparent and flexible electronics

“…Moreover, nanowire/nanotube networks (nanomat/nanobundles) are also possible solutions [46][47][48] . We recently reported transistors consisting of up to 22 ZnO nanowires assembled in parallel and have shown that on-current levels scale with the number of nanowires and with negligible degradation in the subthreshold slope 49 .…”

Integrated Circuits and Logic Operations Based on Single-Layer MoS2

“…32 High-performance top-gated graphene transistors can have normalized transconductance values 33 as high as 1.27 mS/μm, while carbon nanotubes can reach transconductance of 2.3 mS/μm. 34 We expect that lowering the channel length will reduce the number of scattering centers and increase the oncurrent in MoS 2 -based transistors.…”

Simultaneous Tunable Selection and Self-Assembly of Si Nanowires from Heterogeneous Feedstock

“…for chemical/biological sensing applications and their ability to be solution-processed and assembled from "semiconducting inks" using various alignment techniques, make them potential key building blocks for the manufacturing of chemical and biological sensors, [1][2][3] high performance field-effect transistors (FETs), [4][5][6] optical devices, 7,8 memory elements [9][10][11] and energy harvesting. 12,13 The availability of high quality semiconducting NWs in scalable quantities remains one of the main challenges for NW-based printed electronics.…”