Heterogeneous integration of 1-D nanomaterials for electronic circuitry

One-dimensional (1-D) nanomaterials have been extensively explored as the potential building blocks for a variety of electronic and optoelectronic applications due to the continuous increasing demand for miniaturized devices and circuits. In addition, this category of materials possesses a number of unique properties different from bulk materials, such as excellent flexibility, high surface-to-volume ratio, etc., which make them attractive for applications in flexible electronics, sensors, and so on. Nevertheless, controlled and uniform assembly of synthetic 1-D materials with high scalability is still one of the major bottleneck challenges towards the materials and device integration for circuit applications. Here we illustrate the large-scale heterogeneous assembly of highly ordered arrays of organic and inorganic 1-D materials via electrospinning and contact printing methods. These innovative approaches enable the control of the ordering and packing density of 1-D nanomaterials in a significant degree, thus are versatile for the design and implementation of novel electronic circuitry. In particular, we have configured assembled inorganic 1-D materials as a variety of functional electronic and optoelectronic devices, including field-effect transistors, Schottky diodes and photodiodes on both rigid and flexible substrates. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized an all-nanowire integrated image sensor. This demonstrates that these functional components can be heterogeneously integrated together to implement nanomaterial-based circuitry. ©2010 IEEE.