Navaraj, William Ringal Taube (2019) Inorganic Micro/Nanostructures- Based High-Performance Flexible Electronics for Electronic Skin Application
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Navaraj, William Ringal Taube (2019) Inorganic micro/nanostructures- based high-performance flexible electronics for electronic skin application. PhD thesis. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/40973/ This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/ Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Inorganic Micro/Nanostructures-based High-performance Flexible Electronics for Electronic Skin Application William Ringal Taube Navaraj A Thesis submitted to School of Engineering University of Glasgow in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2019 Supervisors: Prof. Ravinder Dahiya Prof. Duncan Gregory Abstract Electronics in the future will be printed on diverse substrates, benefiting several emerging applications such as electronic skin (e-skin) for robotics/prosthetics, flexible displays, flexible/conformable biosensors, large area electronics, and implantable devices. For such applications, electronics based on inorganic micro/nanostructures (IMNSs) from high mobility materials such as single crystal silicon and compound semiconductors in the form of ultrathin chips, membranes, nanoribbons (NRs), nanowires (NWs) etc., offer promising high-performance solutions compared to conventional organic materials. This thesis presents an investigation of the various forms of IMNSs for high-performance electronics. Active components (from Silicon) and sensor components (from indium tin oxide (ITO), vanadium pentaoxide (V2O5), and zinc oxide (ZnO)) were realised based on the IMNS for application in artificial tactile skin for prosthetics/robotics. Inspired by human tactile sensing, a capacitive-piezoelectric tandem architecture was realised with indium tin oxide (ITO) on a flexible polymer sheet for achieving static (upto 0.25 kPa-1 sensitivity) and dynamic (2.28 kPa-1 sensitivity) tactile sensing. These passive tactile sensors were interfaced in extended gate mode with flexible high-performance metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) fabricated through a scalable process. The developed process enabled wafer scale transfer of ultrathin chips (UTCs) of silicon with various devices (ultrathin chip resistive samples, metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) capacitors and n‐channel MOSFETs) on flexible substrates up to 4″ diameter. The devices were capable of bending upto 1.437 mm radius of curvature and exhibited surface mobility above 330 cm2/V-s, on-to-off current ratios above 4.32 decades, and a subthreshold slope above 0.98 V/decade, under various bending conditions. While UTCs are useful for realizing high-density high-performance micro-electronics on small areas, high-performance electronics on large area flexible substrates along with low-cost fabrication techniques are also important for realizing e-skin. In this regard, two other IMNS forms are investigated in this thesis, namely, NWs and NRs. The controlled selective source/drain doping needed to obtain transistors from such structure remains a bottleneck during post transfer printing. An attractive solution to address this challenge based on junctionless FETs (JLFETs), is investigated in this thesis via technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulation and practical fabrication. The TCAD optimization implies a current of 3.36 mA for a 15 μm channel length, 40 μm channel width with an on-to-off ratio of 4.02x 107. Similar to the NRs, NWs are also suitable for realizing high performance e-skin. NWs of various sizes, distribution and length have been fabricated using various nano-patterning methods followed by metal assisted chemical etching (MACE). Synthesis of Si NWs of diameter as low as 10 nm and of aspect ratio more than 200:1 was achieved. Apart from Si NWs, V2O5 and ZnO NWs were also explored for sensor applications. Two approaches were investigated for printing NWs on flexible substrates namely (i) contact printing and (ii) large-area dielectrophoresis (DEP) assisted transfer printing. Both approaches were used to realize electronic layers with high NW density. The former approach resulted in 7 NWs/μm for bottom-up ZnO and 3 NWs/μm for top-down Si NWs while the latter approach resulted in 7 NWs/μm with simultaneous assembly on 30x30 electrode patterns in a 3 cm x 3 cm area. The contact-printing system was used to fabricate ZnO and Si NW-based ultraviolet (UV) photodetectors (PDs) with a Wheatstone bridge (WB) configuration. The assembled V2O5 NWs were used to realize temperature sensors with sensitivity of 0.03% /K. The sensor arrays are suitable for tactile e-skin application. While the above focuses on realizing conventional sensing and addressing elements for e-skin, processing of a large amount of data from e-skin has remained a challenge, especially in the case of large area skin. A Neural NW Field Effect Transistors (υ-NWFETs) based hardware-implementable neural network (HNN) approach for tactile data processing in e-skin is presented in the final part of this thesis. The concept is evaluated by interfacing with a fabricated kirigami-inspired e-skin. Apart from e-skin for prosthetics and robotics, the presented research will also be useful for obtaining high performance flexible circuits needed in many futuristic flexible electronics applications such as smart surgical tools, biosensors, implantable electronics/electroceuticals and flexible mobile phones. Declaration Unless otherwise acknowledged, the content of this Thesis is the result of my own work. None of this material has been submitted for any other degree at the University of Glasgow or any other institution. William Ringal Taube Navaraj Acknowledgements None of this would have been possible without the immense support I received from friends and family members. I want to thank all the people without whom my life, and these pages, would be emptier. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dahiya, for giving me the opportunity to work on this challenging and rewarding PhD project in this wonderful University and providing me with the necessary resources to turn ideas to a reality. Special thanks also go to my co-supervisor, Prof. Gregory, for his guidance and support during these four years. I am also indebted to him for providing various facilities at the School of Chemistry and for giving me a chance to be a part of his research group. I would also like to thank Prof. Fabrice Labeau for hosting my mobility placement at McGill University and for making me feel welcome during my visit. I want to extend my sincere thanks to all members of the Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group. I cannot imagine such a committed at the same time jovial group of individuals. Thank you Shoubhik, Nivasan, Wenting, Oliver, Tasos, Fengyuan, Dr. Dhayalan Shakthivel, Dr. Carlos Nunez, Dr. Libu Manjakkal, Dr. Paul, Habib, Marc, Clara, Dr. Emre Polat, Dr. Hadi Heidari, Brian, David, Dominic, Anton, Saleem, Yohan and Jonathan. Thanks also to my other office buddies: Marc, Shaun, Sean and colleagues from School of Chemistry, specially, Davide, Simon and Manmeet. It has been a great pleasure working with you all. I am particularly indebted to the members of the nanostructures for flexible electronics (NanoFE) theme, Dr. Dhayalan Shakthivel (theme leader), Dr. Carlos Garcia Nunez and Fengyuan who were closely associated in shaping the research presented in this thesis and the associated publications. I’d also like to thank Dr. Shakthivel and Habib Nassar for taking the time to review this thesis. I would like to thank my internal doctoral progression committee members, Dr. David Moran and Dr. Phil Dobson for giving valuable comments. I wouldn’t have got this far in life without the encouragement and education I received from my great teachers/mentors: Mr. Christopher, Dr. Chandra Shekhar, Prof. Raj Singh, Mrs. Sangeetha Rajsingh, Prof. Eranna, Prof. Rangra, Dr. Karmakar, Mr. John James, Dr. Alagu Raja, Mrs. Ruby, Prof. Hariharan, Prof. Mahendran, Dr. Rajan Prakash, Prof. A. Kumar, Prof. J. Akhtar, Prof. R. K. Nahar, Mr. Charles, Mr. Arul, Mr. And Mrs. Samuel. I am particularly grateful to the staff of the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre. None of the devices and structures presented in this Thesis would have been possible without their assistance. Their dedication in running and maintaining the facility is commendable. Special mentions go to Helen, David, Donald, Marc, Lynda, Dr. Arthur Smith, Dr. Stephen Thoms, Tom, Margaret, Vanda, Robert, Rachel and Laura who have been very helpful. Special thanks to University of Glasgow staffs, Elaine, Heather, Elizabeth for the admin/PGR support. I also owe gratitude to Jim, Ian, Dennis and John Liddell. I am thankful for the funding I received through the UofG-College of Science and Engineering Scholarship, Principal’s Early Career Mobility Fund and IET travel awards. I am also thankful for the support I received from CSIR-Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CEERI) by giving me a study leave to pursue my PhD at University of Glasgow. In addition to the above, I would like to thank all of my friends who have no idea in what I’ve spent the last 4 years, whose calls I missed regularly and messages I have failed to give a timely reply so many times. Specially, I have to mention Karthik, Siddharth, Vishanth, Gaurav, Love Thakker, Shaunak, Mayank, Beeren, Niraj, Deep, Charles, David, Jeyapaul, Joby, Hemant, Sudhir, Ashok, Bruce, Sriram, Sanju, Sam, Prateek Sir, Sanjeev Sir. I’d like to thank my parents, my brothers (Stephen annan, Sam annan, Isaac), sister (Kiruba) and sister-in-laws (Janet Anni, Asha Anni) for their constant source of love, strength, encouragement, and support, for always being there whenever I’ve needed them. I wouldn’t have got this far without your support and I hope that I’ve made you proud. Above all, I thank the invisible piper to whose mysterious tone, human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance; whom I see in lógos. Publications Journal Papers 1. L. Manjakkal, W. Taube Navaraj, C.