Technology and Applications of 2D Materials in Micro- and Macroscale Electronics
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Technology and Applications of 2D Materials in Micro- and Macroscale Electronics by Marek Hempel B.S., RWTH Aachen University (2010) M.S., RWTH Aachen University (2013) Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY May 2020 © Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020. All rights reserved. Author ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science May 15, 2020 Certified by ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Tomás Palacios Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Thesis Supervisor Certified by ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Jing Kong Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Thesis Supervisor Accepted by ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Leslie A. Kolodziejski Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Chair, Department Committee on Graduate Students 1 2 Technology and Applications of 2D-Materials in Micro- and Macroscale Electronics by Marek Hempel Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on May 15, 2020, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Abstract: Over the past 50 years, electronics has truly revolutionized our lives. Today, many everyday objects rely on electronic circuitry from gadgets such as wireless earbuds, smartphones and laptops to larger devices like household appliances and cars. However, the size range of electronic devices is still rather limited from the millimeter to meter scale. Being able to extend the reach of electronics from the size of a red blood cell to a skyscraper would enable new applications in many areas including energy production, entertainment, environmental sensing, and healthcare. 2D-materials, a new class of atomically thin materials with a variety of electric properties, are promising for such electronic systems with extreme dimension due to their flexibility and ease of integration. On the macroscopic side, electronics produced on thin films by roll-to-roll fabrication has great potential due to its high throughput and low production cost. Towards this end, this thesis explores the transfer of 2D-materials onto flexible EVA/PET substrates with hot roll lamination and electrochemical delamination using a custom designed roll-to-roll setup. The transfer process is characterized in detail and the lamination of multiple 2D material layers is demonstrated. As exemplary large-scale electronics application, a flexible solar cell with graphene transparent electrode is discussed. On the microscopic side, this thesis presents a 60x60 µm2 microsystem platform called synthetic cells or SynCells. This platform offers a variety of building blocks such as chemical sensors and transistors based on molybdenum disulfide, passive germanium timers, iron magnets for actuation, as well as gallium nitride LEDs and solar cells for communication and energy harvesting. Several system-level applications of SynCells are explored such as sensing in a microfluidic channel or spray- coating SynCells on arbitrary surfaces. Thesis Supervisor: Tomás Palacios Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Thesis Supervisor: Jing Kong Title: Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science 3 4 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the help, guidance, and support of so many people that I would like to acknowledge. Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank my research advisors Prof. Jing Kong and Prof. Tomás Palacios for their mentorship and support. Jing always provided me insightful suggestions and ideas when I faced challenges, especially for the roll-to-roll transfer part of my thesis. Her thoughtful and patient way to interrogate every detail in a figure, manuscript or presentation greatly helped me identify gaps in my thinking and my explanations. Her kind and warm personality also made me feel especially welcome in the group. Tomas has been my other essential pillar of support during this thesis. His inventive ideas and guidance were especially important for my second research project on electronic microsystems. I deeply appreciate Tomas’s positive attitude when encountering research challenges, his creative thinking approach to solving problems and his ability to connect me with the right people at the right time. Furthermore, I would like to thank my third committee member Prof. Michael Strano for his discussions and suggestions for my thesis. His abundant knowledge in realm of chemical engineering gave me an insightful and complementary perspective towards the applications of intelligent microsystems. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Millie Dresselhaus for discussions about my research and her guidance during the first years of my PhD. As part of my time at MIT, I had the fortune to visit other academic and industry partners to expand my knowledge and perspective. I specifically want to say thank you to Prof. Mario Hoffman and Prof. Ya-Ping Hsieh for inviting me to their groups for a short research stay. Furthermore, I want to thank my advisors Stanton Ashburn and Jens Lohse as well as the rest of the process integration group for giving me a unique glimpse into the operations of a state-of-the-art silicon fab during my internship at the Richardson Fab of Texas Instruments. My research relied heavily on the lab-space of RLE and the cleanroom facilities of NSL, MTL, and MIT.nano. In this regard, I want to warmly thank everyone involved who helped maintain these complex facilities and provided help for fabrication issues. I particular, I want to thank Bernard Alamariu, Bob Bicchieri, Daniel Adams, Dave Terry, Dennis Ward, Donal Jamieson, Eric Lim, Gary Riggott, Jim Daley, Jorg Scholvin, Kris Payer, Kurt Broderick, Mark Mondol, Paudely Zamora, Paul Tierney, Paul McGrath, Ryan O'Keefe, Scott Poesse, Tim Turner, Vicky Diadiuk and Whitney Hess, who I had the pleasure to work with directly, be it for tool trainings, trouble-shooting tools or discussing fabrication processes. I am very grateful for the administrative help I received from the staff at MTL and RLE to advance my research goals. Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank Joseph Baylon for his exceptional help in supporting my work in the Palacios group. Furthermore, I want to acknowledge Mike Hobbs, Bill Maloney and Michael McIlrath for their help with computer issues and MTL’s CAD services. I also had the pleasure to interact with Debroah Hodges-Pabon, Elizabeth Kubicki, Jami Mitchell, Katrina Mounlavongsy, Luda Leopardi, Mara Karapetian, Mary O’Neil, Sam Crooks, Shereece Beckford, Stacy McDaid, Steven O'Hearn and Valerie DiNardo for various logistic tasks such as organizing MARC2015 and MTL cookie socials. My research projects would also not have succeeded without my collaborators that I am genuinely appreciative off. With respect to my roll-to-roll project, I would like to thank Yi Song, Wenjing Fan, Fei Hui and Ang-Yu Lu for helping me with the 2D material synthesis and Mahdi Tavakoli and Giovanni Azzellino for their help with the solar cell fabrication and characterization. I also want to acknowledge Libby Shaw for her support with XPS measurements. Regarding the SynCell project, I am thankful to Vera Schroeder 5 in Prof. Timothy Swager group at MIT for helping me with the chemical exposure experiments and the fruitful discussions on the concept of SynCells. I am indebted to Albert Lui in Prof. Michael Strano’s group for trying out several MoS2 sensor functionalizations and in-depth discussions and to Volodymyr Koman in Prof. Michael Strano’s group for his assistance with SynCell spraying experiments, data modeling and manuscript preparation. I want to express my gratitude to Pin-Chun Shen, Chibeom Park and Prof. Jiwoong Park for providing MoS2 films. Furthermore, I thank Prof. Marisa Lopez-Vallejo and Javier De Mena for their outstanding diligence and creativity designing a CMOS chip and Mohamed Ibrahim for sharing his experience and thoughts on this design process. Lastly, I am grateful to Kohei Yoshizawa and DOWA Electronics Materials Co., Ltd. for providing GaAs LED wafers and Noelia Vico Trivino and Jori Lemettinen for providing the GaN LED wafers and helping me develop a GaN LED process, respectively. My time at MIT was so much more pleasant and enjoyable because of the support of my peer and colleagues. I would like to thank all the students in RLE and MTL that I have interacted with for making me feel at home, helping me with my research quests, or just socializing to get a much-needed break. This is especially true for my fellow students on the 6th floor of building 39, the MTL cookie social regulars and so many encounters at MTL’s Annual Research Conferences. I want to express my gratitude to the current and past members of the Kong and Palacios group for making MIT such an enjoyable workplace. In particular, I want to thank Ahmad Zubair for his experience and infinite patience when debugging processes or electric measurements with me. Thank you to Elaine McVay and Mantian Xue for being great partners of our MURI-FATE sub-team. I furthermore want to thank Amir Nourbakhsh, Charles Mackin, Cosmi Lin, Daniel Piedra, Josh Perozek, Kohei Yoshizawa, Lili Yu, Min Sun, Winston Chern, Xu Zhang, Wenjing Fang, Yi Song that I had the pleasure to learn from in one way or another.