A. Busnaina
Northeastern University,
United States
Keywords: nanoelectronics, sensors, flexible substrates, additive manufacturing
Summary:
We introduce a new additive manufacturing technology for making nanoelectronics that is estimated to cost one to two orders of magnitude less than the current conventional semiconductor manufacturing. This is largely accomplished by reducing the initial cost of infrastructures, operating cost, power requirement, little water or chemicals use and three orders of magnitude reduction in materials used. This new technology will enable the fabrication of nanoelectronics while reducing the cost by 10-100 times and allowing device designers the use of any organic or inorganic semiconducting, conductive or insulating material on flexible or rigid substrates. This will also allow industry to leverage novel properties of nanomaterials such as two-dimensional (2D) materials, quantum dots, nanotubes, etc. The new technology is enabled by directed assembly-based nanoscale printing at ambient temperature and pressure and can print 1000 faster and 1000 smaller (down to 20nm) structures than ink-jet based printing. The nanoscale printing platform enables the heterogeneous integration of interconnected circuit layers (like CMOS) of printed electronics and sensors at ambient temperature and pressure on flexible or rigid substrates. The directed assembly-based printing processes were specifically created to be scalable, sustainable and designed to enable precise and repeatable control of assembly of various nanomaterials at high-rate. The new technology has demonstrated the printing of several devices including transistors, inverters, diodes, displays, chemical and biosensors, and interconnects using a variety of nanomaterials at the nano and microscale.