What They Say
Stanford University reports that its researchers have developed a technique for making ‘atomically thin’ flexible transistors that are less than 100 nanometres in length. Using CVD, the researchers put a layer of molybdenum disulfide on a slab of silicon coated with glass and overlaid it with nano-patterned gold electrodes. The resulting film is just three atoms thick, but requires temperatures reaching 850° C (over 1500° F) to work.
With a simple bath in deionised water, the entire device stack peels back, now fully transferred to the flexible polyimide.
Channel lengths down to 60?nm and on-state currents up to 470??A??m?1 at a drain–source voltage of 1?V have been achieved, which is said to be comparable to the performance of flexible graphene and crystalline silicon FETs.
There are other fabrication steps but the entire structure is just 5 microns thick, including the flexible polyimide. The gold metal contacts dissipate and spread the heat generated by the transistors while in use. The approach can be used to create flexible FETs based on molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2)
A paper was published in Nature.
What We Think
The researchers see applications in flexible electronics in health care, but I would assume plenty of applications in displays. (BR)
