“We have made a general conceptual breakthrough by taking nanoelectronics in a new direction: exploiting nanomaterials not for electronic miniaturization, but for better and cheaper electronics over large areas,” said team member Xiangfeng Duan. “We have assembled nanowires into densely packed oriented thin films that can undergo conventional electronic fabrication processes. Since we only use conventional electronic fabrication processes, our technology may lead to the first practical and scalable nanomaterial-enabled electronics.”



Moreover, the technique can exploit a broad range of substances as the channel material. As an example, Duan and the team made a thin-film transistor on a silicon substrate from single-crystal nanoribbons of CdS, a material that has useful optical and electrical properties.

The team also made a silicon nanowire thin-film transistor on a plastic substrate made of polyetheretherketone (PEEK). The transistor had a threshold voltage of about 3 V, an on-off ratio above 105, and a sub-threshold swing of 500-800 mV per decade. According to the researchers these values are among the best reported for thin-film transistors on plastic. Slight flexing of the plastic did not significantly affect the device’s properties.
