NSF Award
0340306
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a new, high-performance thin-film-on-plastic technology that will provide single-crystal silicon thin-film transistors (TFTs). The project will focus on the challenge of fabricating films and forming high quality electrical contacts (both ohmic for source and drain electrodes, and insulated for gate electrodes) on low-temperature plastic substrates. This project focuses on the basic proof of principle, fabricating individual TFTs on plastic by: (1) the creation of a dense and oriented layer of nanowires adhered to plastic; (2) lithographic patterning of source and drain openings using traditional infrastructure; (3) the creation of high quality ohmic contacts under low temperature conditions; and (4) creation of insulated gate-electrode contacts under low temperature conditions.<br/><br/>The commercial applications of this technology will be in the electronics and photonics industries. The unique characteristics of nanowires will enable high-performance macroelectronics on plastic that can be processed using established commercial infrastructure. The research will greatly impact the development of devices for commercial, military, and homeland security markets. Flexible semiconducting films have the potential for replacing amorphous and polycrystalline silicon in important large-area electronics applications such as displays and radio-frequency identification tags. In addition, this fundamental technology can be applied to nanowire materials other than silicon, allowing broader use with materials currently impossible to process onto large area substrates such as gallium arsenide.
