The field of flexible electronics has rapidly expanded over the last decades, pioneering novel applications, such as wearable and textile integrated devices, seamless and embedded patch-like systems, soft electronic skins, as well as imperceptible and transient implants. The possibility to revolutionize our daily life with such disruptive appliances has fueled the quest for electronic devices which yield good electrical and mechanical performance and are at the same time light-weight, transparent, conformable, stretchable, and even biodegradable. Flexible metal oxide semiconductor thin-film transistors (TFTs) can fulfill all these requirements and are therefore considered the most promising technology for tomorrow's electronics. This review reflects the establishment of flexible metal oxide semiconductor TFTs, from the development of single devices, large-area circuits, up to entirely integrated systems. First, an introduction on metal oxide semiconductor TFTs is given, where the history of the field is revisited, the TFT configurations and operating principles are presented, and the main issues and technological challenges faced in the area are analyzed. Then, the recent advances achieved for flexible n-type metal oxide semiconductor TFTs manufactured by physical vapor deposition methods and solution-processing techniques are summarized. In particular, the ability of flexible metal oxide semiconductor TFTs to combine low temperature fabrication, high carrier mobility, large frequency operation, extreme mechanical bendability, together with transparency, conformability, stretchability, and water dissolubility is shown. Afterward, a detailed analysis of the most promising metal oxide semiconducting materials developed to realize the state-of-the-art flexible p-type TFTs is given. Next, the recent progresses obtained for flexible metal oxide semiconductor-based electronic circuits, realized with both unipolar and complementary technology, are reported. In particular, the realization of large-area digital circuitry like flexible near field communication tags and analog integrated circuits such as bendable operational amplifiers is presented. The last topic of this review is devoted for emerging flexible electronic systems, from foldable displays, power transmission elements to integrated systems for large-area sensing and data storage and transmission. Finally, the conclusions are drawn and an outlook over the field with a prediction for the future is provided.

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Metal oxide semiconductor thin-film transistors for flexible electronics

A method of manufacturing a thin film transistor array panel is provided, the method includes: forming a gate line on an insulating substrate; forming a gate insulating layer; forming a semiconductor layer; forming a data conductive layer including a data line and a drain electrode; depositing a passivation layer; forming a photoresist including a first portion located on an end portion of the gate line, a second portion thicker than the first portion and located on the drain electrode, and a third portion thicker than the second portion; exposing a portion of the passivation layer under the second portion of the photoresist and a portion of the gate insulating layer under the first portion of the photoresist by etching using the photoresist as an etch mask; forming first and second contact holes exposing the drain electrode and the end portions of the gate line, respectively; and forming a pixel electrode connected to the drain electrode through the first contact hole.

Thin film transistor array panel and manufacturing method thereof

Viruses are real menace to human safety that cause devastating viral disease. The high prevalence of these diseases is due to improper detecting tools. Therefore, there is a remarkable demand to identify viruses in a fast, selective and accurate way. Several biosensors have been designed and commercialized for detection of pathogenic viruses. However, they present many challenges. Nanotechnology overcomes these challenges and performs direct detection of molecular targets in real time. In this overview, studies concerning nanotechnology-based biosensors for pathogenic virus detection have been summarized, paying special attention to biosensors based on graphene oxide, silica, carbon nanotubes, gold, silver, zinc oxide and magnetic nanoparticles, which could pave the way to detect viral diseases and provide healthy life for infected patients.

Nanomaterial-based biosensors for detection of pathogenic virus

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/2.0291807jss/pdf

Review-field-effect transistor biosensing: Devices and clinical applications

Thin-film solar cells based on Cu(In,Ga)Se2 contain a thin buffer layer of CdS in their standard configuration. In order to avoid cadmium in the device for environmental reasons, Cd-free alternatives are investigated. In this thesis, ZnO-based films, containing Mg or S, grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD), are shown to be viable alternatives to CdS. The CdS is an n-type semiconductor, which together with the n-type ZnO top-contact layers form the pn-junction with the p-type Cu(In,Ga)Se2. From device modeling it is known that a buffer layer conduction band (CB) position of 0-0.4 eV above that of the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 layer is consistent with high photovoltaic performance. For the Cu(In,Ga)Se2/ZnO interface this position is measured by photoelectron spectroscopy and optical methods to –0.2 eV, resulting in increased interface recombination. By including sulfur into ZnO, a favorable CB position to Cu(In,Ga)Se2 can be obtained for appropriate sulfur contents, and device efficiencies of up to 16.4% are demonstrated in this work. From theoretical calculations and photoelectron spectroscopy measurements, the shift in the valence and conduction bands of Zn(O,S) are shown to be non-linear with respect to the sulfur content, resulting in a large band gap bowing. ALD is a suitable technique for buffer layer deposition since conformal coverage can be obtained even for very thin films and at low deposition temperatures. However, deposition of Zn(O,S) is shown to deviate from an ideal ALD process with much larger sulfur content in the films than expected from the precursor pulsing ratios and with a clear increase of sulfur towards the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 layer. For (Zn,Mg)O, single-phase ZnO-type films are obtained for Mg/(Zn+Mg) < 0.2. In this region, the band gap increases almost linearly with the Mg content resulting in an improved CB alignment at the heterojunction interface with Cu(In,Ga)Se2 and high device efficiencies of up to 14.1%.

Atomic layer deposition of Zn1−xMgxO buffer layers for Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells

In order to open up a new application field of zinc oxide (ZnO), characteristics of polycrystalline ZnO-based ion-sensitive field-effect transistors (ISFETs) and FET-type biosensors are studied. These solution-gate FETs were composed of a layered structure on a glass substrate; amorphous tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) for the gate insulator/polycrystalline ZnO doped with indium (ZnO:In) for the channel layer/glass substrate. The Ta2O5/ZnO:In bilayer was deposited by a newly developed facing-target sputtering (FTS) method to reduce the damage on the depositing film by the bombardment of gamma electrons and negatively charged ions. The advantage of FTS, high-quality film growth with sharp interface, enabled the use of such thin layers as 8-nm-thick Ta2O5 and 35-nm-thick ZnO:In for the ISFETs with acceptable performance. The ZnO-based ISFET showed high pH sensitivity and high stability comparable to commercially available silicon-based ISFETs with much lower photo-induced error under visible-ray illumination. By modifying biofunctional molecules on the gate electrode, the application of the ZnO-based ISFET to two types of biosensors was demonstrated. One is an aptamer-immobilized immuno FET specific for human immunoglobulin detection, and the other is a glucose oxidase-immobilized enzyme FET for β-D glucose detection. Both of the former and latter FET-type biosensors showed high sensitivities in accordance with the Langmuir isotherm plot corresponding to monolayer absorption. These results stay at the preliminary stage at present, however, by considering the easy integration of these solution-gate FETs on a chip, it is concluded that micro total analysis system chips for clinical use are promising application fields for ZnO devices as an ecologically and economically favorable semiconductor in the next generation.

Zinc oxide ion-sensitive field-effect transistors and biosensors

Growth of ZnO/Zn1−xMgxO films by pulsed laser ablation

We report characterization of ZnO thin-film transistors (TFTs) on glass substrates fabricated by pulsed laser deposition (PLD). ZnO films were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy and Hall effect measurements. The XRD results showed high c-axis-oriented ZnO(0002) diffraction corresponding to the wurtzite phase. Moreover, the crystallization and the electrical properties of ZnO thin films grown at room temperature are controllable by PLD growth conditions such as oxygen gas pressure. The ZnO films are very smooth, with a root-mean-square roughness of 1 nm. From the Hall effect measurements, we have succeeded in fabricating ZnO films on glass substrates with an electron mobility of 21.7 cm2/V s. By using the ZnO thin film grown by two-step PLD and a HfO2 high-k gate insulator, a transconductance of 24.1 mS/mm, a drain current on/off ratio of 4.4×106 and a subthreshold gate swing of 0.26 V/decade were obtained for the ZnO TFT.

Pulsed laser deposition of ZnO grown on glass substrates for realizing high-performance thin-film transistors

Self-switching nanodiodes (SSDs) using zinc oxide (ZnO) were fabricated on glass substrates. The SSDs using ZnO have attracted significant attention as transparent devices because of their low cost, abundance in nature, and so on. Rectification characteristics in the SSDs were resemblance to the characteristics of conventional diodes with use of a doping junction or a barrier structure. The changes in characteristics depending on the shape of SSDs were investigated. Channel widths in the SSD of 230 and 190 nm and turn-on voltages of 5 and 8 V were obtained. On the other hand, it was found that the channel length influences the current strength. Moreover, after coating the devices with HfO2 to enhance the electric field coupling, the rectification behavior was maintained while the device current increased dramatically. The SSDs were fabricated using ZnO on flexible plastic substrates. For channel widths of 250 and 200 nm, turn-on voltages of 4 and 6 V were obtained, respectively. We also obtained clear rectification and observed the dependence of the turn-on voltage on the channel width.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.7567/JJAP.52.06GE09/pdf

Rectification Effects of ZnO-Based Transparent Nanodiodes on Glass and Flexible Plastic Substrates

Terahertz (THz) radiation from InAs thin films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on closely lattice-matched p-type GaSb (100) substrates and lattice-mismatched semi-insulating GaAs (100) substrates was investigated. The THz radiation intensity was measured from InAs films with thicknesses between 100 nm and 1.5 μm excited by a femtosecond laser pulse with a wavelength of approximately 780 nm. The radiation intensity increased as the InAs film thickness increased and it exceeded that from a bulk n-type InAs substrate with an electron concentration of 2.3 × 1016 cm−3 when the InAs film thickness was greater than about 500 nm. In addition, the THz intensity from a 1-μm-thick InAs film was greater than that from a bulk p-type InAs substrate. We ascribe this enhanced THz intensity to the wave reflected from the lower interface between the InAs film and the layer grown beneath it. We confirmed this by observing an increased pulse width due to constructive overlap of the reflected wave. The results demonstrate that InAs thin films are promising materials for THz emitting devices.

Toshihiko Maemoto

Papers

Zinc oxide ion-sensitive field-effect transistors and biosensors

Growth of ZnO/Zn1−xMgxO films by pulsed laser ablation

Pulsed laser deposition of ZnO grown on glass substrates for realizing high-performance thin-film transistors

Rectification Effects of ZnO-Based Transparent Nanodiodes on Glass and Flexible Plastic Substrates

Intense Terahertz Radiation from InAs Thin Films