Abstract
Large-area manufacturing of flexible nanoscale electronics has long been sought by the printed electronics industry. However, the lack of a robust, reliable, high throughput and low-cost technique that is capable of delivering high-performance functional devices has hitherto hindered commercial exploitation. Herein we report on the extensive range of capabilities presented by adhesion lithography (a-Lith), an innovative patterning technique for the fabrication of coplanar nanogap electrodes with arbitrarily large aspect ratio. We use this technique to fabricate a plethora of nanoscale electronic devices based on symmetric and asymmetric coplanar electrodes separated by a nanogap<15nm. We show that functional devices including self-aligned-gate transistors, radio frequency diodes and rectifying circuits, multi-colour organic light-emitting nanodiodes and multilevel non-volatile memory devices, can be fabricated in a facile manner with minimum process complexity on a range of substrates. The compatibility of the formed nanogap electrodes with a wide range of solution processable semiconductors and substrate materials renders a-Lith highly attractive for the manufacturing of large-area nanoscale opto/electronics on arbitrary size and shape substrates. Adhesion lithography enables coplanar nanogap electrode fabrication and allows for the realisation of nanoscale electronics manufacturingA collaborative team led by Thomas Anthopoulos from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology demonstrated a novel method for patterning coplanar electrodes with inter-electrode distances of less than 15nm and arbitrarily large aspect ratios. This facile manufacturing method, called adhesion lithography, was used to fabricate a series of functional nanoscale electronic devices on various substrates. These flexible electronic devices, which are technologically relevant, included self-aligned-gate transistors, radio frequency diodes and rectifying circuits, multi-colour organic light-emitting diodes and multilevel non-volatile memory devices. Given its versatility in the fabrication of functional electronic devices and its solution-processing compatibility with a range of semiconductors and substrate materials, adhesion lithography is an attractive processing method for the high-throughput manufacture of large-scale flexible electronics at the nanoscale.