Munho Kim

High-performance green flexible electronics based on biodegradable cellulose nanofibril paper

Todays consumer electronics, such as cell phones, tablets and other portable electronic devices, are typically made of non-renewable, non-biodegradable, and sometimes potentially toxic (for example, gallium arsenide) materials. These consumer electronics are frequently upgraded or discarded, leading to serious environmental contamination. Thus, electronic systems consisting of renewable and biodegradable materials and minimal amount of potentially toxic materials are desirable. Here we report high-performance flexible microwave and digital electronics that consume the smallest amount of potentially toxic materials on biobased, biodegradable and flexible cellulose nanofibril papers. Furthermore, we demonstrate gallium arsenide microwave devices, the consumer wireless workhorse, in a transferrable thin-film form. Successful fabrication of key electrical components on the flexible cellulose nanofibril paper with comparable performance to their rigid counterparts and clear demonstration of fungal biodegradation of the cellulose-nanofibril-based electronics suggest that it is feasible to fabricate high-performance flexible electronics using ecofriendly materials.

Origami silicon optoelectronics for hemispherical electronic eye systems

Digital image sensors in hemispherical geometries offer unique imaging advantages over their planar counterparts, such as wide field of view and low aberrations. Deforming miniature semiconductor-based sensors with high-spatial resolution into such format is challenging. Here we report a simple origami approach for fabricating single-crystalline silicon-based focal plane arrays and artificial compound eyes that have hemisphere-like structures. Convex isogonal polyhedral concepts allow certain combinations of polygons to fold into spherical formats. Using each polygon block as a sensor pixel, the silicon-based devices are shaped into maps of truncated icosahedron and fabricated on flexible sheets and further folded either into a concave or convex hemisphere. These two electronic eye prototypes represent simple and low-cost methods as well as flexible optimization parameters in terms of pixel density and design. Results demonstrated in this work combined with miniature size and simplicity of the design establish practical technology for integration with conventional electronic devices.Hemispherical format has been adopted in camera systems to better mimic human eyes, yet the current designs rely on complicated fabrications. Here, Zhang et al. show an origami-inspired approach that enables planar silicon-based photodetector arrays to reshape into concave or convex geometries.

Single-crystalline germanium nanomembrane photodetectors on foreign nanocavities

High-yield, high throughput method creates nanomembrane photodetectors with unique optoelectronic properties. Miniaturization of optoelectronic devices offers tremendous performance gain. As the volume of photoactive material decreases, optoelectronic performance improves, including the operation speed, the signal-to-noise ratio, and the internal quantum efficiency. Over the past decades, researchers have managed to reduce the volume of photoactive materials in solar cells and photodetectors by orders of magnitude. However, two issues arise when one continues to thin down the photoactive layers to the nanometer scale (for example, <50 nm). First, light-matter interaction becomes weak, resulting in incomplete photon absorption and low quantum efficiency. Second, it is difficult to obtain ultrathin materials with single-crystalline quality. We introduce a method to overcome these two challenges simultaneously. It uses conventional bulk semiconductor wafers, such as Si, Ge, and GaAs, to realize single-crystalline films on foreign substrates that are designed for enhanced light-matter interaction. We use a high-yield and high-throughput method to demonstrate nanometer-thin photodetectors with significantly enhanced light absorption based on nanocavity interference mechanism. These single-crystalline nanomembrane photodetectors also exhibit unique optoelectronic properties, such as the strong field effect and spectral selectivity.

Flexible germanium nanomembrane metal-semiconductor-metal photodiodes

We demonstrate flexible Ge nanomembrane (Ge NM) based metal-semiconductor-metal photodiodes. The effect of uniaxial tensile strain on Ge NM based photodiodes was investigated using bending fixtures. Dark current density is decreased from 21.5 to 4.8 mA/cm2 at 3 V by a tensile strain of 0.42% while photon responsivity is increased from 0.2 to 0.45 A/W at the wavelength of 1.5 μm. Enhanced responsivity is also observed at longer wavelengths up to 1.64 μm. The uniaxial tensile strain effectively reduces the direct bandgap energy of the Ge NM, leading to a shift of the absorption edge toward a longer wavelength.

Transferrable single crystalline 4H-SiC nanomembranes

In this work, we demonstrate a transferrable single crystalline 4H-SiC nanomembrane (SiC NM) released from a SiC-on-insulator (SiCOI) wafer. High resolution X-ray diffraction (XRD) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were performed on the SiC NM and confirmed similarly good crystallinity and surface morphology. In addition, the refractive index and extinction coefficient of the SiC NM were investigated using ellipsometry analyses. Despite its thinness (i.e., 200 nm), the SiC NM achieved an absorption greater than 40% in the wavelength range of 200–260 nm with a maximum absorption of 73.8% at 256 nm. Our transferrable SiC NM provides not only good mechanical flexibility, but also exhibits excellent ultraviolet (UV) light absorption which could be readily utilized for high sensitivity flexible UV detectors.

Ultra-thin distributed Bragg reflectors via stacked single-crystal silicon nanomembranes

In this paper, we report ultra-thin distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) via stacked single-crystal silicon (Si) nanomembranes (NMs). Mesh hole-free single-crystal Si NMs were released from a Si-on-insulator substrate and transferred to quartz and Si substrates. Thermal oxidation was applied to the transferred Si NM to form high-quality SiO2 and thus a Si/SiO2 pair with uniform and precisely controlled thicknesses. The Si/SiO2 layers, as smooth as epitaxial grown layers, minimize scattering loss at the interface and in between the layers. As a result, a reflection of 99.8% at the wavelength range from 1350 nm to 1650 nm can be measured from a 2.5-pair DBR on a quartz substrate and 3-pair DBR on a Si substrate with thickness of 0.87 μm and 1.14 μm, respectively. The high reflection, ultra-thin DBRs developed here, which can be applied to almost any devices and materials, holds potential for application in high performance optoelectronic devices and photonics applications.

Light absorption enhancement in Ge nanomembrane and its optoelectronic application

In this study, the light absorption property of Ge nanomembrane (Ge NM), which incorporates hydrogen (H), in near-infrared (NIR) wavelength range was analyzed. Due to the presence of a large amount of structural defects, the light absorption coefficient of the Ge layer becomes much higher (10 times) than that of bulk Ge in the wavelength range of 1000 ~1600 nm. Increased light absorption was further measured from released Ge NM that has H incorporation in comparison to that of bulk Ge, proving the enhanced light absorption coefficient of H incorporated Ge. Finally, metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodetectors were demonstrated using the H incorporated Ge on GeOI.

Resonant cavity germanium photodetector via stacked single-crystalline nanomembranes

In this paper, the authors report resonant cavity (RC) metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) germanium nanomembrane (Ge NM) photodetectors via transfer printing. The dislocation-free Ge NM layer was transferred onto an ultrathin Si NM/SiO2 distributed Bragg reflector. As a result, a low dark current density of 1 × 10−9 A/μm2 and a quantum efficiency of 17.3% at 1.55 μm, which is twice larger than the quantum efficiency without a bottom mirror, were measured from the transferred RC MSM Ge photodetector. The enhancement of the quantum efficiency is verified by simulation.

Polycrystalline GeSn thin films on Si formed by alloy evaporation

Polycrystalline GeSn thin films on Si substrates with a Sn composition up to 4.5% have been fabricated and characterized. The crystalline structure, surface morphology, and infrared (IR) absorption coefficient of the annealed GeSn thin films were carefully investigated. It was found that the GeSn thin films with a Sn composition of 4.5% annealed at 450 °C possessed a desirable polycrystalline structure according to X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses and Raman spectroscopy analyses. In addition, the absorption coefficient of the polycrystalline GeSn thin films in the IR region was significantly better than that of the single crystalline bulk Ge.

Amorphous Si/SiO2 distributed Bragg reflectors with transfer printed single-crystalline Si nanomembranes

A distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) consisting of a single-crystal Si nanomembrane (NM) layer formed by the transfer printing technique on top of an evaporated amorphous Si (a-Si)/SiO2 DBR structure was demonstrated. The reflectivity of different DBR structures/pairs is measured and verified it by the simulation. An improved surface roughness of the top layer by employing a Si NM suggests that the smoother single crystalline surface not only minimizes light scattering loss but also can be an epitaxial template layer for subsequent Si growth without contributing any strain. The results indicate a simple pathway toward achieving high performance Si/SiO2 DBRs employing Si NM as a top layer. This method could also lead to the fabrication of large-area, high performance NM based DBRs at low cost with high throughput.