Salman Bin Inayat

Transformational Silicon Electronics

In todays traditional electronics such as in computers or in mobile phones, billions of high-performance, ultra-low-power devices are neatly integrated in extremely compact areas on rigid and brittle but low-cost bulk monocrystalline silicon (100) wafers. Ninety percent of global electronics are made up of silicon. Therefore, we have developed a generic low-cost regenerative batch fabrication process to transform such wafers full of devices into thin (5 μm), mechanically flexible, optically semitransparent silicon fabric with devices, then recycling the remaining wafer to generate multiple silicon fabric with chips and devices, ensuring low-cost and optimal utilization of the whole substrate. We show monocrystalline, amorphous, and polycrystalline silicon and silicon dioxide fabric, all from low-cost bulk silicon (100) wafers with the semiconductor industrys most advanced high-κ/metal gate stack based high-performance, ultra-low-power capacitors, field effect transistors, energy harvesters, and storage to emphasize the effectiveness and versatility of this process to transform traditional electronics into flexible and semitransparent ones for multipurpose applications.

Flexible and Semi‐Transparent Thermoelectric Energy Harvesters from Low Cost Bulk Silicon (100)

Silicon electronics are at the heart of today’s digital world. Silicon based micro-fabrication technology has unparalleled performance, cost, and yield advantages. However, silicon is brittle and cannot be used for many healthcare and electronic applications. Most living organs are intrinsically of irregular shapes and thus medical electronics intended for implantation on host features such as eye balls or ears need to be fl exible. [ 1 ] Therefore, exploration for a low-cost, simple solution using plastic as substrate and organic materials to fabricate fl exible electronics, like displays and sensors, is on the rise. [ 2–5 ] The basic challenges associated with fl exible electronics compared to precision silicon technology are high thermal budget process incompatibility and inherently low electron mobility. [ 6 ] These two major challenges hinder their potential to integrate high performance devices on a traditional plastic based fl exible platform. With increased world population and concerns about health care, it is important to develop technologies which will be integrated in a benign way to humans or garments capable of collecting and transmitting necessary real-time data to address issues like seizure, heart attacks, etc. [ 7 ] This means high performance silicon-based transistors are required to be implemented on fl exible platforms. Simultaneously, such systems would require ultralow power consumption sourced conveniently from the surrounding environment. Thermoelectric energy harvesters (generators or TEGs) are one of the most pragmatic options to serve as a mobile power source. [ 8 ] Some micrometer-sized TEGs are even commercially available. [ 9–11 ] A few efforts have been made to fabricate them on fl exible substrates like polymide sheet and SU-8 based polymers. [ 12–15 ] Major challenges with these materials are (i) their low melting point making them incompatible for high temperature operation; (ii) their incompatibility for thick fi lm deposition using electrochemical deposition and iii) due to low thermal conductivity ( < 1 W/mK), the temperature cannot drop across the thermocouples. Energy harvesters like TEGs have not

Nano-materials Enabled Thermoelectricity from Window Glasses

With a projection of nearly doubling up the world population by 2050, we need wide variety of renewable and clean energy sources to meet the increased energy demand. Solar energy is considered as the leading promising alternate energy source with the pertinent challenge of off sunshine period and uneven worldwide distribution of usable sun light. Although thermoelectricity is considered as a reasonable renewable energy from wasted heat, its mass scale usage is yet to be developed. Here we show, large scale integration of nano-manufactured pellets of thermoelectric nano-materials, embedded into window glasses to generate thermoelectricity using the temperature difference between hot outside and cool inside. For the first time, this work offers an opportunity to potentially generate 304 watts of usable power from 9 m2 window at a 20°C temperature gradient. If a natural temperature gradient exists, this can serve as a sustainable energy source for green building technology.