Tag Archives: Weidong Zhou

Diamond-based electronics?

Leave a reply

A May 24, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily describes the latest research on using diamonds as semiconductors,

Along with being a “girl’s best friend,” diamonds also have remarkable properties that could make them ideal semiconductors. This is welcome news for electronics; semiconductors are needed to meet the rising demand for more efficient electronics that deliver and convert power.

The thirst for electronics is unlikely to cease and almost every appliance or device requires a suite of electronics that transfer, convert and control power. Now, researchers have taken an important step toward that technology with a new way to dope single crystals of diamonds, a crucial process for building electronic devices.

A May 24, 2016 American Institute of Physics (AIP) news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail,

For power electronics, diamonds could serve as the perfect material. They are thermally conductive, which means diamond-based devices would dissipate heat quickly and easily, foregoing the need for bulky and expensive methods for cooling. Diamond can also handle high voltages and power. Electrical currents also flow through diamonds quickly, meaning the material would make for energy efficient devices.

But among the biggest challenges to making diamond-based devices is doping, a process in which other elements are integrated into the semiconductor to change its properties. Because of diamond’s rigid crystalline structure, doping is difficult.

Currently, you can dope diamond by coating the crystal with boron and heating it to 1450 degrees Celsius. But it’s difficult to remove the boron coating at the end. This method only works on diamonds consisting of multiple crystals stuck together. Because such polydiamonds have irregularities between the crystals, single-crystals would be superior semiconductors.

You can dope single crystals by injecting boron atoms while growing the crystals artificially. The problem is the process requires powerful microwaves that can degrade the quality of the crystal.

Now, Ma [Zhengqiang (Jack) Ma, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison] and his colleagues have found a way to dope single-crystal diamonds with boron at relatively low temperatures and without any degradation. The researchers discovered if you bond a single-crystal diamond with a piece of silicon doped with boron, and heat it to 800 degrees Celsius, which is low compared to the conventional techniques, the boron atoms will migrate from the silicon to the diamond. It turns out that the boron-doped silicon has defects such as vacancies, where an atom is missing in the lattice structure. Carbon atoms from the diamond will fill those vacancies, leaving empty spots for boron atoms.

This technique also allows for selective doping, which means more control when making devices. You can choose where to dope a single-crystal diamond simply by bonding the silicon to that spot.

The new method only works for P-type doping, where the semiconductor is doped with an element that provides positive charge carriers (in this case, the absence of electrons, called holes).

“We feel like we found a very easy, inexpensive, and effective way to do it,” Ma said. The researchers are already working on a simple device using P-type single-crystal diamond semiconductors.

But to make electronic devices like transistors, you need N-type doping that gives the semiconductor negative charge carriers (electrons). And other barriers remain. Diamond is expensive and single crystals are very small.

Still, Ma says, achieving P-type doping is an important step, and might inspire others to find solutions for the remaining challenges. Eventually, he said, single-crystal diamond could be useful everywhere — perfect, for instance, for delivering power through the grid.

Here’s an image the researchers have released,

Optical image of a diode array on a natural single crystalline diamond plate. (The image looks blurred due to light scattering by the array of small pads on top of the diamond plate.) Inset shows the deposited anode metal on top of heavy doped Si nanomembrane that is bonded to natural single crystalline diamond. CREDIT: Jung-Hun Seo

Optical image of a diode array on a natural single crystalline diamond plate. (The image looks blurred due to light scattering by the array of small pads on top of the diamond plate.) Inset shows the deposited anode metal on top of heavy doped Si nanomembrane that is bonded to natural single crystalline diamond. CREDIT: Jung-Hun Seo Courtesy: American Institute of Physics

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Thermal diffusion boron doping of single-crystal natural diamond by Jung-Hun Seo, Henry Wu, Solomon Mikael, Hongyi Mi, James P. Blanchard, Giri Venkataramanan, Weidong Zhou, Shaoqin Gong, Dane Morgan, and Zhenqiang Ma. J. Appl. Phys. 119, 205703 (2016); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4949327

This paper appears to be open access.

Cellulose Nanofibrillated Fiber Based Transistors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Leave a reply

There’s a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working to substitute silicon used in computer chips with cellulose derived from wood (my May 27, 2015 posting). Their latest effort, featuring mobile electronics, is described in a July 1, 2015 news item on Azonano,

A report published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2012 showed that about 152 million mobile devices are discarded every year, of which only 10 percent is recycled — a legacy of waste that consumes a tremendous amount of natural resources and produces a lot of trash made from expensive and non-biodegradable materials like highly purified silicon.

Now researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with a new solution to alleviate the environmental burden of discarded electronics. They have demonstrated the feasibility of making microwave biodegradable thin-film transistors from a transparent, flexible biodegradable substrate made from inexpensive wood, called cellulose nanofibrillated fiber (CNF). This work opens the door for green, low-cost, portable electronic devices in future.

A June 30, 2015 American Institute of Physics news release by Zhengzheng Zhang, which originated the news item, describes the research in more detail,

“We found that cellulose nanofibrillated fiber based transistors exhibit superior performance as that of conventional silicon-based transistors,” said Zhenqiang Ma, the team leader and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UW-Madison. “And the bio-based transistors are so safe that you can put them in the forest, and fungus will quickly degrade them. They become as safe as fertilizer.”

Nowadays, the majority of portable electronics are built on non-renewable, non-biodegradable materials such as silicon wafers, which are highly purified, expensive and rigid substrates, but cellulose nanofibrillated fiber films have the potential to replace silicon wafers as electronic substrates in environmental friendly, low-cost, portable gadgets or devices of the future.

Cellulose nanofibrillated fiber is a sustainable, strong, transparent nanomaterial made from wood. Compared to other polymers like plastics, the wood nanomaterial is biocompatible and has relatively low thermal expansion coefficient, which means the material won’t change shape as the temperature changes. All these superior properties make cellulose nanofibril an outstanding candidate for making portable green electronics.

To create high-performance devices, Ma’s team employed silicon nanomembranes as the active material in the transistor — pieces of ultra-thin films (thinner than a human hair) peeled from the bulk crystal and then transferred and glued onto the cellulose nanofibrill substrate to create a flexible, biodegradable and transparent silicon transistor.To create high-performance devices, Ma’s team employed silicon nanomembranes as the active material in the transistor — pieces of ultra-thin films (thinner than a human hair) peeled from the bulk crystal and then transferred and glued onto the cellulose nanofibrill substrate to create a flexible, biodegradable and transparent silicon transistor.

But to make portable electronics, the biodegradable transistor needed to be able to operate at microwave frequencies, which is the working range of most wireless devices. The researchers thus conducted a series of experiments such as measuring the current-voltage characteristics to study the device’s functional performance, which finally showed the biodegradable transistor has superior microwave-frequency operation capabilities comparable to existing semiconductor transistors.

“Biodegradable electronics provide a new solution for environmental problems brought by consumers’ pursuit of quickly upgraded portable devices,” said Ma. “It can be anticipated that future electronic chips and portable devices will be much greener and cheaper than that of today.”

Next, Ma and colleagues plan to develop more complicated circuit system based on the biodegradable transistors.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the team’s latest paper,

Microwave flexible transistors on cellulose nanofibrillated fiber substrates by Jung-Hun Seo, Tzu-Hsuan Chang, Jaeseong Lee, Ronald Sabo, Weidong Zhou, Zhiyong Cai, Shaoqin Gong, and Zhenqiang Ma.  Applied Physics Letters, Volume 106, Issue 26 or  Appl. Phys. Lett. 106, 262101 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4921077

This is an open access paper.

Wood chip/computer chip, a cellulose nanofibril development

Leave a reply

I imagine researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the US Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) are hoping they have managed to create a wood-based computer chip that can be commercialized in the near future. From a May 26, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

Portable electronics — typically made of non-renewable, non-biodegradable and potentially toxic materials — are discarded at an alarming rate in consumers’ pursuit of the next best electronic gadget.

In an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has collaborated with researchers in the Madison-based U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) to develop a surprising solution: a semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood.

The research team, led by UW-Madison electrical and computer engineering professor Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, described the new device in a paper published today (May 26, 2015) by the journal Nature Communications. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of replacing the substrate, or support layer, of a computer chip, with cellulose nanofibril (CNF), a flexible, biodegradable material made from wood.

Here’s what the wood computer chip looks like,

A cellulose nanofibril (CNF) computer chip rests on a leaf. Photo: Yei Hwan Jung, Wisconsin Nano Engineering Device Laboratory

A cellulose nanofibril (CNF) computer chip rests on a leaf. Photo: Yei Hwan Jung, Wisconsin Nano Engineering Device Laboratory Courtesy University of Wisconsin-Madison

A May 25, 2015 University of Wisconsin-Madison news release by John Steeno, which originated the news item, provides more details,

“The majority of material in a chip is support. We only use less than a couple of micrometers for everything else,” Ma says. “Now the chips are so safe you can put them in the forest and fungus will degrade it. They become as safe as fertilizer.”

Zhiyong Cai, project leader for an engineering composite science research group at FPL, has been developing sustainable nanomaterials since 2009.

“If you take a big tree and cut it down to the individual fiber, the most common product is paper. The dimension of the fiber is in the micron stage,” Cai says. “But what if we could break it down further to the nano scale? At that scale you can make this material, very strong and transparent CNF paper.”

Working with Shaoqin “Sarah” Gong, a UW-Madison professor of biomedical engineering, Cai’s group addressed two key barriers to using wood-derived materials in an electronics setting: surface smoothness and thermal expansion.

“You don’t want it to expand or shrink too much. Wood is a natural hydroscopic material and could attract moisture from the air and expand,” Cai says. “With an epoxy coating on the surface of the CNF, we solved both the surface smoothness and the moisture barrier.”

Gong and her students also have been studying bio-based polymers for more than a decade. CNF offers many benefits over current chip substrates, she says.

“The advantage of CNF over other polymers is that it’s a bio-based material and most other polymers are petroleum-based polymers. Bio-based materials are sustainable, bio-compatible and biodegradable,” Gong says. “And, compared to other polymers, CNF actually has a relatively low thermal expansion coefficient.”

The group’s work also demonstrates a more environmentally friendly process that showed performance similar to existing chips. The majority of today’s wireless devices use gallium arsenide-based microwave chips due to their superior high-frequency operation and power handling capabilities. However, gallium arsenide can be environmentally toxic, particularly in the massive quantities of discarded wireless electronics.

Yei Hwan Jung, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and a co-author of the paper, says the new process greatly reduces the use of such expensive and potentially toxic material.

“I’ve made 1,500 gallium arsenide transistors in a 5-by-6 millimeter chip. Typically for a microwave chip that size, there are only eight to 40 transistors. The rest of the area is just wasted,” he says. “We take our design and put it on CNF using deterministic assembly technique, then we can put it wherever we want and make a completely functional circuit with performance comparable to existing chips.”

While the biodegradability of these materials will have a positive impact on the environment, Ma says the flexibility of the technology can lead to widespread adoption of these electronic chips.

“Mass-producing current semiconductor chips is so cheap, and it may take time for the industry to adapt to our design,” he says. “But flexible electronics are the future, and we think we’re going to be well ahead of the curve.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

High-performance green flexible electronics based on biodegradable cellulose nanofibril paper by Yei Hwan Jung, Tzu-Hsuan Chang, Huilong Zhang, Chunhua Yao, Qifeng Zheng, Vina W. Yang, Hongyi Mi, Munho Kim,    Sang June Cho, Dong-Wook Park, Hao Jiang, Juhwan Lee,    Yijie Qiu, Weidong Zhou, Zhiyong Cai, Shaoqin Gong, & Zhenqiang Ma. Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7170 doi:10.1038/ncomms8170 Published 26 May 2015

This paper is open access.