Abstract
Inorganic semiconductors such as III-V materials are very important in our everyday life as they are used for manufacturing optoelectronic and microelectronic components with important applications span from energy harvesting to telecommunications. In some applications, these components are required to operate in harsh environments. In these cases, having waterproofing capability is essential. Here we demonstrate design and control of the wettability of indium phosphide based multilayer material (InP/InGaAs/InP) using re-entrant structures fabricated by a fast electron beam lithography technique. This patterning technique enabled us to fabricate highly uniform nanostructure arrays with at least one order of magnitude shorter patterning times compared to conventional electron beam lithography methods. We reduced the surface contact fraction significantly such that the water droplets may be completely removed from our nanostructured surface. We predicted the wettability of our patterned surface by modelling the adhesion energies between the water droplet and both the patterned surface and the dispensing needle. This is very useful for the development of coating-free waterproof optoelectronic and microelectronic components where the coating may hinder the performance of such devices and cause problems with semiconductor fabrication compatibility.
Highlights
III-V semiconductors such as indium phosphide (InP) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) are very important class of materials for optoelectronics and high frequency microelectronics
Such superhydrophonic surfaces were inspired by the ‘rose petal effect’[24,25,26,27,28], or gecko hand[29,30,31,32], in which the surfaces have water contact angles greater than 150 degrees with a high hysteresis. These results show that the single shot electron beam lithography (EBL) surface patterning technique allow us to design the surface contact fraction in order to remove or pin the water droplet on the substrate surface, without requiring the addition of hydrophobic polymer coatings
The FEBL method was able to produce highly uniform nanostructure arrays with much reduced patterning time, and the excellent uniformity of the fabricated array enables the demonstration of hydrophobicity in our III-V material
Summary
III-V semiconductors such as indium phosphide (InP) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) are very important class of materials for optoelectronics and high frequency microelectronics. Their use spans from lasers for telecommunications[1,2] and imaging[3,4], to photodetectors[5,6], sensors[7] and novel solar cells based on low dimensional structures[8,9]. Waterproofing of III-V semiconductors has been reported previously, but previous studies involved transferring epitaxially grown III-V structures to flexible and waterproofing substrates such as PDMS13 We support our experimental results with modelling of the surface adhesion energies of water droplets on water-needle and water-surface interfaces of the nanostructured surface; these models are in excellent agreement with our experimental results
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