Abstract
Semiconductor nanowires are routinely grown on high-priced crystalline substrates as it is extremely challenging to grow directly on plastics and flexible substrates due to high-temperature requirements and substrate preparation. At the same time, plastic substrates can offer many advantages such as extremely low price, light weight, mechanical flexibility, shock and thermal resistance, and biocompatibility. We explore the direct growth of high-quality III–V nanowires on flexible plastic substrates by metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). We synthesize InAs and InP nanowires on polyimide and show that the fabricated NWs are optically active with strong light emission in the mid-infrared range. We create a monolithic flexible nanowire-based p–n junction device on plastic in just two fabrication steps. Overall, we demonstrate that III–V nanowires can be synthesized directly on flexible plastic substrates inside a MOVPE reactor, and we believe that our results will further advance the development of the nanowire-based flexible electronic devices.
Highlights
Semiconductor nanowires are routinely grown on high-priced crystalline substrates as it is extremely challenging to grow directly on plastics and flexible substrates due to hightemperature requirements and substrate preparation
Article various techniques to transfer already grown NWs to flexible substrates have been developed where the nanowire arrays are typically embedded into a dielectric or polymer layer and peeled off for further lengthy multistep processing.[16−19] Until now, only direct growth of the ZnO nanowire on a flexible plastic substrate was demonstrated using solution-based chemical growth techniques, which are only available for a limited variety of materials and are challenging to implement in industrial-scale processing.[20−23] Transfer-free, but not direct, growth of Ge NWs on flexible plastic films was reported by utilizing intermediate seed layers and metal-induced layer exchange.[24]
For epitaxial growth techniques such as metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), these techniques are generally incompatible with direct growth of NWs on plastic substrates, with only a few reports of NW growth directly on low-cost flexible foils and metal-coated substrates.[25−28] On the other hand, MOVPE growth of NWs is well-established, allows the use of the important III−V semiconductors, and is readily used for industrial-scale processes
Summary
Semiconductor nanowires are routinely grown on high-priced crystalline substrates as it is extremely challenging to grow directly on plastics and flexible substrates due to hightemperature requirements and substrate preparation. We explore the direct growth of high-quality InAs NWs on flexible plastic substrates using MOVPE.
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