Growth Kinetics and Integration of Inorganic Nanowires for Flexible Electronics

Inorganic NWs in the sub-100 nm diameter range have shown great potential for flexible electronics. Research in this area is governed by the three distinct domains, (1) growth strategy of NWs, (2) NWs printing, (3) development of flexible devices. These three domains are interdependent and the current works aims to show the connectivity via a generalized vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) based high temperature bottom-up growth process, which serves a key role to produce high quality NWs of length ~10-50 µm. These NWs are printed over a flexible substrates using contact or direct roll transfer printing techniques, eventually leading to flexible devices. The key requirement from the growth process is to obtain long NWs needed for effective printing. Here we discuss the growth of NWs suitable for printing via atomistic kinetic model. This is followed by contact printing of vertical grown NWs over flexible substrates to develop an array of flexible ZnO NWs FETs with uniform response.