Nanoblog at Nanowerk Nanotechnology Portal has a fascinating review article by Michael Berger about the latest efforts to develop flexible electronics for the biomed industry.
A group of researchers at the California Institute of Technology now showed that highly ordered films of silicon nanowires can be literally glued onto pieces of plastic to make flexible sensors with state-of-the-art sensitivity to a range of toxic chemicals. These nanowires are crystalline wires made out of doped silicon — the mainstay of the computer industry. By etching nanowires into a wafer of silicon, and then peeling them off and transferring them to plastic, they developed a general, parallel, and scalable strategy for achieving high performance electronics on low cost plastic substrates.
“Our recent paper combines a number of ‘firsts’ into one piece of work” Dr. Michael McAlpine explains to Nanowerk. “For example, while highly aligned nanowires have been assembled on rigid substrates using a variety of methods, this is the first time that such well-ordered, densely packed films have been assembled on pieces of flexible plastic. This achievement opened the door to accomplishing another first: an ‘electronic nose’ composed of nanowire device arrays on flexible plastic, with state-of-the-art sensitivity. Our work was thus motivated by the challenge of overcoming the scientific hurdles to these achievements, the commercial possibilities of these advances, and concerns for health and safety of the general public.”
Full article @ Nanoblog: High performance electronics and sensors on flexible plastic chips …
The abstract: Highly ordered nanowire arrays on plastic substrates for ultrasensitive flexible chemical sensors …