Technology

We have developed a number of novel nanoelectronic components in the last 10 years for both scientific research and commercial exploitations. Our current focus is to pursue new nanodevice concepts that can be used in two areas of applications: Printable electronics and Energy harvesting, as described below.

The market of flexible or printable electronics has been forecast by IDTechEx to grow to $30 billion by 2015 and to as much as $250 billion by 2025. Rather than replacing existing silicon electronics, printed electronics will create new markets where conventional technologies are too expensive or unsuitable to use. These may include smart labels, printed electronic security features, RFID tagging, display drivers, memory devices, and disposable sensors in clinics and food supply chains, etc. Two of the key issues facing the printed electronics industry are the low device speed and high manufacturing cost. Our technologies are based on novel nanoelectronic devices that not only offer HF (13.56 MHz) and UHF (hundreds of MHz or higher) speeds but also can be manufactured by scalable, high-throughput, low-cost processes.

Conventional diodes or transistors are made up of semiconductor, metal contacts, doping junction/barrier structure or insulators, etc. Each of these components is added vertically on top of one another with precise alignment in a series of fabrication steps. Whereas this is quite doable in silicon electronics industry, it is generally very challenging to fabricate such multi-layered devices of small dimensions by printing technique over large areas and/or on flexible substrates. Our novel technologies allow us to reduce or even eliminate a lot of such challenges. The new device concepts also make it possible to significantly reduce the parasitic capacitances and hence enable very fast device operations.

Our ultra-fast, zero-threshold, nano-diodes may also enable a potentially disruptive technology for thermoelectrics. To date thermoelectric devices generally have poor efficiency (typically <1%) and very high cost. Current products are hence mostly limited to providing power for high value or niche applications such as wireless sensors, satellite systems and military hardware. There is a huge potential market for thermoelectrics to harvest waste heat for direct energy generation. Applications may be envisaged in any place where there is heat, such as thermoelectric power plants where tremendous amount of heat is wasted and family cars where about 70% of the energy generated from the fuel is lost in the form of heat from the exhaust and car engine. Another potentially important application is indirect solar energy harvesting, i.e. heating an object using solar concentrators and then collecting the thermal radiation. One advantage of the approach is that if the heat can be stored overnight, which has been demonstrated over 10s hours, these indirect solar power stations will be able to generate electricity in the night.