Nanomeshed form of materials have emerged as promising candidates for future soft bioelectronics, with its unique advantages and broad possibilities. The nanomesh structure can provide the conventional bioelectronic materials with transparency, flexibility and stretchability, which are all highly tunable with different nanomesh designs. The nanomeshing of conventional materials also guarantees the electrochemical performance and biocompatibility of the bioelectronic devices. Additionally, it is very convenient to realize the nanomesh structures with high uniformness compared to the process of forming other nanostructures, such as nanowires and nanorods. For example, we recently developed Au/PEDOT:PSS bilayer nanomeshes, achieving microelectrodes array (MEA) with over 70% transparency while preserving the superior electrochemical performance (Imedance of 130 kΩ at 1 kHz with microeletrode site of 20 μm in diameter). The excellent electrochemical performance resulted from the bilayer nanomesh structure with the low-impedance coating of PEDOT:PSS nanomesh on the top of Au nanomesh, significantly enhancing the scalability of the bilayer nanomesh microelectrodes. The nanomesh based, transparent, flexible MEA allows simultaneous coupling of time-resolved electrophysiology data with optically measured, spatially and type resolved single neuron activity. Specifically, we fabricated both high-yield 32-ch planar and penetrating MEAs with the nanomeshing techniques and successfully recorded single-unit neural activity from the mice brain. In *vivo* two-photon imaging of single neurons in layer 2/3 of the visual cortex of awake mice was conducted simultaneously with the electrical recordings, which was able to detect the visual evoked activity in both electrical and optical modalities consistently. Meanwhile, we have introduced an innovative concept of nanomeshed semiconductor nanomembrane, with the goal to achieve high-performance stretchable semiconductors, which is widely considered as one of the main challenges in stretchable electronics. The nanomeshed nanomembrane is a dense network of fully connected, single-crystalline Si traces of nanoscale line-width and thickness. Due to their spring-like traces, the semiconductor nanomeshes possess promising stretchability while with high electrical performance and high scalability to microscale footprints. Specifically, by making a silicon film into homogeneous nanomeshes with spring-like nano traces, we demonstrated a high electron mobility of 50 cm^2^/V·s, and moderate stretchability with a one-time strain of 25% and cyclic strain of 14% after stretching for 1000 cycles with conventional microelectronic layouts, further improvable with optimized nanomesh designs. Besides potential applications in stretchable electronics, this semiconductor nanomesh concept provides a new platform for materials engineering and is expected to yield a new family of stretchable inorganic materials having tunable electronic and optoelectronic properties with customized nanostructures. Together, our work demonstrates that nanomeshing is a unique way of transforming microelectronics for emerging applications.


Nanomeshing Microelectronics

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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