(24e) Chemical “Engineerifying” Electronics

This talk will overview our recent efforts to chemical “engineerify” electronics manufacturing. While chemical engineering has played a major role in the development and success of integrated circuitry, the process by which we manufacture integrated circuits – the planar process – is strikingly antithetical to the foundational tenets of chemical engineering. To this end, we are developing a suite of processes to modularize nanoelectronic devices and hyper-scale their manufacturing. Modularization at the device level promises an unprecedented combination of performance, cost, and function; opening the door to electronic systems that are natively heterogeneous, on-demand manufacturable, physically reconfigurable, and/or dispersible. This “nanomodular” device fabrication synergistically combines multiple bottom-up and area-selective processes: (i) vapor-liquid-solid semiconductor nanowire growth, (ii) a new nanoscale polymer masking process, and (iii) area-selective atomic layer deposition. Our approach yields single-crystalline, high mobility nanowires with nanoscale coaxial thin films self-aligned to the internal dopant profile. In parallel, we are developing the Geode process to increase manufacturing throughput by orders-of-magnitude. This scale-up is made possible by an unconventional substrate – the interior surface of hollow silica microcapsule powders – on which nanowire growth and subsequent processing occurs. Collaborative efforts are also enabling nanowire property characterization in a high-throughput, non-contact fashion and high-resolution interconnection of nanomodular devices to form functional circuitry.