Technology and applications of 2D materials in micro- and macroscale electronics

Over the past 50 years, electronics has truly revolutionized our lives. Today, many everyday objects rely on electronic circuitry from gadgets such as wireless earbuds, smartphones and laptops to larger devices like household appliances and cars. However, the size range of electronic devices is still rather limited from the millimeter to meter scale. Being able to extend the reach of electronics from the size of a red blood cell to a skyscraper would enable new applications in many areas including energy production, entertainment, environmental sensing, and healthcare. 2D-materials, a new class of atomically thin materials with a variety of electric properties, are promising for such electronic systems with extreme dimension due to their flexibility and ease of integration. On the macroscopic side, electronics produced on thin films by roll-to-roll fabrication has great potential due to its high throughput and low production cost. Towards this end, this thesis explores the transfer of 2D-materials onto flexible EVA/PET substrates with hot roll lamination and electrochemical delamination using a custom designed roll-to-roll setup. The transfer process is characterized in detail and the lamination of multiple 2D material layers is demonstrated. As exemplary large-scale electronics application, a flexible solar cell with graphene transparent electrode is discussed. On the microscopic side, this thesis presents a 60x60 [mu]m² microsystem platform called synthetic cells or SynCells. This platform offers a variety of building blocks such as chemical sensors and transistors based on molybdenum disulfide, passive germanium timers, iron magnets for actuation, as well as gallium nitride LEDs and solar cells for communication and energy harvesting. Several system-level applications of SynCells are explored such as sensing in a microfluidic channel or spray-coating SynCells on arbitrary surfaces.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Hempel, Marek,Ph. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tomás Palacios and Jing Kong.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130201

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130201