Scalable and low-cost fabrication of flexible WS2 photodetectors on polycarbonate

• Published in: Npj flexible electronics 2022-04, Vol.6 (1), p.1-9, Article 23
• Main Authors: Quereda, Jorge, Kuriakose, Sruthi, Munuera, Carmen, Mompean, Federico J., Al-Enizi, Abdullah M., Nafady, Ayman, Diez, Enrique, Frisenda, Riccardo, Castellanos-Gomez, Andres
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/301/1005; 639/925/357/1018; Abrasion; Chemical vapor deposition; Chemistry and Materials Science; Electric contacts; Electrodes; Electronics and Microelectronics; Illumination; Instrumentation; Low cost; Materials Science; Optical and Electronic Materials; Photometers; Polycarbonate resins; Polyethylene terephthalate; Polymer Sciences; Response time; Scanning electron microscopy; Shadow masks; Substrates; Thick films; Thin films
• ISSN: 2397-4621; 2397-4621
• DOI: 10.1038/s41528-022-00157-9

We present a low-cost and easy-to-implement technique to fabricate large-area WS 2 photodetector devices onto transparent and flexible polycarbonate substrates. The method relies on the deposition of large-area (in the cm scale) thin films (~30 nm thick) of WS 2 by a recently introduced abrasion-induced method. Interdigitated electrical contacts are then deposited by thermal evaporation through a shadow mask. The photodetectors present well-balanced performances with an good trade-off between responsivity (up to 144 mA/W at a source-drain voltage of 10 V and illumination power of 1 μW) and response time (down to ~70 µs) and a detectivity value of 10 8 Jones. We found that the devices perform very reversibly upon several illumination and straining cycles and we found a moderate device-to-device variation.