Micropatternable Double-Faced ZnO Nanoflowers for Flexible Gas Sensor

Conductometric semiconducting metal oxide gas sensors have been widely used and investigated in the detection of gases. Investigations have indicated that the gas sensing process is strongly related to surface reactions, so one of the important parameters of gas sensors, the sensitivity of the metal oxide based materials, will change with the factors influencing the surface reactions, such as chemical components, surface-modification and microstructures of sensing layers, temperature and humidity. In this brief review, attention will be focused on changes of sensitivity of conductometric semiconducting metal oxide gas sensors due to the five factors mentioned above.

Electronic systems that offer elastic mechanical responses to high-strain deformations are of growing interest because of their ability to enable new biomedical devices and other applications whose requirements are impossible to satisfy with conventional wafer-based technologies or even with those that offer simple bendability. This article introduces materials and mechanical design strategies for classes of electronic circuits that offer extremely high stretchability, enabling them to accommodate even demanding configurations such as corkscrew twists with tight pitch (e.g., 90 degrees in approximately 1 cm) and linear stretching to "rubber-band" levels of strain (e.g., up to approximately 140%). The use of single crystalline silicon nanomaterials for the semiconductor provides performance in stretchable complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits approaching that of conventional devices with comparable feature sizes formed on silicon wafers. Comprehensive theoretical studies of the mechanics reveal the way in which the structural designs enable these extreme mechanical properties without fracturing the intrinsically brittle active materials or even inducing significant changes in their electrical properties. The results, as demonstrated through electrical measurements of arrays of transistors, CMOS inverters, ring oscillators, and differential amplifiers, suggest a valuable route to high-performance stretchable electronics.