Ultra-Low-Power Printed CNT Electronics Toward Battery-Less Smart Sensors and IoT

4:50 pm - 5:10 pm

 

Printed electronics has considerable potential as an inexpensive route to providing everyday objects and environments with 'edge intelligence'. This is in high demand to support the growth of the IoT ecosystem to one trillion smart connected devices—e.g., for health and wellness monitoring, smart homes, smart cities, and smart manufacturing. However, the power and energy dissipation of printed semiconductor technologies developed to date is generally too high for real-world applications. In fact, the sustainable development of ubiquitous edge computing crucially depends on the availability of low-cost and ultra-low-power electronics that can function with the energy harvested from the environment. In this presentation, we discuss our recent breakthrough in ultralow-power printed electronics. This is based on the novel paradigm of deep-subthreshold ambipolar TFT electronics, which relies on ambipolar TFTs with balanced n- and p-channel conduction in the deep-subthreshold region. This paradigm allows the realization of robust printed electronics with minimal complexity, as it enables complementary-like circuit integration with one single undoped printable semiconductor and one single source-drain metal. We successfully implement this paradigm with printed carbon-nanotubes and solution-processed hybrid nanodielectrics. The resultant high-performance TFT circuits can function with record-low supply voltages (down to 0.2 V) and power consumption (down to picowatt levels), which points to the formidable potential of this technology to approach commercial exploitation for smart sensor nodes in the near future. To demonstrate the capability of deep-subthreshold ambipolar TFT circuits for battery-less operation, we additionally show that they can be powered with a millimeter-scale solution-processed photovoltaic device under standard indoor illumination. Our breakthrough thus provides a platform for printed electronics that can function with the energy harvested from the environment to realize battery-less smart devices for the exponentially-growing Internet of Things ecosystem.

Speaker

Vincenzo Pecunia

Vincenzo Pecunia

Professor, Co-Founder, and Director Soochow University & FemtonFlex

Associate Professor Vincenzo Pecunia is the founder and leader of the Pecunia Group of Thin-Film Optoelectronics (www.pecunialab.com) at the Institute of Functional Nano & Soft Materials, Soochow University, China. Vincenzo is also the Co-Founder and Director of FemtonFlex, a Cambridge (UK)-based cleantech startup developing cutting-edge technology for sustainable smart living and Industry 4.0. Pecunia’s research covers environmentally-friendly, printable semiconductors, their photo-electronic properties, and their applications in thin-film-transistor (TFT) electronics, optoelectronics, and third-generation photovoltaics. Prior to establishing his own group, Vincenzo worked for more than six years at the Optoelectronics Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK. Whilst there, he earned his PhD in Physics and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate under the supervision of Professor Henning Sirringhaus. Drawing from his research experience, Vincenzo has authored the books 'Organic Narrowband Photodetectors' (Institute of Physics Publishing, https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-2663-6) and 'Organic and Amorphous-Metal-Oxide Flexible Analogue Electronics' (Cambridge University Press, https://www.cambridge.org/pecunia).