Spectrometer Devices and Fabric from Co-drawn Conducting, Semiconducting, and Insulating Materials

Primary tabs

Applications

  • Optoelectronic functional fabrics and large area functional surfaces
  • Tunable narrow band fiber photodetectors
  • Fibers for dual electron-photon transport

Problem Addressed

Electronic and optoelectronic devices are typically fabricated using a variety of elaborate wafer-based processes. These afford dense device packing and small feature sizes, but are restricted to planar geometries with limited coverage area. Preform-based fiber-drawing techniques are, in comparison, simpler and yield extended lengths of highly uniform fibers with well controlled geometries and excellent transport characteristics. However, they are only used with a small number of materials and only large-sized features have been implemented.

Technology

The technology is a method for drawing extended lengths of fibers made of conducting, semiconducting, and insulated micro-elements in close contact and in a variety of geometries. The fibers are fabricated using low-melting temperature conductors with amorphous semiconductors and insulators into a preform which holds the final fiber geometry. The preform is subsequently drawn into a fiber which preserves the initial geometry while forming intimate interfaces and feature sizes down to below 100 nanometers. Two prototypical functional fiber structures are fibers for dual electron-photon transport and tunable narrow band fiber photodetectors. Both structures demonstrate excellent metal-semiconductor contact and the fibers retained desired electrical and optical properties. The fiber characteristics allow for the construction of optoelectronic functional fabrics by weaving fibers together. This allows for the illumination points to be localized with only order N (instead of N2) fibers. Large area optoelectronic functional surfaces are also enabled with the possibility of determining the direction of observed light.

Advantages

  • Flexible and mechanically tough fibers great for optoelectronic functional fabrics
  • Simple and highly uniform design
  • Integrates a variety of materials with a variety of device geometries and sizes