ABSTRACT
Micro/nanoelectronics very much defines our world, and will for the foreseeable future, at a rapidly accelerating pace. To satisfy the growing demand for smaller/faster/cheaper, microelectronics has very naturally morphed into nanoelectronics via a top-down evolutionary nanotech paradigm that is pretty much business-as-usual. The usefulness of semiconductors for building electronic devices fundamentally rests on our ability to change its resistivity. Electronically speaking, carbon nanotubes are interesting because they can carry exceptionally large current densities, have both high carrier mobility and high saturation velocity, has excellent thermal conductivity. More promising for electronic applications is epitaxial graphene, which, can be grown at large geometries and with fewer defects. Zinc oxide (ZnO) has interesting electrical and optical properties, including transparency, high electron mobility, wide bandgap, and strong room-temperature luminescence. Large-scale array of ZnO nanowires synthesized using a solution method that can enable high-volume manufacturing of large-scale one-dimensional nanostructures on various substrates for applications in energy harvesting, sensing, optoelectronics, and electronics.
