All-printed ZnO nanowire based high performance photodetectors

Resource-efficient manufacturing of electronics is needed to reduce the environmental impact of wasteful conventional electronic fabrication processes. This paper presents a resource-efficient printed electronics route for the fabrication of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowire (NW) based high performance photodetectors (PDs). The all-printed devices are realised with high-quality as-grown ZnO NWs integrated onto flexible polyimide substrates using a contact printing method. An optimised high-resolution extrusion printer is employed to define the sensing channel (~15µm) using high viscosity silver (Ag) nanoparticle paste (>100,000 cP). The miniaturised all-printed PDs on PI substrates exhibit high-performance for UV detection with extremely high responsivity (~3 ×107 A/W), specific detectivity (~1017 jones), photoconductive gain (~108), external quantum efficiency (~1010 %) and Ilight/Idark ratio (~103). The presented work demonstrates a potential route for next-generation of sustainable electronics manufacturing, which is needed to alleviate the problem of chemical-wastage while retaining the transformative power of electronics.