New electronic ‘skin’ could enable lightweight night-vision glasses

MIT engineers have developed a technique to grow and peel ultrathin “skins” of electronic material. The method could pave the way for new classes of electronic devices, such as ultrathin wearable sensors, flexible transistors and computing elements, and highly sensitive and compact imaging devices.

As a demonstration, the team fabricated a thin membrane of pyroelectric material—a class of heat-sensing material that produces an electric current in response to changes in temperature. The thinner the pyroelectric material, the better it is at sensing subtle thermal variations.

With their new method, the team fabricated the thinnest pyroelectric membrane yet, measuring 10 nanometers thick, and demonstrated that the film is highly sensitive to heat and radiation across the far-infrared spectrum.

The newly developed film could enable lighter, more portable, and highly accurate far-infrared (IR) sensing devices, with potential applications for night-vision eyewear and autonomous driving in foggy conditions.

Current state-of-the-art far-IR sensors require bulky cooling elements. In contrast, the new pyroelectric thin film requires no cooling and is sensitive to much smaller changes in temperature. The researchers are exploring ways to incorporate the film into lighter, higher-precision night-vision glasses.

“This film considerably reduces weight and cost, making it lightweight, portable, and easier to integrate,” said Xinyuan Zhang, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “For example, it could be directly worn on glasses.”

The heat-sensing film could also have applications in environmental and biological sensing, as well as imaging of astrophysical phenomena that emit far-infrared radiation.

What’s more, the new lift-off technique is generalizable beyond pyroelectric materials. The researchers plan to apply the method to make other ultrathin, high-performance semiconducting films.

Their results are reported in a paper appearing in the journal Nature. The study’s MIT co-authors are first author Xinyuan Zhang, Sangho Lee, Min-Kyu Song, Haihui Lan, Jun Min Suh, Jung-El Ryu, Yanjie Shao, Xudong Zheng, Ne Myo Han, and Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering, along with researchers at the University Wisconsin at Madison led by Professor Chang-Beom Eom and authors from multiple other institutions.

Chemical peel

Kim’s group at MIT is finding new ways to make smaller, thinner, and more flexible electronics. They envision that such ultrathin computing “skins” can be incorporated into everything from smart contact lenses and wearable sensing fabrics to stretchy solar cells and bendable displays.

To realize such devices, Kim and his colleagues have been experimenting with methods to grow, peel, and stack semiconducting elements, to fabricate ultrathin, multifunctional electronic thin-film membranes.

One method that Kim has pioneered is “remote epitaxy”—a technique where semiconducting materials are grown on a single-crystalline substrate, with an ultrathin layer of graphene in between. The substrate’s crystal structure serves as a scaffold along which the new material can grow.

The graphene acts as a nonstick layer, similar to Teflon, making it easy for researchers to peel off the new film and transfer it onto flexible and stacked electronic devices. After peeling off the new film, the underlying substrate can be reused to make additional thin films.

Kim has applied remote epitaxy to fabricate thin films with various characteristics. In trying different combinations of semiconducting elements, the researchers happened to notice that a certain pyroelectric material, called PMN-PT, did not require an intermediate layer assist in order to separate from its substrate.

Just by growing PMN-PT directly on a single-crystalline substrate, the researchers could then remove the grown film, with no rips or tears to its delicate lattice.

“It worked surprisingly well,” Zhang says. “We found the peeled film is atomically smooth.”

Lattice lift-off

In their new study, the MIT and UW Madison researchers took a closer look at the process and discovered that the key to the material’s easy-peel property was lead.

As part of its chemical structure, the team, along with colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discovered that the pyroelectric film contains an orderly arrangement of lead atoms that have a large “electron affinity,” meaning that lead attracts electrons and prevents the charge carriers from traveling and connecting to another materials such as an underlying substrate. The lead acts as tiny nonstick units, allowing the material as a whole to peel away, perfectly intact.

The team ran with the realization and fabricated multiple ultrathin films of PMN-PT, each about 10 nanometers thin. They peeled off pyroelectric films and transferred them onto a small chip to form an array of 100 ultrathin heat-sensing pixels, each about 60 square microns (about .006 square centimeters). They exposed the films to ever-slighter changes in temperature and found the pixels were highly sensitive to small changes across the far-infrared spectrum.

The sensitivity of the pyroelectric array is comparable to that of state-of-the-art night-vision devices. These devices are currently based on photodetector materials, in which a change in temperature induces the material’s electrons to jump in energy and briefly cross an energy “band gap,” before settling back into their ground state.

This electron jump serves as an electrical signal of the temperature change. However, this signal can be affected by noise in the environment, and to prevent such effects, photodetectors have to also include cooling devices that bring the instruments down to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Current night-vision goggles and scopes are heavy and bulky. With the group’s new pyroelectric-based approach, NVDs could have the same sensitivity without the cooling weight.

The researchers also found that the films were sensitive beyond the range of current night-vision devices and could respond to wavelengths across the entire infrared spectrum.

This suggests that the films could be incorporated into small, lightweight, and portable devices for various applications that require different infrared regions. For instance, when integrated into autonomous vehicle platforms, the films could enable cars to “see” pedestrians and vehicles in complete darkness or in foggy and rainy conditions.

The film could also be used in gas sensors for real-time and on-site environmental monitoring, helping detect pollutants. In electronics, they could monitor heat changes in semiconductor chips to catch early signs of malfunctioning elements.

The team says the new lift-off method can be generalized to materials that may not themselves contain lead. In those cases, the researchers suspect that they can infuse Teflon-like lead atoms into the underlying substrate to induce a similar peel-off effect. For now, the team is actively working toward incorporating the pyroelectric films into a functional night-vision system.

“We envision that our ultrathin films could be made into high-performance night-vision goggles, considering its broad-spectrum infrared sensitivity at room-temperature, which allows for a lightweight design without a cooling system,” Zhang says.

“To turn this into a night-vision system, a functional device array should be integrated with readout circuitry. Furthermore, testing in varied environmental conditions is essential for practical applications.”

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.