A team of engineers from Exeter’s Centre for Graphene Science have developed a new method for creating entire device arrays directly on the copper substrates used for the commercial manufacture of graphene. Complete and fully-functional devices can then be transferred to a substrate of choice, such as silicon, plastics or even textiles.
Professor David Wright, from Exeter’s Engineering department and one of the authors said: “The conventional way of producing devices using graphene can be time-consuming, intricate and expensive and involves many process steps including graphene growth, film transfer, lithographic patterning and metal contact deposition. Our new approach is much simpler and has the very real potential to open up the use of cheap-to-produce graphene devices for a host of important applications from gas and bio-medical sensors to touch-screen displays.”
To demonstrate the new process, the team have produced a flexible and completely transparent graphene-oxide based humidity sensor that would cost pennies to produce using common wafer-scale or roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques, yet can outperform currently available commercial sensors.
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