Large-area plastic nanogap electronics enabled by adhesion lithography

Large-area manufacturing of flexible nanoscale electronics has long been sought by the printed electronics industry.However,the lack of a robust,reliable,high throughput and low-cost technique that is capable of delivering high-performance functional devices has hitherto hindered commercial exploitation.Herein we report on the extensive range of capabilities presented by adhesion lithography(a-Lith),an innovative patterning technique for the fabrication of coplanar nanogap electrodes with arbitrarily large aspect ratio.We use this technique to fabricate a plethora of nanoscale electronic devices based on symmetric and asymmetric coplanar electrodes separated by a nanogap<15 nm.We show that functional devices including self-aligned-gate transistors,radio frequency diodes and rectifying circuits,multi-colour organic light-emitting nanodiodes and multilevel non-volatile memory devices,can be fabricated in a facile manner with minimum process complexity on a range of substrates.The compatibility of the formed nanogap electrodes with a wide range of solution processable semiconductors and substrate materials renders a-Lith highly attractive for the manufacturing of large-area nanoscale opto/electronics on arbitrary size and shape substrates.