Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Abbasi, Salman A.
• Busnaina, Ahmed
• Isaacs, Jacqueline A.

Titel

Cumulative Energy Demand for Printing Nanoscale Electronics

Ist Teil von

• Procedia CIRP, 2019, Vol.80, p.298-303

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EZB Free E-Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Researchers are exploring processes to print electronics with the promise of economic and environmental benefits. Printing techniques such as inkjet, gravure, flexographic, and transfer printing have been devised, and are undergoing constant development to achieve scaling comparable to that of the semiconductor fabrication industry. Printing, unlike conventional semiconductor fabrication, is primarily a room temperature and pressure-based process, and avoids the high vacuum environment, harsh chemicals and solvents used in top-down fabrication. While it is widely asserted that largescale printing of electronics is environmentally beneficial, there is little concrete data to support this assertion, and closer scrutiny is required to quantify the gains and capture any potential trade-offs involved. Most printing technologies utilize nanoparticle-based inks to print conductive, insulating and semiconducting patterns. Nanoparticles used in such inks are associated with two problems: a) a potential risk when released to the environment during the lifecycle of the product, and b) nanoparticles have a very high embodied energy. While it is difficult to quantify the environmental threat due to a lack of toxicity and risk characterization data, a cumulative energy demand analysis is feasible and has been previously suggested as a predictor of environmental burden. Keeping this in mind, this study compares the energy requirements to construct nanoscale transistors on a one cm2 silicon substrate using an additive, directed assembly-based printing process with the top-down conventional fabrication method. Directed assembly-based printing is capable of printing at the nanoscale, and thus provides a meaningful comparison to the state-of-the-art technology in this case. Preliminary results of this ongoing study show that the embodied energy of conventionally fabricated structures could potentially be an order of magnitude higher than their printed counter-parts. It is also shown that the high-embodied energy of nanomaterials is a small contributor to the overall embodied energy compared to the other processes involved.