Rapid determination of nanowires electrical properties using a dielectrophoresis-well based system

Abstract

The use of high quality semiconducting nanomaterials for advanced device applications has been hampered by the unavoidable growth variability of electrical properties of one-dimensional nanomaterials, such as nanowires and nanotubes, thus highlighting the need for the characterization of efficient semiconducting nanomaterials. In this study, we demonstrate a low-cost, industrially scalable dielectrophoretic (DEP) nanowire assembly method for the rapid analysis of the electrical properties of inorganic single crystalline nanowires, by identifying key features in the DEP frequency response spectrum from 1 kHz to 20 MHz in just 60 s. Nanowires dispersed in anisole were characterized using a three-dimensional DEP chip (3DEP), and the resultant spectrum demonstrated a sharp change in nanowire response to DEP signal in 1-20 MHz frequency range. The 3DEP analysis, directly confirmed by field-effect transistor data, indicates that nanowires of higher quality are collected at high DEP signal frequency range above 10 MHz, whereas lower quality nanowires, with two orders of magnitude lower current per nanowire, are collected at lower DEP signal frequencies. These results show that the 3DEP platform can be used as a very efficient characterization tool of the electrical properties of rod-shaped nanoparticles to enable dielectrophoretic selective deposition of nanomaterials with superior conductivity properties.