Drawing devices on paper with van der Waals materials

A big chunk of the price tag of electronic components is due to the cost of silicon wafer
substrates. Although silicon is a highly abundant and cheap element, the transformation
and processing from the raw material into high quality silicon wafers results very costly.
In fact, the cost of silicon substrates constitutes ~1/3rd of the total cost of a memory chip
and about ~1/10th of the cost of a high-end state of the art micro-processor. The societal,
industrial and technological demands of ultra-low-cost electronic components has
spurred the quests towards lower cost substrates. This has motivated a surge of works
on paper-based electronics in the last years. In fact, paper substrates cost (~0.1 €/m2) is
orders of magnitude lower than that of polymer substrates (PET ~2 €/m2 and PI ~30
€/m2) and crystalline silicon (~1000 €/m2).
Despite the promises of paper-based electronics, there are several challenges to be solved.
One of the major challenges is that the rough, fiber-based structure of paper makes it
impossible to fabricate devices using conventional lithographic techniques. In this talk I
will discuss our last works to integrate different van der Waals materials onto standard
paper substrates [1-4].

[1] J Azpeitia et al. Materials Advances (2021)
[2] W Zhang et al. Applied Materials Today (2021) 23, 101012
[3] M Lee et al. Nanoscale (2020) 12 (43), 22091-22096
[4] A Mazaheri et al. Nanoscale (2020) 12 (37), 19068-19074