Chemically Designed Metallic/Insulating Hybrid Nanostructures with Silver Nanocrystals for Highly Sensitive Wearable Pressure Sensors

With the increase in interest in wearable tactile pressure sensors for e-skin, researches to make nanostructures to achieve high sensitivity have been actively conducted. However, limitations such as complex fabrication processes using expensive equipment still exist. Herein, simple lithography-free techniques to develop pyramid-like metal/insulator hybrid nanostructures utilizing nanocrystals (NCs) are demonstrated. Ligand-exchanged and unexchanged silver NC thin films are used as metallic and insulating components, respectively. The interfaces of each NC layer are chemically engineered to create discontinuous insulating layers, i.e., spacers for improved sensitivity, and eventually to realize fully solution-processed pressure sensors. Device performance analysis with structural, chemical, and electronic characterization and conductive atomic force microscopy study reveals that hybrid nanostructure based pressure sensor shows an enhanced sensitivity of higher than 500 kPa^-1, reliability, and low power consumption with a wide range of pressure sensing. Nano-/micro-hierarchical structures are also designed by combining hybrid nanostructures with conventional microstructures, exhibiting further enhanced sensing range and achieving a record sensitivity of 2.72 × 10⁴ kPa^-1. Finally, all-solution-processed pressure sensor arrays with high pixel density, capable of detecting delicate signals with high spatial selectivity much better than the human tactile threshold, are introduced.