Application of Semiconductors and Nanowires on Plastic Substrates for Medical Devices and Biosensors
Dr. Michael McAlpine

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 7 PM
CLU - Richter Hall, Ahmanson Science Building

The fabrication of electronic devices on plastic substrates has attracted considerable recent attention owing to the proliferation of handheld, portable consumer electronics. Plastic substrates possess many attractive properties including biocompatibility, flexibility, light weight, shock resistance, softness and transparency. Achieving high performance electronics or sensors on plastic substrates is difficult, because plastics melt at temperatures above 120°C. Unfortunately, high quality semiconductors require high growth temperatures, so their application to flexible plastics is prohibited. The Health Research Group at Caltech has recently shown that highly ordered films of silicon nanowires, made out of doped silicon, can be etched into a wafer of silicon, peeled off and literally glued onto pieces of plastic to make flexible sensors with state-of-the-art sensitivity to a range of toxic chemicals.

Dr. Michael McAlpine
California Institute of Technology

Dr. Michael C. McAlpine is a Postdoctoral Fellow at California Institute of Technology. He received a B.S with honors in Chemistry from Brown University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University. His dissertation work involved the development of integrated, high performance, nanoelectronic systems on flexible plastic substrates. Dr. McAlpine's current research interests at Caltech include nanotechnology-enabled sensors on plastic for medical applications. He was awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2000 and an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2006.