Leveraging Innate Piezoelectricity of Ultra-Smooth Silk Thin Films for Flexible and Wearable Sensor Applications

Joseph, J and Singh, Shiv Govind and Vanjari, Siva Rama Krishna (2017) Leveraging Innate Piezoelectricity of Ultra-Smooth Silk Thin Films for Flexible and Wearable Sensor Applications. IEEE Sensors Journal. ISSN 1530-437X (In Press)

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Abstract

In this paper, the innate peizoelectricity of silk is utilized to demonstrate an optimized silk thin film based pressure sensor. Furthermore, a novel approach to pattern silk films is proposed, that could potentially lead to the development of a variety of miniaturized, flexible, wearable sensors. The key in this endeavor is to achieve a uniform thin film of silk. The preparation methodology was optimized to achieve an ultra-smooth, reproducible thin film. The surface quality of the optimized thin film was analyzed using Atomic Force Microscopy and the RMS roughness was found to be 2.43 nm. The piezo-response of the silk film was measured using Piezo Force Microscopy and the average d33 value of the silk piezoelectric thin film was estimated as 56.7 pm/V. A pressure sensor using silk piezoelectric thin film was developed with a simple process flow. This process is devoid of any silk patterning steps. Keeping in view the potentiality of piezoelectric silk films in MEMS, a novel lithography based technique was developed to pattern the silk films. This patterning technique can easily be integrated with any standard MEMS/Post CMOS process flow, thus opening up a new avenue in developing a variety of sensors.

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