Flexible surface acoustic wave devices and its applications in microfluidics
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Flexible surface acoustic wave devices and its applications in microfluidics Jian Zhou1,2, Xingli He1, Wenbo Wang1, Nana Hu1, Hao Jin1, Y.Xu1, Shurong Dong1, Demiao Wang1, Y.Q.Fu2 and J. K. Luo1,3* 1
Dept. Info. Sci. & Electron. Eng., and Cyrus Tang Center for Sensor Mater. & Appl., Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China 2
Thin Film Centre, University of West Scotland, Paisley, PA1 2BE, UK
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Inst. of Renew. Energ.&Environ. Tech. Bolton University, Deane Road, Bolton BL3 5AB, U.K
*Corresponding authors e-mails: [email protected]
Abstract: Flexible electronics and microsystems are an emerging technology with a tremedous impact to the future electronics and information technology and widespread applications. Various devices and microsystems have been developed. Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are a type of essential device for electronics, microsensors and microsystems; however there is no activity on the development of flexible SAW devices yet. This paper reports the development of flexible SAW devices on cheap, bendable and disposable plastic films. Flexible SAW devices with resonant frequency of 198.1 MHz and 447 MHz for the Rayleigh and Lamb waves respectively have been obtained with a large transmission signal up to 18dB. The flexible SAW devices have also demonstrated their ability for acoustic streaming with a velocity up to 3.4 cm/s and for particle concentration. The results have clearly demonstrated that the flexible SAW devices have great potential for applications in electronics and microsystems.
Keywords: Flexible electronics, flexible SAW, polyimide, ZnO
INTRODUCTION Flexible electronics has been intensively studied recently as it is a very promising technology for widespread applications owing to its advantages of excellent flexibility, conformal contact with curved surfaces and light-weight over present rigid electronics [1]. Great efforts have been made to develop various flexible electronic devices and systems such as displays [2], eyeball camera [3], memory [4], lithium-ion batteries [5], and RF transistors and circuits [6,7] etc. Attempts have also been made to fabricate micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) on flexible substrates to deliver unique functions that electronic devices are lacking, including micromachined infrared bolometers [8], piezoelectric actuators [9], thin film bulk acoustic wave resonators [10], piezoelectric pressure sensors [11] and micro-fluidics [12]. Surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonators are one of the building blocks for electronic devices with applications in electronics and communications, biochemical sensing, drug development, life science and
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medical research etc [13], and in microactuators, microfluidics[14, 15] and lab-on-a-chip [16]. So far there was no development of SAW devices on flexible polymer substrates yet. In this paper, we report flexible SAW devices made from piezoelectric ZnO thin films on polyimide substrates and show they have performance comparable to those on rigid substrates. EXPERIMENTS The flexible SAW devices were made on
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