Development of Area-arrayed Graphene-nano-ribbon-Base Strain Sensor

摘要

Decrease in working population is serious problem for Japanese society in the 21st century. Therefore, various robots have been widely used in our daily lives to sustain our society system comfortably. In order to assure the safe and reliable operation of them, it is indispensable for developing various human-interface sensors. One of the expected sensors is strain sensor, which has high strain sensitivity, large deformability and spatial resolution. Recently, large attention has been focused on graphene as a sensing part for next-generation strain sensor with high sensitivity and large deformability. Graphene is a two-dimensional carbon sheet composed of π-conjugated network of sp2 carbons, having large deformability, high electron mobility and some outstanding properties. It is well known that graphene nano-ribbon (GNR), which is cut from graphene into nano-scale, shows semiconducting properties. Since semiconductor material has high strain sensitivity based on piezoresistive effect, GNR can be used for highly sensitive and deformable strain sensor. In this study, to fabricate graphene nano-ribbon and measure its strain sensitivity, thermal CVD (chemical vapor deposition) using C2H2, metallic electrodes fabrication using EB evaporation and micromachining using EB(electron beam) lithography were employed. From the measurement of strain sensitivity of the fabricated GNR, it was indicated that GNR can be used for the development of next-generation strain sensor.