(Invited) Opportunities in Atomic Layer Deposition for Electronic Textile and Hydrophobic Coating Applications

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) has been widely applied for high technology applications from semiconductor industry to energy devices since it has several superior properties in nanoscale device fabrications, such as excellent conformality, large area uniformity, and process compatibility, over the conventional thin film deposition methods. In this work, we extended ALD researches to two novel applications, electronic textile (e-textile) and hydrophobic coating applications. We developed a Pt ALD process capable of low temperature deposition down to 80 °C using a new Pt precursor and O₂ counter reactant. Pt was deposited on organic textile substrates, such as cotton and Nylon. The ALD-Pt-coated textiles showed high electrical conductivity and high mechanical durability even after mechanical wrinkling test. Fabrications of pressure sensor arrays using ALD-Pt-coated textile were demonstrated. For the hydrophobic coating, we developed rear earth oxides (REOs) ALD including Y₂O₃, La₂O₃, CeO₂, Dy₂O₃ and Er₂O₃ by using new rare earth precursors All the ALD REOs showed hydrophobic property over 100 ° of water contact angles. In addition, the hydrophobicity of ALD REOs showed high durability even after high temperature process over 500 °C. A superhydrophobic surface was fabricated by using ALD REOs and nanostructured Si surface. The nanostructured Si coated by ALD REOs showed very high water contact angle as high as 158 °.