Flexible silicon nanowire low-power ring oscillator featuring one-volt operation

• Si nanowires are fabricated by fully CMOS-compatible top-down route.
• Ring oscillator is fabricated on the polyethersulphone (PES) flexible substrate.
• We report a flexible ring oscillator which features 1-V operation.
• Ring oscillator generated a sinusoidal wave with a frequency of ∼6.6 MHz.

In this study, we propose a flexible silicon nanowire (SiNW) low-power ring oscillator, which features 1-V operation. Our flexible ring oscillator is composed of three CMOS inverters with a gain of 70 at a supply voltage of 1 V. p- and n-channel SiNW field-effect transistors (FETs) forming the component inverters exhibit on/off current ratios of 4.36 × 104 and 1.46 × 105, respectively. Our ring oscillator generates a sinusoidal wave with a frequency of ∼6.6 MHz. The frequency and waveform are undistorted under upwardly bent and downwardly bent strain conditions of 0.7%. The good mechanical bendability of the flexible ring oscillator indicates high stability and good fatigue properties.

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