Wafer-scale heterostructured piezoelectric bio-organic thin films

Abstract

Piezoelectric biomaterials are intrinsically suitable for coupling mechanical and electrical energy in biological systems to achieve in vivo real-time sensing, actuation, and electricity generation. However, the inability to synthesize and align the piezoelectric phase at a large scale remains a roadblock toward practical applications. We present a wafer-scale approach to creating piezoelectric biomaterial thin films based on γ-glycine crystals. The thin film has a sandwich structure, where a crystalline glycine layer self-assembles and automatically aligns between two polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) thin films. The heterostructured glycine-PVA films exhibit piezoelectric coefficients of 5.3 picocoulombs per newton or 157.5 × 10