Zinc Oxide Nanowires on Printed Circuit Boards

Printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are widely used for the fabrication of electronic circuits, can only withstand rather low temperatures. For this reason, the fabrication of high-density, long ZnO nanostructures on PCBs still remains a complex task. In fact, in absence of a seed-layer, whose annealing would require high temperatures, solution-growth methods only allow to synthesize low-density arrays of nanowires. Here we evaluate methods for overcoming this issue and, as a prototype, demonstrate a simple displacement sensor.