Highly sensitive strain sensors based on piezotronic tunneling junction

Piezotronics with capacity of constructing adaptive and seamless interactions between electronics/machines and human/ambient are of value in Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering. Here, we report a kind of highly sensitive strain sensor based on piezotronic tunneling junction (Ag/HfO2/n-ZnO), which utilizes the strain-induced piezoelectric potential to control the tunneling barrier height and width in parallel, and hence to synergistically modulate the electrical transport process. The piezotronic tunneling strain sensor has a high on/off ratio of 478.4 and high gauge factor of 4.8 × 105 at the strain of 0.10%, which is more than 17.8 times larger than that of a conventional Schottky-barrier based strain sensor in control group as well as some existing ZnO nanowire or nanobelt based sensors. This work provides in-depth understanding for the basic mechanism of piezotronic modulation on tunneling junction, and realizes the highly sensitive strain sensor of piezotronic tunneling junction on device scale, which has great potential in advanced micro/nano-electromechanical devices and systems.