Development of a Simple Manufacturing Process for All-Inkjet Printed Organic Thin Film Transistors and Circuits

Abstract

In the last years there has been a growing interest in the realization of low-cost, flexible and large area electronic systems such as item-level RFID tags, flexible displays or smart labels, among others. Specifically, inkjet printing technology has been increasingly applied as advanced deposition technology in the field of printed electronics due to the high flexibility in terms of patterns (mask-less) and materials, and its low cost approach as only a small amount of materials is required in comparison to other solution-based deposition techniques. Our work focuses on the development of Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFTs) by using organic, inorganic inks and low-cost all-inkjet purely printing process, thus centring the effort in the design, manufacturing and characterization point of view in order to fabricate all-inkjet printed organic integrated circuits. Electrical and morphological characterizations were performed in order to obtain device statistics to investigate the origins of the failures responsible for the low yields. Most of research works are based on laboratory inkjet equipment for manufacturing using single nozzle systems to fabricate small numbers of devices. The variability and mismatch of the printed devices are underrepresented in literature and are key factors towards commercialization of printed electronics.