Abstract
The solution-processed deposition of metal-oxide semiconducting materials enables the fabrication of large-area and low-cost electronic devices by using printing technologies. Additionally, the simple patterning process of these types of materials become an important issue, as it can simplify the cost and process of fabricating electronics such as thin-film transistors (TFTs). In this study, using the electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing technique, we fabricated directly patterned zinc-tin-oxide (ZTO) semiconductors as the active layers of TFTs. The straight lines of ZTO semiconductors were successfully drawn using a highly soluble and homogeneous solution that comprises zinc acrylate and tin-chloride precursors. Besides, we found the optimum condition for the fabrication of ZTO oxide layers by analyzing the thermal effect in processing. Using the optimized condition, the resulting devices exhibited satisfactory TFT characteristics with conventional electrodes and conducting materials. Furthermore, these metal-oxide TFTs were successfully applied to complementary inverter with conventional p-type organic semiconductor-based TFT, showing high quality of voltage transfer characteristics. Thus, these printed ZTO TFT results demonstrated that solution processable metal-oxide transistors are promising for the realization of a more sustainable and printable next-generation industrial technology.
Highlights
Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are regarded as the key components in flat-panel display (FPD) applications, such as active matrix liquid crystal displays and active matrix organic light-emitting diode displays [1]
The development of TFT has become an important part of FPDs with high resolution and large size, thereby pushing the traditional amorphous Si (a-Si) TFTs to their limit [2,3]
We examined solution-processed zinc-tin-oxide (ZTO) semiconductors as the active layers of metal oxide TFT, with different annealing conditions
Summary
Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are regarded as the key components in flat-panel display (FPD) applications, such as active matrix liquid crystal displays and active matrix organic light-emitting diode displays [1]. The conduction band minimum is formed because of highly dispersive unoccupied metal orbitals, whereas the valence band maximum is composed because of fully occupied and localized oxygen orbitals [5,8] Those vacant metal orbitals are spherical (i.e., non-directional) and exhibit large spatial spread, inducing high electron-transport characteristics in the TFT operation [9]. The optimized EHD jet-printed ZTO showed low-hysteresis driving behaviors with the field-effect mobility (μFET) of 1.35 ± 0.14, 0.52 ± 0.08 cm2/V s for Al- and MWCNT-based devices These well-operated oxide-based TFT devices (mainly electrons were transported) were successfully applied to the fabrication of complementary inverters by combining with organic material-based transistors (holes were mainly transported). We believe that this research will contribute to the production of EHD printing-based oxide semiconductors for TFTs, and to the fabrication of electronic devices based on the properties of oxide- and organic-based materials
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