High yield manufacturing of fully screen-printed organic electrochemical transistors

Marzieh Zabihipour,Isak Engquist,Jan Strandberg,Roman Lassnig,Peter Andersson Ersman,Simone Fabiano,Magnus Berggren

doi:10.1038/s41528-020-0078-9

Marzieh Zabihipour, Isak Engquist + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41528-020-0078-9

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Abstract

The potential of the screen printing method for large-scale production of organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), combining high production yield with low cost, is here demonstrated. Fully screen-printed OECTs of 1 mm2 area, based on poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with poly(styrensulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), have been manufactured on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. The goal of this project effort has been to explore and develop the printing processing to enable high yield and stable transistor parameters, targeting miniaturized digital OECT circuits for large-scale integration (LSI). Of the 760 OECTs manufactured in one batch on a PET sheet, only two devices were found malfunctioning, thus achieving an overall manufacturing yield of 99.7%. A drain current ON/OFF ratio at least equal to 400 was applied as the strict exclusion principle for the yield, motivated by proper operation in LSI circuits. This consistent performance of low-footprint OECTs allows for the integration of PEDOT:PSS-based OECTs into complex logic circuits operating at high stability and accuracy.

Highlights

Printed electronics enables high volume production of thin and flexible sensor and communication technology at low cost[1]
In one full print run, a total number of 760 organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are manufactured on a ~A4-sized substrate area (200 × 300 mm[2], Fig. 1)
In this study we evaluate, in depth, all the OECTs printed onto one single sheet, even though one print batch typically contains an ensemble of several sheets

Summary

Introduction

Printed electronics enables high volume production of thin and flexible sensor and communication technology at low cost[1]. Several archetypical techniques have been established within the printed electronics community to process and produce a vast array of functional materials[1], needed to achieve devices and systems, where the screen printing technique is one of the most commonly used methods[1,3,4,5,6,7]. In the screen printing process, the ink is squeezed through the open areas of the patterned mesh, which allows reproduction of configurations on a wide variety of surfaces (rough, planar, bent, stretchable etc.) and materials, e.g., paper, plastics, cardboard, wood, etc[8]. The manufacturing is done layer by layer and the functionality and overall performance of the resulting components are heavily dependent on the alignment and patterning accuracy of every individual layer

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