Abstract
Advancements in thin-film transistor (TFT) technology have extended to electronics that can withstand extreme bending or even folding. Although the use of ultrathin plastic substrates has achieved considerable advancement towards this end, free-standing ultrathin plastics inevitably suffer from mechanical instability and are very difficult to handle during TFT fabrication. Here, in addition to the use of a 1.5 μm-thick polyimide (PI) substrate, a 1.5 μm-thick PI film is also deposited on top of the TFT devices to ensure that the devices are located at the neutral plane of the two PI films for high folding stability. For mechanical support during TFT fabrication up to the deposition of the top PI film, the PI substrate is spin coated on top of a carrier glass that is coated with a mixture of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene oxide (GO). The mixture of CNT and GO facilitates mechanical detachment of the neutral plane (NP) TFTs from the carrier glass before they are transferred to a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate as islands. Being located in the neutral bending plane, the NP TFT can be transferred to the PDMS without performance degradation and exhibit excellent mechanical stability after stretching the PDMS substrate up to a 25% elastic elongation.
Highlights
Advancements in thin-film transistor (TFT) technology have extended to electronics that can withstand extreme bending or even folding
The fabrication process of the amorphous indium−gallium−zinc oxide (a-IGZO) neutral plane (NP) TFTs is depicted in Fig. 1 and details of the materials can be found in the Methods Section
The results indicate that the NP TFTs are more stable than the TFTs that are not located in the neutral bending plane during the transfer to PDMS (Supplementary Figure S4)
Summary
Advancements in thin-film transistor (TFT) technology have extended to electronics that can withstand extreme bending or even folding. For mechanical support during TFT fabrication up to the deposition of the top PI film, the PI substrate is spin coated on top of a carrier glass that is coated with a mixture of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene oxide (GO). We use ultrathin plastic substrates for extreme bending capabilities, and we deposit a second ultrathin plastic film of similar thickness on top of the TFT devices to ensure that the devices are located close to the neutral bending plane of the two plastics for minimum strain. The PI allows fabrication process temperatures as high as 300 °C, which is very important to achieve high performance and highly stable inorganic TFTs. For handling purposes during fabrication, carrier glass, on which the CNT/GO backbone and PI substrate are first deposited from solution by spin coating, is employed (see Fig. 1a–f for schematized fabrication process). Mechanical stability of the neutral plane (NP) TFTs is tested by performing bending and stretch tests
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