Abstract
Flexible electronics opened a new class of future electronics. The foldable, light and durable nature of flexible electronics allows vast flexibility in applications such as display, energy devices and mobile electronics. Even though conventional electronics fabrication methods are well developed for rigid substrates, direct application or slight modification of conventional processes for flexible electronics fabrication cannot work. The future flexible electronics fabrication requires totally new low-temperature process development optimized for flexible substrate and it should be based on new material too. Here we present a simple approach to developing a flexible electronics fabrication without using conventional vacuum deposition and photolithography. We found that direct metal patterning based on laser-induced local melting of metal nanoparticle ink is a promising low-temperature alternative to vacuum deposition– and photolithography-based conventional metal patterning processes. The “digital” nature of the proposed direct metal patterning process removes the need for expensive photomask and allows easy design modification and short turnaround time. This new process can be extremely useful for current small-volume, large-variety manufacturing paradigms. Besides, simple, scalable, fast and low-temperature processes can lead to cost-effective fabrication methods on a large-area polymer substrate. The developed process was successfully applied to demonstrate high-quality Ag patterning (2.1 µΩ·cm) and high-performance flexible organic field effect transistor arrays.
Highlights
The development of electric circuit fabrication on a flexible polymer substrate has gained significant interest as a pathway to low cost or large area electronics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
As a potential alternative to the conventional vacuum deposition and photo-lithography based metal patterning, we introduce a novel digital, low-temperature, fast, high resolution direct metal patterning method wherein solution-deposited metal NPs were selectively sintered by applying a raster scanning focused laser to pattern metal electrode on a polymer substrate in a single step for the fabrication of flexible electronics
The proposed laser based digital direct metal patterning method can produce high resolution metal patterning on a large polymer substrate in a very fast single step at room temperature in an ambient pressure
Summary
The development of electric circuit fabrication on a flexible polymer substrate has gained significant interest as a pathway to low cost or large area electronics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. As an alternative to conventional vacuum deposition and photolithographic metal patterning approach, there is a strong need for a development of a fully ‘‘digital’’ maskless, high resolution, low temperature, and fast metal patterning method on a flexible polymer substrate to realize cost-effective flexible electronics [19,20]
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