Abstract
Printed electronics is one of the emerging technologies owing to its low cost and productivity. Recently, many researchers tried to adapt printing technology to the fabrication of fine electronic patterns on flexible substrates, including the gate line of thin film transistors. In this study, we fabricated a flexible cliché using the nanoimprint process and used it in reverse offset printing. Then, we analyzed the effect of the surface energy of the imprinted cliché on process parameters, such as printing speed and rolling direction. We showed that the productivity of the process and quality of printed pattern can be considerably enhanced by controlling the surface energy of the cliché. When a flexible cliché is manufactured using a resin with a surface energy considerably different from that of the blanket, the ink can be detached easily and fine patterns can be engraved successfully regardless of the pattern shape.
Highlights
Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are widely used and have various applications in the electronics industry, such as smart cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, display backplanes including liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and electronic paper, and organic light emitting diode (OLED)devices [1,2,3,4,5,6]
As the off-speed increased to 10 mm/s and 20 mm/s, it was confirmed that a high printing quality could be obtained only when the resin with the highest surface energy was used as the cliché material
We confirmed the possibility of fabricating a flexible cliché that can replace the hard type in the reverse offset printing process using the nanoimprint process
Summary
Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are widely used and have various applications in the electronics industry, such as smart cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, display backplanes including liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and electronic paper, and organic light emitting diode (OLED)devices [1,2,3,4,5,6]. TFTs were generally manufactured by the conventional photolithography process, though it is complicated and not eco-friendly because of multiple steps and chemical waste. In a TFT used in LCDs, the metal line may shield backlight emission, which causes the energy output to be reduced. As the line width is minimized, the transmittance is increased and energy efficiency can be much higher. In a TFT used in OLEDs, the width of the metal line should be reduced to obtain a smaller pixel size than the current commercialized OLED devices because of increased on-current and switching speed [7,8]. To obtain a thin line width, the manufacturing cost of the conventional process is extremely high
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