Micromachined Printheads for the Evaporative Patterning of Organic Materials and Metals

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and testing of electrostatically actuated microshutters used as active shadow masks to pattern evaporated materials. The fabricated microshutters can obstruct a 25-mum-wide aperture at an actuation voltage of 90 V, with a resonant frequency of 4 kHz due to a 400-mum-long actuator. The microshutters integrated with an x-y-z manipulator were used to print patterns of organic material and metal on glass substrates in vacuum with a pixel size of 25 mum. The maximum resolution achievable with this setup is 800 dpi, and we printed active organic light-emitting device arrays of 400 dpi resolution. This printing scheme could enable the patterning of large-area organic optoelectronic devices on diverse substrates