Towards printed organic electronics

Summary form only given. Silicon integrated circuits (ICs) are wonderful for numerous microelectronic applications. But for large-area devices and low-cost microelectronic applications where high computer powers or switching speeds are not needed, they become unjustifiably and prohibitively expensive. Plastic ICs composed of organic transistors and components are attractive alternatives for these applications as they can potentially be manufactured at low cost by solution processes such as coating, stamping, printing, etc. No capital-intensive photolithographic clean-room setups are required. Fabricating ICs via jet printing is particularly efficient and environmentally friendly as it is a direct-write process, and is amenable to the productive reel-to-reel manufacturing protocols. Organic transistors are also compatible with flexible substrates, thus enabling fabrication of compact, lightweight, flexible, and structurally inspiring microelectronic products. The ability to directly integrate ICs with other electronic components via printing may also contribute to lowered manufacturing cost as some of the costly packaging processes can be eliminated. Organic semiconductor polymers are appealing active materials for low-cost thin film transistor designs. For low-cost manufacturing, both the solution processability of materials and their ability to be processed at ambient without detrimental effects are of paramount importance. However, most of the current semiconductor polymers are not stable enough to permit processing and device fabrication in ambient conditions to achieve the required functionalities. We describe here our work on the semiconductor polymer design, their synthesis and processing that have led to the fabrication of polymer thin film transistors in ambient conditions with excellent field-effect transistor properties.