Advanced Printed Electronics – Materials and Junction Technologies

Printed electronics aims to realize self-formation of electronics devices under ambient conditions via the printed patterned fluids that contain such as dispersed metal nanoparticles or soluble organic semiconductors [1] , [2] . These technologies are expected to realize facile productions of light weight and flexible human interface or energy harvesting devices without the use of huge vacuum facilities. In this talk, we present our recent studies to develop advanced printed electronics technologies for the production of all-printed and high-resolution thin-film transistors (TFTs) by utilizing self-organized characteristics of both silver nanoparticles and organic semiconductors. Specifically, we show that 1) novel printing principle via the nanoparticle chemisorption effect enables the formation of conductive silver patterning with submicron resolution, and 2) intrinsic high layered crystallinity of some organic semiconductors is quite effective to produce high performance printed organic TFTs. We also discuss that the junction technologies are crucial for these semiconductor devices, although the issues and features are fundamentally different from those in inorganic semiconductor devices.