A Gravure-Printed Organic TFT Technology for Active-Matrix Addressing Applications

In this work is presented a gravure-printed unipolar Organic Thin-Film Transistor (OTFT) technology able to achieve state-of-the-art yield performance. A multilayer cross-linked dielectric is printed to reduce gate-leakage defects, which have been found to be one of the main failure mechanisms in previous printed OTFTs. The defectivity analysis performed at transistor level reveals 99.8% defect-free devices in a sample of 540 OTFTs, manufactured on 6 successive foils. A novel row driver circuit for matrix-addressing applications has been designed and fabricated using the improved technology. The experimental characterization of the proposed 8-stage row drivers reveals a circuit yield as high as 100%, over 15 samples in 5 successive foils, corresponding to a total number of 2085 fully functional OTFTs. The availability of a printed organic technology compatible with mass production is expected to enable innovative Internet of Things (IoT) applications characterized by extremely low production cost.