Wave Printing (II) : Polymer MISFETs Using Microcontact Printing

The advent of printing for the manufacturing of transistors is a task vividly pursued both for silicon[1] and polymer-based devices [2-4]. Printed MISFET devices based on semiconducting polymer have already been realized with soft lithography [5], but they were either using an unstructured gate substrate or designed for low resolution alignments [2,4]. For printable electronics to become a reality, it is necessary to demonstrate that sufficient resolution and good registration can be combined in a single technology. In a first article, we have discussed some difficulties that hampered soft lithography from delivering large area multilayer printing with μm alignment, and we introduced the concept of wave printing [6]. We demonstrated single layer capability with very low distortions. This second article discusses the multilayer capabilities and demonstrates thin film transistors based on organic materials. The primary objective of these experiments was to verify that the microcontact wave printing process is compatible with other, e.g. photolithographic steps and to benchmark the alignment capability and printing distortions of wave printing with underlying photolithographically structured layers.