14 April 2010
Paintable electronics technique claimed by NIST
A multidisciplinary research team at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found that it may be possible to create large area electronics, such as solar cells and displays, by spray painting an organic semiconductor.
While the electronics will not be ready for market in the near future, the research team says the material it studied could overcome one of the main cost hurdles blocking the large scale manufacture of organic thin film transistors. The team adds the development could lead to devices that are cheap enough to be disposable.
"At this stage, there is no established best material or manufacturing process for creating low cost, large area electronics," says Calvin Chan, an electrical engineer at NIST. "What our team has done is to translate a classic material deposition method, spray painting, to a way of manufacturing cheap electronic devices."
The team showed that P3HT, a commonly used organic transistor material, works well as a spray on transistor material because transistors aren't very deep. Although spraying gives the P3HT film an uneven top surface, the transistor effects occur along its lower surface where it contacts the substrate.
Chan says the simplicity of spray on electronics gives it a potential cost advantage over other manufacturing processes for organic electronics. Other candidate processes, he says, require costly equipment to function or are simply not suitable for use in high volume manufacturing.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.nist.gov
Companies
NIST
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