Recent years have witnessed an expanding interest in the application of flexible polymer materials (e.g., polyimide, polyester, etc.) as the substrates for electronic and display devices. These applications include flexible organic light-emitting displays, [1,2] thin film transistors, [3][4][5] sensors, [6,7] and polymer MEMS. [8,9] The advantages of polymer-based materials are their mechanical flexibility, light weight, enhanced durability, and low cost compared with rigid materials (such as silicon and quartz). However, it can be difficult to integrate polymers into an integrated circuit (IC) microfabrication process due to their low thermal stability (low melting and low glass transition temperatures) and solvent susceptibility. In practice, conventional IC fabrication processes are subject to limitations, in that they are multi-step, involve high processing temperatures, caustic baths and strong solvents. In order to address the current problems of microfabrication on flexible substrate, many alternative approaches to conventional photolithography-based process have been introduced by a number of researchers. These include microcontact printing (lCP) combined with metal etching, [10] electroless plating, [11] electropolymerization, [12] and direct metal layer transfer [13] for the microscale metal patterning on flexible substrates. Stencil lithography [14] was mainly applied for dielectric layer patterning on polymer substrates for the formation of electrical capacitors [15,16] due to its limited resolution. Inkjet printing was used for a drop-on-demand patterning of conductive polymer PEDOT [17] and gold [18] layers for drain-source and gate electrodes. However, its best resolution is 20-50 lm [19,20] limited by the nozzle diameter, the statistical variation of the droplet flight, and spreading on the substrate. Organic semiconducting materials are being widely used as semiconducting layers in flexible electronics due to their costeffectiveness, mechanical flexibility, and ease of application via specific chemical modification. However, further channel size down-scaling is essential for better performance of organic field effect transistor due to the lower carrier mobility of the organic semiconducting materials. While the abovementioned methods cannot achieve ultrafine features (a few lm's down to ∼ 100 nm) in high aerial density and good reproducibility, nanoimprinting lithography (NIL) allows easy fabrication of precise nanoscale structures. NIL has been applied for nanopatterning in various fields such as biological nanostructures, [21] nanophotonic devices, [22,23] organic electronics, [24,25] and the patterning of magnetic materials. [26] Especially, metal nanopatterning via nanoimprinting is widely employed in nanoscale electronics and biosensing platforms. However, metal nanoimprinting has been typically an indirect process where a polymer (e.g., PMMA) pattern is first created by nanoimprinting, and then used as a mask for metal film etching or metal lift-off process. [27] This involves multiple and ...
Uniform metal nanomesh structures are promising candidates that may replace of indium-tin oxide (ITO) in transparent conducting electrodes (TCEs). However, the durability of the uniform metal mesh has not yet been studied. For this reason, a comparative analysis of the durability of TCEs based on pure Ag and AgNi nanomesh, which are fabricated by using simple transfer printing, is performed. The AgNi nanomesh shows high long-term stability to oxidation, heat, and chemicals compared with that of pure Ag nanomesh. This is because of nickel in the AgNi nanomesh. Furthermore, the AgNi nanomesh shows strong adhesion to a transparent substrate and good stability after repeated bending.
In this paper, we fabricated a fluorinated organic-inorganic hybrid mold using a nonhydrolytic sol-gel process which can produce a crack-free mold without leaving any trace of solvent. No special chemical treatment of a release layer is needed because the fluorinated hybrid mold has fluorine molecules in the backbone. The other advantages of the hybrid mold are thermal stability over 300 degrees C. The hybrid mold produced from UV nanoimprint lithography (UV-NIL) was used as a mold for the next UV-NIL and soft lithography without requiring use of an antisticking layer. Various nanometer scale patterns including sub-100 nm patterns could be obtained from the hybrid mold. Nanopatterning processes using this low-cost mold are useful because they preserve the expensive original master.
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