Advancements in thin-film transistor (TFT) technology have extended to electronics that can withstand extreme bending or even folding. Although the use of ultrathin plastic substrates has achieved considerable advancement towards this end, free-standing ultrathin plastics inevitably suffer from mechanical instability and are very difficult to handle during TFT fabrication. Here, in addition to the use of a 1.5 μm-thick polyimide (PI) substrate, a 1.5 μm-thick PI film is also deposited on top of the TFT devices to ensure that the devices are located at the neutral plane of the two PI films for high folding stability. For mechanical support during TFT fabrication up to the deposition of the top PI film, the PI substrate is spin coated on top of a carrier glass that is coated with a mixture of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene oxide (GO). The mixture of CNT and GO facilitates mechanical detachment of the neutral plane (NP) TFTs from the carrier glass before they are transferred to a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate as islands. Being located in the neutral bending plane, the NP TFT can be transferred to the PDMS without performance degradation and exhibit excellent mechanical stability after stretching the PDMS substrate up to a 25% elastic elongation.

Major obstacles toward the manufacture of transparent and flexible display screens include the difficulty of finding transparent and flexible semiconductors and electrodes, temperature restrictions of flexible plastic substrates, and bulging or warping of the flexible electronics during processing. Here we report the fabrication and performance of fully transparent and rollable thin-film transistor (TFT) circuits for display applications. The TFTs employ an amorphous indium-gallium-zinc oxide semiconductor (with optical band gap of 3.1 eV) and amorphous indium-zinc oxide transparent conductive electrodes, and are built on 15-μm-thick solution-processed colorless polyimide (CPI), resulting in optical transmittance >70% in the visible range. As the CPI supports processing temperatures >300 °C, TFT performance on plastic is similar to that on glass, with typical field-effect mobility, turn-on voltage, and subthreshold voltage swing of 12.7 ± 0.5 cm(2)/V·s, -1.7 ± 0.2 V, and 160 ± 29 mV/dec, respectively. There is no significant degradation after rolling the TFTs 100 times on a cylinder with a radius of 4 mm or when shift registers, each consisting of 40 TFTs, are operated while bent to a radius of 2 mm. For handling purposes, carrier glass is used during fabrication, together with a very thin (∼1 nm) solution-processed carbon nanotube (CNT)/graphene oxide (GO) backbone that is first spin-coated on the glass to decrease adhesion of the CPI to the glass; peel strength of the CPI from glass decreases from 0.43 to 0.10 N/cm, which eases the process of detachment performed after device fabrication. Given that the CNT/GO remains embedded under the CPI after detachment, it minimizes wrinkling and decreases the substrate's tensile elongation from 8.0% to 4.6%. Device performance is also stable under electrostatic discharge exposures up to 10 kV, as electrostatic charge can be released via the conducting CNTs.

No abstract

We present here an amorphous indium-galliumzinc-oxide (a-IGZO) thin-film transistor (TFT) in which the accumulation layer is not only confined to the a-IGZO/gateinsulator interface, but extends the entire depth of the a-IGZO. This bulk accumulation TFT is achieved by the use of topand bottom-gate, that are electrically tied together, resulting in drain current that is over seven times higher than that of a single-gate device, for an a-IGZO thickness of 10 nm. Thus, high drive current is achieved for a relatively small channel width due to bulk accumulation. Furthermore, being independent of carrier scattering at the interface and owing to the bulk accumulation/depletion, the subthreshold swing is always small and turn-on voltage around zero volts with device-to-device uniformity that is much better than that of single-gate TFTs. IndexTerms-Amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO), bulk accumulation, dual gate, thin-film transistor (TFT).

Advancement in thin-film transistor (TFT) technologies has extended to applications that can withstand extreme bending or folding. The changes of the performances of amorphous-indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) TFTs on polyimide substrate after application of extreme mechanical bending strain are studied. The TFT designs include mesh and strip patterned source/drain metal lines as well as strip patterned a-IGZO semiconductor layer. The robustness of the a-IGZO TFTs with the strain of 2.17% corresponding to the radius of 0.32 mm is tested and no crack generation even after 60 000 bending cycles is found. The split of source/drain electrodes and semiconductor layer can improve the mechanical bending stability of the TFTs. This can be possible by using conventional TFT manufacturing process so that this technology can be easily applied to build robust TFT array for foldable displays.