Organic electronics is promising to be one of the groundbreaking technologies to revolutionize our everyday lives by including new functionalities into nearly any item. Cost is the most significant barrier, since new functionalities should not increase the price of the product dramatically. Roll-to-roll production is the solution to overcome the price barrier. In combination with integrated laser processes new possibilities are opened up for cost-efficient, versatile and high throughput manufacturing lines (Fig. 1).
The breakthrough of flexible organic electronics and especially organic photovoltaics is highly dependent on cost-efficient production technologies. Roll-2-Roll processes show potential for a promising solution in terms of high throughput and low-cost production of thin film organic components. Solution based material deposition and integrated laser patterning processes offer new possibilities for versatile production lines. The use of flexible polymeric infstrates brings along challenges in laser patterning which have to be overcome. One main challenge when patterning transparent conductive layers on polymeric infstrates are material bulges at the edges of the ablated area. Bulges can lead to short circuits in the layer system leading to device failure. Therefore following layers have to have a sufficient thickness to cover and smooth the ridge. In order to minimize the bulging height, a study has been carried out on transparent conductive ITO layers on flexible PET in fstrates. Ablation results using different beam shapes, such as Gaussian beam, Top-Hat beam and Donut-shaped beam, as well as multi-pass scribing and double-pulsed ablation are compared. Furthermore, lab scale methods for cleaning the patterned layer and eliminating bulges are contrasted to the use of additional water based sacrificial layers in order to obtain an alternative procedure suitable for large scale Roll-2-Roll manufacturing. Besides progress in research, ongoing transfer of laser processes into a Roll-2-Roll demonstrator is illustrated. By using fixed optical elements in combination with a galvanometric scanner, scribing, variable patterning and edge deletion can be performed individually
Micro-hairs are profound elements widely used in nature. A great variety of animals use them as sensors to gather information about their surroundings. To artificially fabricate these kinds of sensors, we present a method to produce micro-hairs made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). We investigated the laser micro-drilling of wax and polycarbonate (PC) substrates with a 193-nm ArF laser to produce molds suitable for casting micro-hairs. Especially PC molds lead to high-quality micro-hairs. Thus, laser ablation of PC was intensively studied. In order to obtain micro-hair arrays, experiments where performed to optimize the casting techniques of PDMS in PC molds. The possibilities and limitations of the investigated method of micro-hair production are presented
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