Competing Fracture in Kinetically Controlled Transfer Printing

Abstract

Transfer printing by kinetically switchable adhesion to an elastomeric stamp shows promise as a powerful micromanufacturing method to pickup microstructures and microdevices from the donor substrate and to print them to the receiving substrate. This can be viewed as the competing fracture of two interfaces. This paper examines the mechanics of competing fracture in a model transfer printing system composed of three laminates: an elastic substrate, an elastic thin film, and a viscoelastic member (stamp). As the system is peeled apart, either the interface between the substrate and thin film fails or the interface between the thin film and the stamp fails. The speed-dependent nature of the film/stamp interface leads to the prediction of a critical separation velocity above which separation occurs between the film and the substrate (i.e., pickup) and below which separation occurs between the film and the stamp (i.e., printing). Experiments verify this prediction using films of gold adhered to glass, and the theoretical treatment extends to consider the competing fracture as it applies to discrete micro-objects. Temperature plays an important role in kinetically controlled transfer printing with its influences, making it advantageous to pickup printable objects at the reduced temperatures and to print them at the elevated ones.

Thermal Release Transfer Printing for Stretchable Conformal Bioelectronics

“…The thermal transfer release process can be modeled by two competing fracture paths that have different energy release rates ( G ): the TRT/membrane interface and the membrane/substrate interface. The energy release rate G for these fracture paths can be described as steady‐state crack propagation, which can be determined by13 $G=\frac{F}{w}$where F is the peeling force, w is the width of the interface. According to the Griffith criterion, G describes the energy of interfacial bond breaking and adhesive dissipation around the crack tip, and the crack will propagate steadily when the value of G reaches the critical G value.…”

“…The transfer printing technique involves the use of a soft elastomeric stamp to transfer solid micro/nanostructured materials from a donor substrate onto a receiver substrate for device integration 13. In this technique, dynamic control of the interfacial adhesion between the stamp and the object to be transferred plays a crucial role in completing successful transfer printing.…”

Curvy surface conformal ultra-thin transfer printed Si optoelectronic penetrating microprobe arrays

“…The magnetic actuation of the probes from a planar to a 3D vertical array proves to be effective in such a thin device. By taking the advantage of the recent advances in heterogeneous integration, [32][33][34][35][36] this type of penetrating microprobe array could be equipped with other functionalities such as sensors, actuators, light sources, not just limited to Si electronics, for penetrating probe array based neural interfaces with more complex and multi-functionalities, and can also find potential and broad utilities in a wide range of bio-integrated applications, such as optogenetics, deep brain stimulation, cortex mapping, etc.…”

Transfer Print Integration of 40Gbps Germanium Photodiodes onto Silicon Photonic ICs

“…Micro-transfer-printing (μTP or transfer printing), proposed by Rogers et al 1 is an integration technology that relies on the use of a PDMS stamp to transfer materials or devices from a source wafer to a target wafer in a massively parallel way 2 . The key advantage of the technology for the field of photonic integrated circuits is that opto-electronic devices (either Sibased or III-V based) can be realized in dense arrays on their native substrate and costeffectively integrated on passive target waveguide circuits.…”