Photo‐Curable Fluorinated High‐k Polyimide Dielectrics by Polar Side Substitution Effect for Low‐Voltage Operating Flexible Printed Electronics

Abstract

Polyimide‐based dielectric films are widely used in various thin film devices including organic field‐effect transistors (OFETs) owing to their promising thermal/chemical stability, mechanical flexibility, and insulating properties. On the other hand, considerable attention is paid to lowering the process temperature to allow coating on plastic substrates because high‐temperature annealing (≈200 °C) is usually required to convert precursors to polyimide films with those excellent properties. In addition, polyimide‐based dielectric films have low dielectric constants (k) (<4). Therefore, modifying the k properties of polyimide is a critical issue for applications as an insulating thin film for practical transistors. This paper reports a new type of polyimide‐based gate dielectric comprising methacryloyl moiety (PI‐MA) as a side chain for photo‐pattern/processability and high‐k properties. This study shows that the photocured PI‐MA thin films show excellent insulating properties (leakage current densities < 10−8 A cm⁻2 at 4 MV cm⁻1) and high‐k properties (≈8) even without a post‐annealing process. Finally, the use of PI‐MA in printed field‐effect transistors results in high performance with low‐voltage operation (within 5 V) and integrated logic‐gate devices (NOT, NAND, and NOR gates).