Printing Technologies for the Gate and Source/Drain Electrodes of OTFTs

This is a report on the fabrication of a flexible OTFT backplane for electrophoretic display (EPD) using a printing technology. A practical printing technology for a polycarbonate substrate was developed by combining the conventional screen and inkjet printing technologies with the wet etching and oxygen plasma processes. For the gate electrode, the screen printing technology with Ag ink was developed to define the minimum line width of ${\sim}5{\mu}m$ and the thickness of ${\sim}70nm$ with the resistivity of ${\sim}10^{-6}{\Omega}{\cdot}cm$, which are suitable for displays with SVGA resolution. For the source and drain (S/D) electrodes, PEDOT:PSS, whose conductivity was drastically enhanced to 450 S/cm by adding 10 wt% glycerol, was adopted. In addition, the modified PEDOT:PSS could be neatly confined in the specific S/D electrode area that had been pretreated with oxygen. The OTFTs that made use of the developed printing technology produced a mobility of ${\sim}0.13cm^2/Vs.ec$ and an on/off current ratio of ${\sim}10^6$, which are comparable to those using thermally evaporated Au for the S/D electrode.