Researchers print high performance TFT transistors

The performance is 100 times higher than that of TFTs fabricated by conventional printing methods.

Researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan have been experimenting with manufacturing high performance TFT transistors by printing them using ink jet technology.

Printing TFT transistors is hardly something new, but the interesting thing about these transistors is that they have about a 100 times higher performance than transistors that have been printed using other methods. This according to an article in Nanowerk.

The researchers are using a special printing technique to manufacture the transistors.

In this study, the researchers succeeded in producing single-crystal thin films of organic semiconductors with molecularly flat surfaces by the use of a novel “double-shot inkjet printing” technique. The technique uses alternating print deposition of microliquid droplets both of ink composed of a dissolved organic semiconductor and of another ink that prompts crystallization of the organic semiconductor.

The organic TFTs based on this technology present mobility of 31.3 cm2/Vs at the highest. This value is much higher than that of amorphous silicon TFTs that are used in the conventional liquid-crystal displays.

It is very difficult to control the crystallization of semiconductor materials in solution due to the convection flow and random crystallization inside the droplets, so that it has been considered to be extremely difficult to form a uniform semiconductor layer by conventional printing techniques.S|A

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