Flexible Electronics for Rugged, Low Power Army Systems

Performance of current amorphous (A-Si) and even polycrystalline (Poly-Si) silicon thin film transistors (TFTs) made with low temperature processes ( 300°C on rigid glass or metal foil substrates with acceptable performance and yield, this is too high for traditional plastic substrates. Versatilis proposes to show high performing top gate based TFTs made of Zinc Oxide (ZnO) as an alternate semiconductor material, and made directly on a flexible polymer sheet at < 200°C. Such TFTs will be further patterned to <2&#956; features for high switching speeds using a novel multiwavelength photolithographic technique that will obviate sequential masking steps and fully eliminate registration and alignment challenges in working with flexible polymer substrates, and which will be compatible with a future R2R manufacturing paradigm for very low cost flexible electronics. Proposer will partner with the Display Research Lab at Lehigh University and adapt existing designs and techniques for Silicon based TFTs on metal foils to ZnO based TFTs on plastic.