Ultrafast laser trimming for reduced device leakage in high performance OTFT semiconductors for flexible displays

摘要

Organic semiconductors (OSC) are solution processable synthetic materials with high carrier mobility that promise to revolutionise flexible electronics manufacturing due to their low cost, lightweight and high volume low temperature printing in reel-to-reel (R2R) [1] for applications such as flexible display backplanes (Fig.1), RFID tags, and logic/memory devices. Despite several recent technological advances, organic thin film transistor (OTFT) printing is still not production-ready due to limitations mainly with printing resolution on dimensionally unstable substrates and device leakage that reduces dramatically electrical performance. OTFTs have the source-drain in ohmic contact with the OSC material to lower contact resistance. If they are unpatterned, a leakage pathway from source to drain develops which results in non-optimum on/off currents and not controllable device uniformity (Fig.2). DPSS lasers offer several key advantages for OTFT patterning including maskless, non-contact, dry patterning, scalable large area operation with precision registration, well-suited to R2R manufacturing at overall μm size resolutions. But the thermal management of laser processing is very important as the devices are very sensitive to heat and thermomechanical damage [2]. This paper discusses 343nm picosecond laser ablation trimming of 50nm thick PTAA, TIPS pentacene and other semiconductor compounds on thin 50nm thick metal gold electrodes in a top gate configuration. It is shown that with careful optimisation, a suitable process window exists resulting in clean laser structuring without damage to the underlying layers while also containing laser debris. Several order of magnitude improvements were recorded in on/off currents up to 106 with OSC mobilities of 1 cm2/Vsec, albeit at slightly higher than optimum threshold voltages which support demanding flexible display backplane applications.