Polycrystalline silicon TFTs on a paper substrate using solution-processed silicon

Abstract

Solution-processing has gained widespread attention over the past years due to their potential low-cost advantage in terms of fabrication of electronics as well as application to flexible electronics. Cyclopentasilane is used for the solution-based processing of silicon. As a liquid, the material has the potential to be applied directly on low-cost flexible substrates that generally have a low thermal budget, by annealing the liquid using an excimer laser treatment. So far, electronics based on this material have only been demonstrated on rigid and high cost substrates. In this work, silicon has been applied as a solution on top of a paper substrate and processed into PMOS and NMOS thin-film transistors (TFTs). The maximum fabrication temperature was limited to approximately 100° C. By being able to fabricate devices on top of a paper substrate, a pathway opens towards new applications that combine the true low-cost and biodegradability with the high performance of silicon electronics.