Selective Printing of Electronic Layers for multi-layered Devices using Tailored Surface Morphology

Contact printing of inorganic nanostructures such nanowires (NWs) has shown great potential for development of high-performance large area electronics (LAE) by printing. The LAE requires printing of electronic layer at selected locations, defined by the circuit layouts. In this paper, we demonstrate that simply with tailored surface morphology of the receiver substrate it is possible to obtain selective printing of electronic layers. The contact printing process has been used here to obtain NW (d=100nm) arrays on the receiver substrates, which is patterned with 3D features of varying height (20 – 200nm). The result show that for larger feature heights, the surface morphology has an impact on the printing uniformity. The effects of surface morphology are also studied in the context of multi-layer devices where uneven surfaces can be found. Surface planarization is investigated as a means for restoring the printing uniformity on uneven surfaces. The conducted studies demonstrate that surface features of a device can be exploited to aid in device fabrication while the planarization technique is able to negate unwanted effects resulting from uneven printing surfaces.