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2008
Conference Paper
Titel
Reliability of polymer electronics on plastic film
Abstract
Different working groups have already shown the possibilities of organic electronics for realization of low cost electronic circuits. In the mean time different technology demonstrators have been presented by different groups ranging from transistor level to ring oscillators or even digital circuits. However a crucial issue for polymer electronic applications is their reliability. Most prominent reliability limitation is the sensitivity on humidity as the most prominent reason for degradation. But also mechanical stresses, which are only minor relevant to silicon electronics due to the rigidity of the silicon wafers, they play a major role for polymer electronics on flexible substrates. At IZM we investigated the behaviour of polymer electronic circuits under different stress conditions. The devices have been fabricated on metallised PET film, where the basic source-drain electrodes are fabricated by a reel-to-reel photolithography process. Two coating steps are performed to process the active layer with polymer semiconductor of the PTAA type and a gate dielectric. Finally three screen printing steps are used to finish the polymer electronic process. A more detailed description of the fabrication process is given in ref. 1 and 2. Stable transistor function has been reached under normal ambient conditions with on-currents in the µA- and off-currents in the nA-range.