Mitigating Meniscus Instabilities in Solution-Sheared Polymer Films for Organic Field-Effect Transistors

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Semiconducting donor-acceptor copolymers are considered to be a promising material class for solution-coated, large-scale organic electronic applications. A large number of works have shown that the best-performing organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) are obtained on low-surface-energy substrates. The meniscus instabilities that occur when coating on such surfaces considerably limit the effective deposition speeds. This represents a limiting factor for the upscaling of device fabrication for mass production, an issue that needs to be addressed if organic electronic devices are ever to become commercially relevant. In this work, we present a method to increase the accessible window of coating speeds for the solution shearing of donor-acceptor semiconductor polymers for the fabrication of OFETs. By incorporating a piezo crystal that is capable of producing high-frequency vibrations into the coating head, we are able to mitigate contact line instabilities due to the depinning of the contact line, thereby suppressing the commonly encountered "stick-and-slip" phenomenon.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)30079-30088
Number of pages10
JournalACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
Volume11
Issue number33
Publication statusPublished - 12 Aug 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 31403762
ORCID /0000-0002-8487-0972/work/142247521

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • large-area fabrication, meniscus instabilities, organic field-effect transistors, solution shearing, vibration