Printed electronics have opened up applications—flexible circuits and rollable displays, to name two—that were impossible with conventional electronics. Usually printed electronics are created using materials whose electronic properties often pale in comparison to silicon. Now scientists have discovered a new way to print silicon onto paper which could led to a whole range of new products and uses.
While we could print silicon onto paper before, this involved using temperatures upwards of 350 degrees Celsius—far too hot for many of the flexible surfaces onto which one might want to print.
The new technique, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Ishikawa, completely bypasses this step. Researchers found that the thin-film transistors they created using this new strategy performed on par with conventional polysilicon devices and far better than other ink materials.
This work could lead to low-cost, high-speed, flexible, biodegradable, recyclable electronics that could show up in wearable electronics, solar cells, RFID tags, edible devices, and trillions of Internet of Things sensor nodes.
Click here for source (IEEE Spectrum)
Photo: R. Ishihara and M. Trifunovic/TU Delft
