Abstract

The increasing advancement of electronic components has been imposing demanding requirements in terms of performance, miniaturization and versatile processing. Regarding the latter, the laser induced forward transfer (LIFT) of metal nanoparticle inks or pastes, followed by laser sintering in a two-step digital fabrication approach, has been proven a key enabling additive technology for flexible electronics, over the last decade. In this work, we demonstrate the application of this laser-based process for the digital additive manufacturing of linear Ag micro-electrodes with a width down to 50 μm and height down to less than 500 nm. These Ag microelectrodes are laser fabricated on top of thermally sensitive and even multi-stack layers involving very challenging surface topographies, such as patterns and micro-components with periodicity and aspect ratio in the 100-micron scale and submicron-scales respectively. The versatility of LIFT as a digital manufacturing solution has been validated in two use cases: i) the fabrication of gate electrodes for flexible organic thin film transistors (OTFTs), ii) the development of metal grids as ITO replacers in flexible organic photovoltaics (OPVs).

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