Large scale, flexible organic transistor arrays and circuits based on polyimide materials

• Polyimide is used as insulator layers in the process of photolithography for the first time.
• Large scale, flexible and high-performance transistor arrays and circuits are fabricated.
• The modified photolithography technique is employed to protect the polyimide in the process of photolithography.

Polyimide (PI) materials are lightweight, flexible, resistant strongly to heat and chemicals, and have been widely used in electronics industry such as working as electronic packaging materials in large-scale integrated circuits. In this letter, PI materials, for the first time, are introduced into organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and circuits as insulator layers in order to be compatible with the photolithography process. Moreover, a novel method is developed to make the PI films strong enough to endure the critical processes of photolithography (e.g., the influence of developer on polyimide layer). Based on the intact PI insulator and the modified photolithographic technique, large scale, flexible transistor arrays and circuits were fabricated with high resolution and high performance (mobility up to 0.55 cm2 V−1 s−1 for bottom-contact bottom-gate OFETs). It provides a new way for the fabrication of large-area organic devices and circuits beyond solution printed techniques, especially for the application of organic semiconductors with poor solubility, e.g., pentacene.

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