Imaging Technique Accelerates Practical Application of Printed Electronics

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Jun’ya Tsutsumi, Tatsuo Hasegawa and the Flexible Materials Base Team of the Flexible Electronics Research Center at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have developed a new imaging technique for collective inspection of performance distribution of organic transistors. The technique drastically reduces the inspection time in the manufacturing process for information terminal devices consisting of a vast number of transistors, including electronic papers and displays.

Recent advancement in information technology and society generates a strong demand for the evolution of manufacturing technology of active backplanes which control the ON/OFF of each pixel in display devices. The most promising solution is printing-based manufacturing technology ("printed electronics" technology), because of its great advantage in manufacturing large-area devices with considerably low energy consumption. However, there has been no rapid and collective inspection technique for active backplanes consisting of a huge number of transistors, which has been a bottleneck to realize the printing-based manufacturing.

In this study, the researchers developed a new gate-modulation imaging (GMI) technique which utilizes a CCD area sensor to detect tiny change of optical transmittance and reflectance of organic semiconductors induced by gate biasing of the transistors. The image obtained by this technique reflects the distribution of transistor performance, which allows rapid and collective inspection of performance distribution of organic transistors for active backplanes.

The details of this technique will be published online in a European scientific journal, Organic Electronics.