A new materials package developed by the Mississauga-Ontario-based Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) and NanoIntegris (a subsidiary of Raymor Industries) will help advance the rapidly expanding wearable and flexible electronics market. The thin film transistor package combines a novel dielectric ink developed at the XRCC, with a high-purity, single-walled carbon nanotube ink developed by NanoIntegris. The materials package improves the overall performance of printed high-mobility p-type transistors. Printing transistors, the next frontier in wearable and flexible electronics, offers manufacturers a low-cost way to add intelligence or computing power to a wide range of surfaces, such as plastic or fabric. Printable semiconducting and dielectric materials enable flexible tags, sensors and displays. Compatibility between semiconducting and dielectric materials is critical for reliable processing and device performance.
One of the challenges that’s limited the implementation of single-walled, carbon nanotube-based thin film transistors is that they exhibit considerable hysteresis. (Hysteresis is the time-based dependence of a system’s output on present and past inputs. The dependence arises because the history affects the value of an internal state. To predict its future outputs, either its internal state or its history must be known). The thin film transistor package overcomes this issue by using Xerox ink as a dielectric and encapsulant, ensuring compatibility between semiconducting and dielectric materials, and enabling reliable processing and device performance. “XRCC and NanoIntegris are providing a materials package that enables fabrication of highly functional printed electronic components,” said Brynn Dooley, Manager of XRCC’s Electronic Materials Business. “This new materials solution will help our clients with their innovation mandates.”
XRCC is the global materials research and development centre for Xerox Corporation with a 40-year history of taking materials from concept through to commercialization. Its core expertise lies in the design, synthesis, formulation, and scale-up of novel materials. NanoIntegris Technologies is the world’s leading supplier of high mobility semiconductor solutions. Its inks include high-purity, sorted semiconducting or metallic, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and grapheme used by leading OEMs and academics to develop the next generation of transparent conductive coatings, transistors, sensors and photovoltaics – a method of converting solar energy into direct current electricity using semiconducting materials.
