Self-Aligned, Additive Manufacturing Approaches to Large Area Electronics
Speaker
C. Daniel Frisbie
University of Minnesota
Abstract
Self-Aligned, Additive Manufacturing Approaches to Large Area Electronics
The integration of electronic circuits into flexible, stretchable, conformal, impact-resistant, and large-area (m2) formats has the potential to expand the application space for microelectronics and deliver new capabilities across a broad spectrum of technologies.1,2 Recent demonstrations of large-area, flexible circuits include applications in radiation detection, health diagnostics, drug-delivery, distributed sensing, information display, food security, identification tagging, inventory tracking, robotics, and human-machine interfacing, for example. Developing new processes to print large area circuits, especially in continuous, high-throughput, sequential unit operations, is highly desirable from efficiency, sustainability, and cost perspectives.
However, additive manufacturing (e.g., printing) of large area electronics has a number of significant challenges, including spatial resolution, pattern registration, and printed circuit performance. This talk will describe a patented liquid-based fabrication approach developed at Minnesota (with colleague Lorraine Francis) that we term SCALE, or Self-Aligned Capillarity-Assisted Lithography for Electronics. The SCALE process combines imprint lithography with inkjet printing and plating processes to produce self-aligned devices with feature sizes that are currently as small as 2 μm. Beyond the critical self-alignment aspect, SCALE offers a number of possible advantages for large area electronics manufacture including compatibility with roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing, excellent spatial resolution, conventional height-to-width aspect ratios for conductor lines, and sharp, well-defined line edges of all printed features. This talk will describe the use of R2R SCALE to build arrays of discrete devices such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, interconnects, and transistors, as well as simple circuits. As SCALE relies on capillary flow of electronic inks in imprinted features, important fundamentals of capillary flow in open channels, and practical innovations for controlling flow, will also be covered.
1. Arias, A. C., MacKenzie, J. D., McCulloch, I., Rivnay, J. & Salleo, A. Materials and Applications for Large Area Electronics: Solution-Based Approaches. Chem. Rev. 110, 3–24 (2010).
2. Portilla, L. et al. Wirelessly powered large-area electronics for the Internet of Things. Nat. Electron. 6, 10–17 (2023).
Bio
C. Daniel Frisbie is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS) at the University of Minnesota. He joined the faculty in 1994 and served as Head of CEMS from 2014-2024. A physical chemist by training, he obtained a PhD from MIT in 1993 and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry at Harvard. His research focuses on materials for printed electronics, including organic semiconductors and their applications in devices such as transistors and electrochromic displays. He also has a long-standing program in molecular electronics. Research themes include the synthesis of novel organic semiconductors, structure-property relationships, device physics, and the application of scanning probe techniques. New efforts also include manufacturing approaches for flexible electronics and strategies for electrocatalysis.