Low-cost all-polymer integrated circuits

Abstract

A technology has been developed to make all polymer integrated circuits. It involves reproducible fabrication of field-effect transistors in which the semiconducting, conducting and insulating parts are all made of polymers. The fabrication on flexible substrates uses spin-coating of electrically active precursors and patternwise exposure of the deposited films. In the whole process stack integrity is maintained. Vertical interconnects are made mechanically. As a demonstrator functional 15-bit programmable code generators are fabricated. These circuits still operate when the foils are sharply bent. Due to the limited number of process steps the technology is potentially inexpensive.