Component Management

Nanoparticle ink suits room-temperature printing

10th July 2014
Siobhan O'Gorman
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A nanoparticle ink which can be used in room-temperature printing has been developed by MANA. Previously, nanoparticle inks could only be used in high-temperature printing because they were surrounded by non-conductive ligands and required annealing. Researchers have created a nanoparticle ink surrounded by planar aromatic molecules which, therefore, does not require annealing.

Nanoparticle inks should allow simple low-cost manufacture but the nanoparticles usually used are surrounded in non-conductive ligands - molecules that are introduced during synthesis for stabilising the particles. These ligands must be removed by annealing to make the ink conducting.

The gold nanoparticles have a resistivity of around 9 x 10-6 Ωcm - similar to pure gold. The researchers used the nanoparticle ink to print organic thin film transistors on a flexible polymer and a paper substrate at room-temperature, producing devices with mobilities of 7.9 and 2.5cm2V-1s-1 for polymer and paper respectively.

Researchers concluded “This room-temperature printing process is a promising method as a core technology for future semiconductor devices.”

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