Xerox Scientist Describes Breakthrough Materials That Hold Promise for Printable Organic Electronics
Tuesday December 3, 8:08 am ET
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2002--Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX - News)
A potential alternative to silicon transistors, printed plastic electronics could dramatically lower costs and usher in a new generation of products
Portable, poster-like television screens and monitors made of a single sheet of flexible plastic may be one step closer to reality as a result of new materials that were described today by Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX - News) researchers.
Source: XEROX CORPORATION
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Beng Ong, a research fellow at Xerox Research Centre of Canada, described the design and synthesis of breakthrough semiconducting organic polymers that show promise for printing electronic patterns on a plastic substrate - the plastic equivalent of etching circuits on silicon wafers - in a talk presented at the Materials Research Society's fall conference here.
Ong's experimental materials possess the outstanding electrical properties that would be necessary for printing plastic circuits. But in contrast to other materials that degrade quickly when exposed to oxygen, the Xerox materials are stable in air, a requisite for low-cost manufacturing under ambient conditions. No one else has been able to achieve this combination in a polymer material.
Printed plastic transistors augur an inexpensive, easy-to-manufacture alternative to silicon electronics, which are difficult to fabricate and can cost up to $10,000 per square meter. Projected applications range from identification tags on merchandise to electric paper displays.
"One of the main cost advantages of printed plastic transistors is that they will not need specialized, costly fabrication facilities and procedures, while silicon transistors require ultra-clean room environments, high-temperature vacuum systems, and complex, photolithographic processes," said Ong, an inventor who holds more than 110 U.S. patents and who manages the printed organic electronics group at XRCC in Mississauga, Ontario.
Designing performance-specific materials and developing robust printing processes for device manufacturing are key challenges in realizing this vision; both are areas where Xerox has expertise. Its scientists have a long history of productive research in conductive organic materials, printing technologies, and device and systems technology - expertise at the heart of Xerox printing and copying products.
Under a National Institute of Standards and Technology grant, scientists from XRCC and the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox in Palo Alto, Calif., are collaborating with teams at Motorola Labs and Dow Chemical to "develop novel organic electronic materials and processing technologies ... to enable the fabrication of large-area electronic devices, such as displays, using relatively inexpensive printing technologies in lieu of semiconductor lithography."
Ong and his group developed the breakthrough material by first understanding the polymer structural features responsible for limitations in existing materials, and by then developing design rules to get around those limitations. The materials were evaluated in simple devices at XRCC, with further testing and experimental printing at PARC and select electronics firms around the world.
Experimental Results
In his presentation to the MRS, Ong described the design and properties of new polythiophene materials, which are significantly better on a variety of performance dimensions than the currently established polymers. The experimental organic semiconductor material developed by his group is second-generation smectic liquid crystal with field effect transistor mobility of up to 0.12 square centimeters per Volt second (cm(2)/V.s), which is a measure of the speed of electron movement per unit electric field. That could be up to an order of magnitude greater than other polymer benchmarks measured in the same device architecture.
In addition, current on-off ratios are in an excellent range of 10(6) to 10(7), and devices containing the experimental Xerox material exhibit little bias stress, hysteresis or instability in air. Indeed, the breakthrough achieved by Ong and his group is to bring together all these outstanding thin film transistor properties simultaneously within a material that is processable in ambient conditions. That hasn't been done before.
PARC's NIST work builds on its extensive experience in large area electronics based on amorphous and polycrystalline silicon. It has demonstrated jet-printed polymer field effect transistors and is developing processes to print complete active matrix arrays.
Together with PARC, the other members of the NIST consortium and leading electronics companies, Xerox is evaluating this new experimental material for suitability in a variety of printed electronics applications. If these evaluations continue to be promising, the company intends to aggressively commercialize the material through licensing to the emerging organic electronics industry.
Separately at the MRS meeting, Xerox is discussing Ong's new materials for printed organic electronics and a variety of other technologies from around the company, including CarbonConX(TM) (a preferred technology for electrical switch components), organic light-emitting diodes (long life structure, Black Cathode(TM), and optoelectronic materials), and emulsion aggregation microspheres (used in Xerox's EA color toners but also applicable to biotech and personal care applications).
Xerox Corporation, one of the world's top technology innovators, spent about $1 billion on research and development in 2001. It operates research and technology centers in the United States, Canada and Europe that conduct work in color science, computing, digital imaging, work practices, electromechanical systems, novel materials and other disciplines connected to Xerox's expertise in printing and document management. Xerox consistently builds its inventions into business by embedding them in superior Xerox products and solutions, using them as the foundation of new businesses, or licensing or selling them to other entities. For more information, visit www.xerox.com/innovation.
The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a subsidiary of Xerox, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in physical, computational and social sciences. Building on its three-decade tradition of innovation, PARC works with Xerox and other strategic partners to commercialize technologies created by its renowned scientists. For more information, visit www.parc.com.
Customer Contact:
For more information on Xerox materials, contact Tony Paine, 905-823-7091 x336, tony.paine@crt.xerox.com
Media Contacts:
Bill McKee, Xerox Corporation, 585-423-4476, bill.mckee@usa.xerox.com
Sandy Mauceli, Lightyear Marketing , 585-385-0834, smauceli@mindspring.com
Tracy Kugelman, Palo Alto Research Center, 650-812-4085, tracyk@parc.com
NOTE TO EDITORS: Dr. Ong's talk is 11:15 a.m. today in room 201 of the Hynes Convention Center, Boston. It is part of session D4: Electronics on Flexible Substrates. Xerox will be exhibiting this and other materials innovations in Booth 825.
For more information about Xerox, visit www.xerox.com/news. XEROX®, The Document Company® and the digital X® are trademarks of XEROX CORPORATION.
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