Inkjet Technology for Digital Fabrication

Chapter 9

Active Electronics

Madhusudan Singh,¹ Hanna M. Haverinen,² Yuka Yoshioka³ and Ghassan E. Jabbour^*,4

¹Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

²Solar and Alternative Energy Engineering Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

³Heraeus Materials Technology, USA

⁴Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Solar and Alternative Energy Engineering Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia

 

^*Corresponding author. [e-mail]

9.1 Introduction

According to various industry estimates, including the organic electronics roadmap, the size of the printed electronics industry is expected to exceed billions of dollars in the coming decades. A recent IDTechEx report (Das and Harrop, 2011) states that the market for printed and thin-film electronics will reach US$44.25 billion in 2021. Inkjet printing has the potential to contribute significantly in this rapidly growing area. We have seen in Chapter 7 how electrical conductors and passive components can be fabricated by inkjet methods; here we shall review the application of inkjet printing to active electronic devices. In this field, the particular merits of inkjet include the fact that it provides a noncontact, maskless additive patterning process, which can be used to deposit and pattern a very wide range of materials (Lewis, 2006). ...