Plastics electronics

Plastic bags Plastic beads Plastic bearing materials Plastic cements Plastic drums Plastic electronic package Plastic encapsulant... 

Applications. The applications sought for these polymers include composites, stmctural plastics, electronics/circuit boards, aircraft/spacecraft coatings, seals, dental and medical prosthetics, and laser window adhesives. However, other than the early commercialization by Du Pont of the NR-150 B material, Httie development has occurred. These polymers are quite expensive ( 110 to 2200 per kg for monomers alone). 

As a result of the remarkable progress in the chemistry, physics and engineering (device physics) of semiconducting and metallic polymers, we are now witnessing the beginning of a revolution in Plastic Electronics . 

Loo, Y. L. Willett, R. L. Baldwin, K. W. Rogers, J. A. 2002. Additive, nanoscale patterning of metal films with a stamp and a surface chemistry mediated transfer process Applications in plastic electronics. Appl. Phys. Lett. 81 562-564. 

The PBDEs (decaBDE, octaBDE, and pentaBDE) and are used as flame retardants in plastics, electronic equipment, printed circuit boards, vehicles, furniture, textiles, carpets, and building materials. Global demand has increased rapidly since the 1970s with 70,000 tonnes produced in 2001. Their flame retardant activity relies on decomposition at high temperatures, leading to the release of bromine atoms. This slows the chemical reactions that drive 02-dependent fires. HBCDs are a flame retardant added to extruded and expanded polystyrene that is used as thermal insulation in buildings. 

The extensive use of phthalates as plasticizers in various materials (furniture, plastics, electronics equipment, textiles, etc.) has led to the widespread and substantial contamination of the indoor environment, e.g., air and dust [3, 96, 97]. Indoor environment and dietary intake are of special concern for the increasing... 

One of the most promising bottom-up approaches in nanoelectronics is to assemble 7i-conjugated molecules to build nano-sized electronic and opto-electronic devices in the 5-100 nm length scale. This field of research, called supramolecular electronics, bridges the gap between molecular electronics and bulk plastic electronics. In this contest, the design and preparation of nanowires are of considerable interest for the development of nano-electronic devices such as nanosized transistors, sensors, logic gates, LEDs, and photovoltaic devices. 

W.A. MacDonald, K. Rollins, R. Eveson, R.A. Rustin and M. Handa, Plastic Displays - new developments in polyester films for plastic electronics, Society For Information Display, Digest of Technical Papers, 2003, 264-267. 

For plastic electronics and many other systems, multiple layers must be patterned on top of each other with good overlay registration. A challenge with pCP is that the elastomeric stamps tend to deform during the printing. This deformation can alter, in ways that are difficult to control, the precise alignment of features. There are at least two simple strategies to reduce these problems ... 

The second approach has the advantage that it provides flexibility in the choice of means to perform the printing. Figure 10.14 shows a stamp with this construction, designed for plastic electronics applications [42]. It consists of a thin layer of PDMS on top of a sheet of polyimide. The relatively high in-plane modulus of the poly-imide prevents distortions that can frustrate registration. Its small thickness enables the stamp to be bent in a manner that facilitates printing. 

Micro-contact printing can be used in plastic electronics to form high-resolution source/drain electrodes with short channel lengths [14]. Depositing an organic semiconductor on top of these electrodes yields a transistor with a layout like that... 

Like pCP, nTP can pattern electrodes for plastic electronic components. Figure 10.23 shows an optical micrograph (inset) and current-voltage characteristics (left frame) of a transistor that incorporates interdigitated source/drain electrodes of Au/Ti patterned by nTP on PDMS/PETusing procedures described previously [10]. 

The high resolution of nTP and its multilayer capabilities are useful for plastic electronic systems. Figure 10.24 shows a scanning electron micrograph and... 

Because most anticipated applications of plastic electronics systems cannot bear high processing costs, the scale-up of pCP presented here is based on simple, low-... 

This chapter summarizes some of our recent work in printing techniques and plastic electronics. It also presents new data from printed transistors that use several different organic semiconductors in a variety of device geometries. In all cases, we observed good performance. pCP for the source/drain electrodes is attractive because it provides a simple and potentially low-cost route to high resolution (i.e. small channel lengths, L) structures that can be used to build transistors which... 

Behl M, Seekamp J, Zankovych S, Torres CMS, Zentel R and Ahopelto J, Towards plastic electronics Patterning semiconducting polymers by nanoimprint lithography , Adv Mater, 2002 14 588-591. 

The field known as organic or plastic electronics is centered on field effect transistor (FET)-based circuits mounted on large-area and/or flexible substrates. When the semiconductor is organic, the device is referred to as an organic field-effect transistor (OFET). Work on OFET has been extensively reviewed, most notably and comprehensively in Chemistry of Materials and Journal of Materials Research special issues, to which the one of us has contributed three articles [1-3]. 

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