High Performance Printed Electronics on Large Area Flexible Substrates

Printed electronics has attracted significant interest in recent years due to simple, cost-effective fabrication, reduced e-waste and potential for the development of multifunctional devices over large areas. Over the years, various printing technologies have been developed to pattern flexible surfaces to develop wide range of electronic devices. A large part of the research so far has focussed on organic semiconductors based devices, even if the modest performance they offer is insufficient for several emerging applications (e. g. internet of things (IoTs), smart cities, robotics, etc.) where fast computation and communication are required. The high-performance requirements could be addressed with printed devices from high-mobility materials such as single crystal silicon (Si) and graphene. This paper presents the printing methodologies (i.e. contact and transfer printing) that are being explored for high-performance devices and circuits using nano to macro scale structures such as semiconductor nanowires (NWs), nanoribbon (NR), and ultra-thin chips (UTCs) as well as graphene. Few examples of high-performance devices obtained using contact and transfer printing are also presented.