Transfer technology for fabrication of flexible OTFT backplane

Abstract

A new transfer technology to realize flexible organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) on a plastic substrate has been developed. The basic principle of the proposed method is that all the fabrication processes for the OTFT array on glass substrate have been completed, and the OTFT is then transferred onto the plastic film. A 5.8-inch diagonal wide-QQVGA OTFT array was fabricated using this technology. We confirmed that degree of substrate deformation with the proposed technology could be suppressed in comparison with that with conventional direct formation method, and also that no significant degradation in the electrical characteristics of the OTFT was observed as a result of the transfer process. It is thought that this will be a key technology for the fabrication of large flexible displays with TFT backplanes.