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Highly smooth and conductive silver film with metallo-organic decomposition ink for all-solution-processed flexible organic thin-film transistors

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Abstract

A facile silver metallo-organic decomposition (MOD) ink and its two-step sintering process was developed to fabricate highly conductive and smooth silver film for the flexible organic electronics. Using simple and feasible two-step sintering processes and double-layer processes, the conductivity of silver film with the facile MOD ink was greatly improved from 2.85 × 103 S cm−1 to 1.50 × 105 S cm−1, indicating about 53 times increase and about 24% bulk silver conductivity, and the surface RMS roughness was about 6 nm by atomic force microscope, nearly identical to the thermal-evaporated silver film. The XRD showed that synthesized silver thin films were composed of pure silver and well crystallized to the face-centered cubic structure, similar to metallic silver. And the full XPS spectra showed the presence of the same elements and almost identical peaks of solution-processed silver, as compared to the thermal silver surface elemental data. Besides, the silver film also demonstrated great mechanical stability and adhesion on PET substrate. At last, using silver gate/source/drain electrodes generated from the MOD ink, the all-solution-processed organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) were demonstrated. The optimized OTFTs exhibited a high field mobility of 0.36 cm2 V−1 s−1 with threshold voltage of 0.35 V and on/off current ratio of 1 × 105.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61804019, 61574092), the Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. KJQN201800623) and Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing (Grant No. cstc2019jcyj-msxmX0343). It was performed in part at the facilities in National Engineering Lab for TFT-LCD Key Materials and Technologies in SJTU.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, 400065, People’s Republic of China

    Yingtao Xie

  2. Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, People’s Republic of China

    Shihong Ouyang, Dongping Wang & Hon Hang Fong

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Research and Development Center for Smart Textile Technology, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, 10608, Taiwan

    Wen-Ya Lee

  4. Department of Chemical Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, People’s Republic of China

    Hon Hang Fong

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  1. Yingtao Xie
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Correspondence to Hon Hang Fong.

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Xie, Y., Ouyang, S., Wang, D. et al. Highly smooth and conductive silver film with metallo-organic decomposition ink for all-solution-processed flexible organic thin-film transistors. J Mater Sci 55, 15908–15918 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-020-05140-1

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