The notion of printable electronics encompasses any printing technologies or processes to create electronic devices, circuits and systems. Printed electronics will complement rather than compete with silicon-based electronics. It aims at completely different application markets where solution-processable, simple and laterally structured circuitry, such as radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) tags on plastic foils, flexible displays, artificial skins, electronic textiles, electronic toys, energy storage devices etc. will be manufactured with high throughput. From the advent of the idea of solution-processed devices organic semiconductors became the immediate choice due to their easy solution processability. The first thin film transistor (TFT) based on an organic semiconductor (polythiophene) was published in the mid 1980’s and showed a mobility value of 10-5 cm2/Vs. Since then, in spite of rapid developments of organic field-effect transistors (OFET’s) over the last decades, measured by the steep rise in the device carrier mobility, the values are still inferior to those of amorphous silicon. For most of the organic semiconductors progress has stalled around values of 10-1 cm2/Vs. This has been accompanied by another limitation pertinent to their applicability, i.e., the stability of the organic materials in air. Moreover, most of the available organic semiconductors are p-type, while n-type semiconductors are scarce.
In this context inorganic oxide semiconductors can be a natural choice as most of the inexpensive, non-toxic, high quality oxide semiconductors are electron conductors. Moreover, the performance of inorganic devices in terms of good efficiency, reliability, high mobility, electronic properties and cost effectiveness is much superior to that of organic devices. There have been only scattered efforts on the development of solution-processed inorganic semiconductor field effect transistors (FET). The progress in inorganic semiconductor devices has been hampered notably due to processing limitations such as low temperature and solution processibility. At this point, we believe that the negligence in inorganic-based printed electronics due to mere processing limitations is premature. The novel approach developed at KIT shows that printed and room temperature processed high quality oxide FET with a transistor mobility better than of amorphous silicon can be produced when electrochemical gating is utilized.

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