LOW-COST ALL-POLYMER INTEGRATED-CIRCUITS

A technology has been developed to make all polymer integrated circuit s. it involves reproducible fabrication of field-effect transistors in which the semiconducting, conducting and insulating parts are all mad e of polymers. The fabrication on flexible substrates uses spin-coatin g of electrically active precursors and patternwise exposure of the de posited films. In the whole process stack integrity is maintained. Ver tical interconnects are made mechanically. As a demonstrator functiona l 15-bit programmable code generators are fabricated. These circuits s till operate when the foils are sharply bent. Due to the limited numbe r of process steps the technology is potentially inexpensive. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.