A Rapid and Facile Soft Contact Lamination Method: Evaluation of Polymer Semiconductors for Stretchable Transistors

Organic stretchable electronics have attracted extensive scientific and industrial interest because they can be stretched, twisted, or compressed, enabling the next-generation of organic electronics for human/machine interfaces. These electronic devices have already been described for applications such as field-effect transistors, photovoltaics, light-emitting diodes, and sensors. High-performance stretchable electronics, however, currently still involve complicated processing steps to integrate the substrates, semiconductors, and electrodes for effective performance. Herein, we describe a facile method to efficiently identify suitable semiconducting polymers for organic stretchable transistors using soft contact lamination. In our method, the various polymers investigated are first transferred on an elastomeric poly­(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) slab and subsequently stretched (up to 100%) along with the PDMS. The polymer/PDMS matrix is then laminated on source/drain electrode-deposited Si substrates equipped with a PDMS dielectric layer. Using this device configuration, the polymer semiconductors can be repeatedly interrogated with laminate/delaminate cycles under different amounts of tensile strain. From our obtained electrical characteristics, e.g., mobility, drain current, and on/off ratio, the strain limitation of semiconductors can be derived. With a facile soft contact lamination testing approach, we can thus rapidly identify potential candidates of semiconducting polymers for stretchable electronics.