Photonic post-processing of a multi-material transparent conductive electrode architecture for optoelectronic device integration

RSC Adv. 2024 Feb 5;14(7):4748-4758. doi: 10.1039/d3ra07103k. eCollection 2024 Jan 31.

Abstract

Emerging flexible optoelectronic devices require multi-material processing capabilities to fully enable the use of temperature-sensitive substrates and materials. This report demonstrates how photonic sintering enables the processing of materials with very different properties. For example, charge carrier transport/blocking metal-oxides, and transparent conductive silver nanowire-based electrodes ought to be compatible with low-energy and high-throughput processing for integration onto flexible low-temperature substrates. Compared to traditional post-processing methods, we show a rapid fabrication route yielding highly-stable hybrid electrode architectures on polyethylene terephthalate (PET). This architecture consists of an interconnected silver nanowire network encapsulated with a thin crystalline photo-sensitive titanium dioxide (TiO2) coating, allowing both layers to be treated using independent photonic post-processing sintering steps. The first step sinters the nanowires, while the second completes the conversion of the top metal-oxide layer from amorphous to crystalline TiO2. This approach improves on the fabrication speed compared to oven processing, while delivering optical and electrical characteristics comparable to the state of the art. Optimized transparency values reach 85% with haze values down-to 7% at 550 nm, while maintaining a sheet resistance of 18.1 Ω sq.-1. However, this hybrid architecture provides a much stronger resilience to degradation, which we demonstrate through exposure to harsh plasma conditions. In summary, this study shows how carefully-optimized photonic curing post-processing can provide more-stable hybrid architectures while using a multi-material processing technique suitable for high-volume manufacturing on low-temperature substrates.