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Inkjet printing technology has emerged as major contender for large area electronics. The major challenge for this technology is the development of suitable conductive ink to obtain high quality patterns with desired electrical conductivity comparable to metals. The conductive ink should have good film formability on the flexible substrate as well as lower annealing temperature compatible with plastic substrates. Gold nano particle (AuNP) is the material of choice due to its very low sintering temperature in addition to excellent electrical property and resistance to corrosion. We have synthesized the butanethiol encapsulated Au-NP by the Brust method. We demonstrate a sintering temperature as low as 150°C for butanethiol capped gold nanoparticles of size less than 2 nm. The conductive gold films obtained after transformation have been investigated using four point probe method to measure sheet resistance as a function of process time. We show that the electrical properties degrade as annealing time increases. The reason for changes in electrical property has been investigated using SEM, TEM and XRD. The decrease in conductivity is traced to the formation of large micron sized gold crystallites on the film surface at temperatures as low as 160°C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, super transparent (~100%) and conducting In 14 Ti 1 O 23 (Titanium doped Indium oxide; InTiO) films were reported via solution combustion processing with acetylacetone as fuel. Both bulk-powder and thin film systems were studied and revealed the efficacy of low temperature combustion synthesis which yielded crystalline InTiO powder at 150 °C and its film counterpart had shown pronounced crystalinity with temperature. Also, all films with varying annealing temperature were smooth with rms value ranging from 0.29 nm to 1.9 nm. In addition, the charge carrier density in all films found to be of the order 10 19  cm −3 , possessing highest transparency nearly equals to uncoated glass at an annealing temperature of 350 °C having maximum of ~67% metal-oxygen-metal framework (or lattice oxygen) confirmed via X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Also, the highest conductivity of 20 S/cm at an annealing temperature of 450 °C clearly conveyed the potential of solution combustion processing in the fabrication of ultra-transparent InTiO films with no sophistication in the film fabrication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]