Advances in maskless and mask-based optical lithography on plastic flexible substrates

Organic flexible electronics is an emerging technology with huge potential growth in the future which is likely to open up a complete new series of potential applications such as flexible OLED-based displays, urban commercial signage, and flexible electronic paper. The transistor is the fundamental building block of all these applications. A key challenge in patterning transistors on flexible plastic substrates stems from the in-plane nonlinear deformations as a consequence of foil expansion/shrinkage, moisture uptake, baking etc. during various processing steps. Optical maskless lithography is one of the potential candidates for compensating for these foil distortions by in-situ adjustment prior to exposure of the new layer image with respect to the already patterned layers. Maskless lithography also brings the added value of reducing the cost-of-ownership related to traditional mask-based tools by eliminating the need for expensive masks. For the purpose of this paper, single-layer maskless exposures at 355 nm were performed on gold-coated poly(ethylenenaphthalate) (PEN) flexible substrates temporarily attached to rigid carriers to ensure dimensional stability during processing. Two positive photoresists were employed for this study and the results on plastic foils were benchmarked against maskless as well as mask-based (ASML PAS 5500/100D stepper) exposures on silicon wafers. © 2009 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.