Polymeric mold soft-patterned metal oxide field-effect transistors: Critical factors determining device performance

The chemical structures of either spin-cast or soft-patterned ZTO semiconductors were compared and the device performance of thin-film transistors (TFTs) employing two kinds of zinc tin oxide (ZTO) channel layers was investigated in order to explore the factors limiting device performance in soluble oxide TFTs fabricated by polymeric mold-based patterning methodologies Through the comparative analysis of both ZTO layers, it was revealed that less transformed chemical structures evolved in soft-patterned ZTO devices, with significantly degraded device performance, regardless of characteristic synthetic strategies. This variation in the performance was caused by kinetics-involved, different chemical reaction pathways due to gradual solvent evaporation in structurally confined polymeric molds, which inevitably occurs in mold-based soft-patterning techniques The results also suggest the meaningful fact that controlling the solvent evaporation involved trigger of the sol-gel reactions is one of the most significant factors for facilitating high performance devices when using polymeric mold-based soft-patterning processes, unlike the general spin-casting method and jet based printing techniques.