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Low-cost, environmentally-friendly photolithography patterning method to produce sub-micron size features on sensitive substrates such as conductive polymers or lipid bilayers.
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Background: Engineers in Prof. Nick Melosh’s laboratory have developed a low-cost, environmentally-friendly photolithography patterning method to produce sub-micron size features on sensitive substrates such as conductive polymers or lipid bilayers. This approach uses a sacrificial layer of germanium (Ge) to protect the integrity of soft organic materials from conventional lithographic patterning techniques. Because Ge is water soluble, it does not require hazardous or exotic solvents with high processing and disposal costs. Furthermore, by enabling reliable, well-established processing with standard photoresists, the overall fabrication has high resolution and reproducibility with end-user applications including biosensors, flexible electronics, or OLED displays. Stage of Research: Organic electronics - The inventors have used this technique to produce a 4 inch wafer with features as small as 500 nanometers. They demonstrated a high speed organic electrochemical transistor (OECT) with switching speeds that were five times faster than previous reports. Biosensors - The inventors have used the method to pattern hybrid lipid bilayers. Applications: Organic semiconductors and displays - patterning conductive polymers for flexible electronics and OLEDs Biosensors - allows engineers to leverage powerful patterning techniques that would otherwise destroy lipids or other biological samples Advantages: Compatible with sensitive organic materials - enables standard photolithography on sensitive materials such as PEDOT:PSS, other conductive polymers, and lipid membranes Low-cost, environmentally-friendly processing - patterning does not require fluorinated ethers or other hazardous chemicals that are expensive to dispose of Reliable, scalable patterning - simple Ge deposition followed by standard photoresists which have been optimized for high resolution and reproducibility High performance devices: sub-micron feature size (500nm) produced OECT with 5 times faster switching than conventional shadow mask fabrication only solvent on final device is water, which does not affect conductivity