Printing, molding, and near-field photolithographic methods for patterning organic lasers, smart pixels and simple circuits

This paper describes several ‘soft lithographic’ techniques that use rubber stamps, molds, and conformable photomasks for micro and nanofabrication. It illustrates how these methods provide low cost routes to patterning for applications in organic electronics and integrated optics. It summarizes some of our recent work in (i) roller printing of organic transistors and related circuitry for transistors, organic ‘smart pixels’ and complementary inverters that have critical dimensions as small as 1 μm, (ii) nanomolding of first and third order distributed feedback, distributed Bragg reflector and photonic crystal resonators for plastic lasers that have narrow emission profiles in the visible range, and (iii) fabrication of low voltage organic transistors and inverter circuits with 0.1 μm channels formed using low cost near-field photolithographic methods.