Inkjet-Printed High Mobility Transparent–Oxide Semiconductors

In this paper, we report a general and low-cost process to fabricate high mobility metal-oxide semiconductors that is suitable for thin-film electronics. This process use simple metal halide precursors dissolved in an organic solvent and is capable of forming uniform and continuous thin films via inkjet-printing or spin-coating process. This process has been demonstrated to deposit a variety of semiconducting metal oxides include binary oxides (ZnO, In₂O₃ , SnO₂ , Ga₂O₃ ), ternary oxides (ZIO, ITO, ZTO, IGO) and quaternary compounds (IZTO, IGZO). Functional thin film transistors with high field-effect mobility were fabricated successfully using channel layers deposited from this process. This synthetic pathway opens an avenue to form patterned metal oxide semiconductors through a simple and low-cost process and to fabricate high performance transparent thin film electronics via digital fabrication processes on large substrates.