A printable form of single crystal silicon for high performance thin film transistors on plastic

This talk describes the fabrication and electrical characteristics of high performance thin film transistors derived from printed and solution cast micro/nanoscale objects of single crystal silicon. These elements are fabricated from conventional bulk silicon substrates or from silicon-on-insulator wafers by patterning a layer of resist by soft lithography, anisotropically wet etching the exposed silicon, and then lifting off the silicon. A large collection of such objects - which can have geometries that range from ribbons to platelets, sheets, disks and other shapes - constitutes a type of material, which we refer to as microstructured silicon (ps-Si), that can be deposited and patterned, by dry transfer printing or solution casting, onto plastic substrates to yield mechanically flexible thin film transistors that have excellent electrical properties.