Characterization of the production process of nanoimprinted organic devices by analytical TEM
Johanna Kraxner
Graz Centre for Electron Microscopy and Institute for Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis
15:20 - 17:30 Thursday 24 October 2013 Foyer Alte Technik Organic electronics is a field of research with growing interest in the last years. Many applications are already entering industrial commercialization, but the search for new materials and the improvement of the used processes is still in progress. My work is so far embedded in the FFG project NILechoII (830269). In this project our partners at Joanneum Research are producing organic thin film transistors (oTFT) with a well-established self-aligned process. One goal of the project is to perform a transition to all printable materials with regard to roll-to-roll processability. This transition makes the cross section analysis essential to evaluate the suitability of new materials for the process.
With regard to the optimization of the electrical devices, the electron microscope provides an excellent method to systematically study the various manufacturing steps and their influence on the devices. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), including also scanning TEM (STEM) are used to monitor the output of the manufacturing process. Moreover energy filtered TEM (EFTEM) as well as Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EEL) and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDXS) are also used to gain a deeper understanding of the device at hand. Especially with the transformation to all printable materials the analytical methods become more and more important due to the lack of differences (e.g. contrast) between the different materials.
A further challenge is the TEM specimen preparation which is done mainly by FIB, due to the fact that soft matters are difficult to prepare. Moreover the FIB preparation itself can result in artifacts in the polymeric materials, leading for example, to an intermixing of the different layers.
The poster will give an overview of the used NIL process and furthermore will present the results for characterization of the device within the Transmission Electron Microscope.
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