Surfactant-Induced Solubility Control To Realize Water-Processed High-Precision Patterning of Polymeric Semiconductors for Full Color Organic Image Sensor.

Sim, Kyu Min; Yoon, Seongwon; Kim, Soo-Kwan; Ko, Hyunki; Hassan, Syed Zahid; Chung, Dae Sung · ACS Nano · 2020

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

A fully water-based patterning method for polymer semiconductors was developed and utilized to realize high-precision lateral patterning of various polymers. Water-borne polymer colloids, wherein hydrophobic polymers are dispersed in water with the assistance of surfactant molecules, possess a hydrophilic surface when printed onto a substrate. When this surface is exposed to a washing molecule, the surface of the polymer film recovers its original hydrophobic nature. Such surfactant-induced solubility control (SISC) enables environmentally benign, water-processed, and high-precision patterning of various polymer semiconductors with totally different solubilities, so that fully water-processed polymer organic image sensors (OISs) can be realized. B-/G-/R-selective photodiodes with a pixel size of 100 μm × 100 μm were fabricated and patterned by this water-based SISC method, leading to not only high average specific detectivity values (over 10<sup>12</sup> Jones) but also narrow pixel-to-pixel deviation. Thanks to the superiority of the SISC method, we demonstrate the image capturing ability of OISs without B-/G-/R-color filters, from a fully water-based fabrication process.