Towards paper electronics - printing transistors on paper in a roll-to-roll process

New value-added, intelligent products with novel functionalities, e.g., sensors and simple displays have recently received much attention in the research community. For these types of products to come into everyday use, devices with reasonable electrical performance and negligible production cost are required. One way to reduce the manufacturing cost is to fabricate the electronics on inexpensive paper substrates by using roll-to-roll techniques (“Paper Electronics”), as an alternative to conventional electronics manufactured with batch processes on glass or polymer film substrates. The current work discusses printing of electronics on paper and demonstrates, as a proof-of-concept, a hygroscopic insulator field effect transistor device (HIFET) printed on paper with a custom-built roll-to-roll hybrid printer.