On August 2, KAIST announced that through their collaboration, Professors Seung Hwan Ko and Minyang Yang of the Department of Mechanical Engineering developed a method to make high-resolution metal patterns through a single process, using femtosecond laser selective nanoparticle sintering (FLSNS).

Until now, conventional vacuum metal deposition and photolithography processes have been widely used for high-resolution metal patterning of microelectronics. To produce the patterns, Inkjet and Roll to Roll printing techniques have usually been incorporated. The drawbacks of these processes are that they are costly and the resolution is limited to only one micrometer in width.

To overcome these issues, FLSNS was developed as an alternative. It uses silver nanoparticles which have a low melting point and sizes between three to six nanometers. Due to the above characteristics and low thermal diffusivity, it is possible to produce high-detail metal patterns at low temperatures and non-vacuum environments on various surfaces such as glass, wafers and films for lower prices than conventional methods. Furthermore, with the new technique the resolution of the patterns can get up to 380 nanometers in width. It was also successfully shown that it is possible to use the FLSNS process to synthesize metal electrodes for devices such as organic field-effect transistors (OFETs).

As FLSNS makes high-resolution patterning possible on various material surfaces at low temperatures and non-vacuum conditions, should it be used in conjunction with the OFETs production process, the production of high-performance flexible electronic devices or displays in the near future will be a possibility.
 

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