Plastic substrates are thinner, lighter, tear-resistant, flexible, roll-up and foldable, making Silicon-on-Plastic an enabling technology for new applications / products. This paper studies the development of Silicon on Plastic technology.
Advances in polysilicon technology have extended TFT (thin film) technology to high-speed electronic applications such as smart cards, RFID tags, portable imaging devices, photovoltaic devices and solid state lighting and other integrated circuit functions .
The challenge of Silicon-on-Plastic technology is to overcome the fact that plastic melts at the temperature required to build transistors in conventional TFT processes. Technological innovations have been made to accommodate silicon processing at low temperatures. His paper describes an innovative TFT process of ultra-low temperature poly-silicon in plastic substrates. Key technologies include stages of deposition of oxide and silicon at room temperature, laser crystallisation and activation of dopants. We review the manufacturing problems related to the compatibility of plastic materials in a TFT process. The lamination and de-lamination of plastic wafers to glass support wafers for manufacture are discussed. An active matrix TFT backplane will be fabricated with an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display to demonstrate this technology.