Abstract

As solution-processing of organic semiconductors emerges as a viable manufacturing process, supported by recent reports of high performance organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) and solar cells, there is increasing urgency to speed up the development of scalable, robust and reproducible manufacturing processes. Complementing traditional trial-and-error methods with rigorous in situ investigations and predictive computational modeling (farther down the road) should help to achieve rapid optimization and performance improvements on industrially relevant scalable processes. Fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms of laboratory-based solution processes, such as drop-, spin- and blade-casting is therefore a crucial and informative first step, since these processes have yielded most of the record-breaking device performances reported to date in the organic electronics and photovoltaics. This talk will present a status update of my group’s multidisciplinary efforts at KAUST and through strategic collaborations to understand, control, and ultimately model these processes. I will begin by discussing drop- and spin-casting of small-molecule thin films and contrast the nucleation and growth processes within these processes to a significantly different behavior observed in blade-cast films in the context of OTFT applications. I will also share recent findings related to the formation of polymer-molecule blends via spin-casting, and highlight preliminary results suggesting that experimentally validated computer-assisted process development and optimization may not be so far off into our future.