'Hetero-print': A holistic approach to transfer-printing for heterogeneous integration in manufacturing

在微纳米尺度上快速发展的转移印刷技术允许在几乎任何位置的各种基材上制造高质量，高性能的设备。这种高度通用的功能具有高精度的机械拾取和放置组装技术，该技术利用了软邮票的粘合特性，该技术直到最近才进入电子和光子学领域。在20世纪90年代，作为微加工和纳米技术的先驱，Whitesides（哈佛大学化学系）将这一令人兴奋和高度重要的发展置于背景下，建立了用于平版印刷、传感、医疗和制药应用的自组装单层图案的开创性概念，并将其称为微接触印刷。在此基础上，该技术已经发展到更高层次的复杂性，其中微转移印刷最近提供了微型LED阵列，例如，在柔性显示器中具有特色，并提供柔性有机发光二极管（oled）的无机类似物-以前被认为是极具挑战性的，如果不是不可能的话。在这个项目中，“异质印刷”，我们的目标是通过建立，第一次和领先于国际竞争，快速推动这一令人兴奋的领域进一步发展，迈向异质设备制造的新路线，包括由纯和/或混合无机/有机材料制成的集成系统。对这些混合方法的需求非常高，因为它开辟了有机材料可以与无机半导体技术相结合的多功能器件的前景。Hetero-print的目标是提供微纳米转移印刷技术，用于异质材料、结构和设备的通用和可扩展制造。为了实现这一目标，我们将为电子、光子和其他系统的制造引入重要的新能力，这些能力与现有的半导体大规模制造方法（包括真空沉积和溶液处理）相补充和协同。在这方面，转移印刷是一种高度可扩展的技术，非常适合大批量生产，允许在一次运行中处理100万个微型集成电路。许多光子设备的一个问题是成本，但微转移印刷可以经济的打印周期的数量从一个邮票运行到数万；该技术在材料浪费方面也是经济的，提供了一种以非常高的产量制造多阵列器件的方法。

The rapidly developing technique of transfer printing on the micro and nanoscales allows the manufacture of high quality, high performance devices on a wide range of substrates in almost any location. This highly versatile capability features a high-precision mechanical pick-and-place assembly technique that utilises the adhesive properties of soft stamps, and the technology has only recently broken into the field of electronics and photonics. Placing this exciting and highly important development into context, in the 1990s Whitesides (Harvard University Chemistry Dept.), a pioneer in microfabrication and nanotechnology, established the ground-breaking concept of patterning self-assembled monolayers for lithographic, sensing, medical and pharmaceutical applications and termed this micro-contact printing. From this foundation, the technique has evolved into much higher levels of complexity in which micro-transfer printing has recently delivered micro- LED arrays that, for example, feature in flexible displays and provide inorganic analogues of flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) - something that was previously thought to be extremely challenging if not impossible. In this programme, 'Hetero-print', we aim to rapidly push this exciting field further by establishing, for the first time and ahead of the international competition, new routes towards the manufacture of heterogeneous devices, consisting of integrated systems made from pure and/or hybrid inorganic/organic materials. The demand for these hybrid approaches is extremely high, because it opens up the prospect of multifunctional devices that organic materials can deliver in tandem with inorganic semiconductor technology. The ambition of Hetero-print is to deliver micro- and nano-transfer printing as the technology for the versatile and scalable manufacture of heterogeneous materials, structures and devices. In achieving this, we will introduce significant new capabilities for the manufacture of electronic, photonic, and other systems, which complement and are synergistic with those of established semiconductor mass-manufacturing methods including vacuum deposition and solution processing. In this respect, transfer printing is a highly scalable technique and perfectly suited to high volume manufacture, allowing >10,000 micro-sized integrated circuits to be processed in a single run. An issue with many photonic devices is cost, but micro-transfer printing can be economical with the number of print cycles from a single stamp running into the tens of thousands; the technique is also economical in terms of materials waste, providing a methodology to manufacture multiple-array devices in very high yield.