Issue 20, 2018, Issue in Progress

Extremely flat metal films implemented by surface roughness transfer for flexible electronics

Abstract

We present an innovative approach to fabricate an extremely flat (EF) metal film which was done by depositing metal on an extremely flat mother substrate, then detaching the metal from the substrate. The detached flexible metal films had a roughness that was within 2% of the roughness of the mother substrate, so EFs with Ra < 1 nm could be fabricated using the surface roughness transfer method. With quantitative analysis using in situ synchrotron XPS, it was concluded that the chemical reaction of oxygen atoms with the metal film played a critical role in designing a peel-off system to get extremely flat metal films from the mother substrate. The OLED was successfully implemented on the metal film. The OLED's luminance could be increased from 15 142 to 17 100 cd m−2 at 25 mA m−2 by replacing the glass substrate with an EF copper (Cu) substrate, due to the enhanced heat dissipation during the operation. This novel method can be very useful for mass production of large scale, low-cost and high quality metal films using roll-to-roll process.

Graphical abstract: Extremely flat metal films implemented by surface roughness transfer for flexible electronics

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
11 Jan 2018
Accepted
07 Mar 2018
First published
19 Mar 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

RSC Adv., 2018,8, 10883-10888

Extremely flat metal films implemented by surface roughness transfer for flexible electronics

K. Kim, S. Kim, G. H. Jung, I. Lee, S. Kim, J. Ham, W. J. Dong, K. Hong and J. Lee, RSC Adv., 2018, 8, 10883 DOI: 10.1039/C8RA00298C

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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