Solution-Based Manufacturing of Semiconductors for Emerging Applications: From Basic Research to Device Applications

Printed semiconductors have made remarkable inroads in recent years, raising the profile of solution-based manufacturing as an increasingly viable and potentially low-cost platform which will one day bring technological functionality more pervasively into our lives. For instance, conjugated organic semiconductors and transition metal oxides already exhibit field effect mobility well above the a-Si:H industrial standard of 1 cm²/Vs, and their performance is increasingly flirting with that of polycrystalline Si. Similarly, solar cells using solution-processed organic semiconductors or colloidal quantum dot solids as light harvesting material have now broken through the 10% power conversion efficiency bar, while lead-based organohalide perovskites have skyrocketed to 20% efficiency. To date, many of these breakthroughs have been driven by trial-and-error and brute force optimization of the figures of merit of devices, with little attention paid to the phase transformation mechanisms leading to these highly performing solid-state materials. In this presentation, I will summarize through practical examples our recent efforts and understanding of the nucleation, growth and microstructure development of solution-processed organic and hybrid semiconductors used in electronics and energy harvesting. I will demonstrate how printed semiconductors can exhibit remarkably good transport and light harvesting properties and how their microstructure can be patterned. Finally, I will discuss how 2D printing of advanced devices can one day be combined concurrently with 3D additive manufacturing of bulk objects to transform how very sophisticated products are manufactured.

Biography:

Aram Amassian is the SABIC Presidential Chair and associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Aram obtained his PhD in Engineering Physics from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal (Canada) in 2006, and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow in the Malliaras group in Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. Aram currently leads the Organic Electronics and Photovoltaics laboratory and is a member of the Solar and Photovoltaic Engineering Research Centre (SPERC). His research focuses on the science and engineering of solution-processing of semiconductors. Aram‘s students seek to establish a mechanistic and quantitative structure-property-performance relationship by emphasizing the roles of formulation thermodynamics and processing kinetics on the phase transformation mechanism from solution through to the solid-state microstructure. He was awarded the NSERC (Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship, as well as the American Vacuum Society’s Electronic Materials Postdoctoral