Continuous roll to roll nanoimprinting of inherently conducting polyaniline

Roll to roll printing has been used recently to produce organic electronics. In future, the high speed manufacturing methods offer a way to integrate electronic functions on consumer products and packages. The minimum feature sizes achieved with roll to roll printing processes, such as gravure or flexography printing, are in the range of tens of microns. Roll to roll nanoimprinting enables a way to produce submicron features at high speed. In this work we have investigated roll to roll manufacturing of submicron structures of conducting polymer using a custom made laboratory scale nanoimprinting machine. The machine combines a gravure printing unit and a nanoimprinting unit. The units can be used consecutively to pattern the web in a single pass. We present results obtained using the gravure unit to print inherently conducting polymer layer on the substrate web, followed by pattering the polymer layer using the nanoimprinting unit. Using this approach we have realised submicron features in inherently conductive polyaniline-dodecylbenzenesulfonic acid (PANI-DBSA) film. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.