Flexible and Transparent Metallic Grid Electrodes Prepared by Evaporative Assembly

We propose a novel approach to fabricating flexible transparent metallic grid electrodes via evaporative deposition involving flow-coating. A transparent flexible metal grid electrode was fabricated through four essential steps including: (i) polymer line pattern formation on the thermally evaporated metal layer onto a plastic substrate; (ii) rotation of the stage by 90° and the formation of the second polymer line pattern; (iii) etching of the unprotected metal region; and (iv) removal of the residual polymer from the metal grid pattern. Both the metal grid width and the spacing were systematically controlled by varying the concentration of the polymer solution and the moving distance between intermittent stop times of the polymer blade. The optimized Au grid electrodes exhibited an optical transmittance of 92% at 550 nm and a sheet resistance of 97 Ω/sq. The resulting metallic grid electrodes were successfully applied to various organic electronic devices, such as organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), and organic solar cells (OSCs).