Breaking Fundamental Limitation of Flow-Induced Anisotropic Growth for Large-Scale and Fast Printing of Organic Single-Crystal Films

Advanced organic electronic technologies have put forward a pressing demand for cost-effective and high-throughput fabrication of organic single-crystal films (OSCFs). However, solution-printed OSCFs are typically plagued by the existence of abundant structural defects, which pose a formidable challenge to achieving large-scale and high-performance organic electronics. Here, it is elucidated that these structural defects are mainly originated from printing flow-induced anisotropic growth, an important factor that is overlooked for too long. In light of this, a surfactant-additive printing method is proposed to effectively overcome the anisotropic growth, enabling the deposition of uniform OSCFs over the wafer scale at a high speed of 1.2 mm s-1 at room temperature. The resulting OSCF exhibits appealing performance with a high average mobility up to 10.7 cm2 V-1 s-1, which is one of the highest values for flexible organic field-effect transistor arrays. Moreover, large-scale OSCF-based flexible logic circuits, which can be bent without degradation to a radius as small as 4.0 mm and over 1000 cycles are realized. The work provides profound insights into breaking the limitation of flow-induced anisotropic growth and opens new avenues for printing large-scale organic single-crystal electronics.