e-LIFT : a European project

e-LIFT is a collaborative project funded by European community within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). It is part of the "Flexible, Organic and Large Area Electronics (OLAE)" activities of the "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)" theme. This collaborative project involves 15 partners from 7 different european countries. It started in January 2010 for a 3 years period. Its overall budget is 4.16M€ for 3M€ funding from Europe.

e-LIFT context

For many applications within the microelectronics industry, the most relevant keywords are now 'flexible', 'low cost' and 'large area'. In this context, the typical dimension of the elementary unit is of the order of a few microns (3 to 50 micrometers). Moreover, the integration or many functions on the same device via one unique process is of paramount importance. Moreover, device performance will be significantly enhanced by the appropriate combination of organic and inorganic compounds. The development of a simple process allowing the deposition of a wide variety of materials, with high spatial resolution (a few micrometers), is therefore of great interest for the manufacturing of future electronic devices.

e-LIFT objectives

The main objective of this project is to use the Laser-Induced Forward Transfer (LIFT) process as a high resolution printing technique for organic and inorganic material. It has been successfully applied so far in laboratory-scale trials for the deposition of various materials (organic, inorganic, polymers, biomaterials, ...) and the realisation of devices such as OLEDs or TFTs. This process can print millions pixels per second and doesn't require any post-annealing. The ability of printing such a diverse range of materials with a unique process opens up new perspectives for increasing the performances of devices.
e-LIFT integrates expertises in laser physics, chemistry and microelectronics from academics, integrators and product manufacturers from industry in order to validate this printing technology, define its capabilities and its limits, and finally to ensure its successful transfer towards real-world applications in manufacturing. Some specific applications will be addressed and that will lead to the realisation and characterisation of components like TFTs, OLEDs, sensors, energy harvesters, and the laser printing of the most promising of these composites onto RFID tags. This scientific effort will pave the way to the definition of the laser printing prototype together with reliability and productivity considerations.