Highly durable Cu-based electrodes from a printable nanoparticle mixture ink: flash-light-sintered, kinetically-controlled microstructure

Recently, printable nanomaterials have drawn tremendous attention for low-cost, large-area electronics applications. In particular, metallic nanoparticles that can facilitate the formation of highly functioning electrodes are indispensable constituent nanomaterials. In this paper, we propose printable mixed inks comprising multicomponent ingredients of Cu, Ni and Cu/Cu Sn core/shell nanoparticles. It is clearly revealed that a characteristic morphology appropriate to highly conductive and durable Cu-based electrodes can be derived easily in a timescale of about 1 ms through an instantaneous flash-light-sintering process, resulting in a resistivity of 49 μΩ cm and normalized resistance variation of around 1 (after 28 days under a harsh environment of 85 °C temperature and 85% humidity). In addition, it is demonstrated that highly functioning electrodes can be formed on thermally vulnerable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates by incorporating an ultrathin optical/thermal plasmonic barrier layer.