Fully gravure printed half adder on plastic foils

All-printed half adders will be the first step to the way of printing an arithmetic logic unit which will be further expanded to printing microprocessors directly onto flexible plastic foils. In this letter, the half-adder circuit has been constructed using an all gravure printing process on poly(ethylene terephtalate) foils. To successfully operate the printed half adder, we first simulate the half adder using the parameters extracted from gravure-printed single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT)-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) to provide a tolerable range of fluctuations of electrical parameters of the gravure-printed SWNT-based TFTs. Based on the close comparison between simulation results and attained electrical parameters of printed TFTs, controlling waviness of printed drain-source electrodes has been found to be a key factor for successfully executing the function of a printed half adder on the plastic foils.