(1 of 37)high mobility (µ) (even in amorphous phase), wide bandgap (transparent in the visible range), and the ability to be controllably doped. Importantly, they can be grown into thin films and various nanostructures with different scalable deposition techniques, including vacuum-based methods such as physical vapor deposition (PVD) [7,8] and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [9] as well as solution-based processes such as spray [10] and spin coating. [11] Moreover, the resulting layers can be easily patterned using standard fabrication procedures and as such can be integrated into state-of-the-art processes for (opto)electronic applications. The above-mentioned capabilities have led to a plethora of applications such as switching backplanes for displays, transparent and flexible electronics, integrated circuits (ICs), photovoltaics (PVs), organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), capacitors, batteries, photocatalytic devices, electrochromics and memory devices, to name but a few. [8,[12][13][14] Because of their ability to be doped, their electronic properties can be tuned from dielectrics to semiconductors and conductors. This characteristic versatility has recently been exploited to stretch the range of their applications to new technological sectors, such as plasmonics in the near infrared and midinfrared spectral ranges. [12,15] One of the driving applications of metal oxides is in thinfilm transistors (TFTs) for large area electronics such as current driven optical displays and ICs. Following the early demonstrations, [16] most effort focused on the fabrication and processing of metal oxides TFTs paying particular attention to the device performance and applications. [1,5,6,17] Especially when processed over large areas, as in the case for display applications, the complexity to precisely control the device reliability and reproducibility becomes a challenging aspect of any TFT technology. To that respect, solution-based techniques progressed rapidly due to their lower cost and higher throughput compared to vacuum-based techniques. In both cases, the metal-oxide deposition has so far been limited to high processing temperatures (>250 °C) (Figure 1a) which renders the technology incompatible with inexpensive, temperature-sensitive substrates such as polymers, the material class of choice for various high throughput manufacturing techniques such as roll-to-roll (R2R) and sheet-to-sheet (S2S)Over the past few decades, significant progress has been made in the field of photonic processing of electronic materials using a variety of light sources. Several of these technologies have now been exploited in conjunction with emerging electronic materials as alternatives to conventional hightemperature thermal annealing, offering rapid manufacturing times and compatibility with temperature-sensitive substrate materials among other potential advantages. Herein, recent advances in photonic processing paradigms of metal-oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs) are presented with particular emphasis on the use of various light sour...
