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Hybrid fabrication of flexible fully printed carbon nanotube field-effect transistors

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Abstract

A facile and cost-efficient multiple fully printed method to fabricate p-type carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET) on the flexible paper substrate is proposed in this paper. Through the selective separation of polymer poly[(9,9-dioctylfluorenyl-2,7-diyl)-alt-(benzo [2,1,3] thiadiazol-4,7-diyl)] (PFO-BT) and stable dispersion of sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate (SDBS) surfactant, the obtained CNTs individually dispersed ink (denoted as mono-dispersion ink) is applied in standard inkjet printers. The multiple system of Roll-to-Roll (R2R) flexo printing (to print silver-based catalyst ink for the subsequent electroless copper plating process) and inkjet printing (to print semiconductor channel material) is adopted in p-type metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication with good printing line accuracy and high-throughput. The transistors obtained by this fabrication process can maintain an on-off ratio (Ion/Ioff \(\approx\) 2806), with approximately 70% of the devices’ on-off ratio is concentrated in 103–104 with a threshold voltage of about + 3 V. The flexible and fully printed strategy presented in this paper has a strong migration ability, which can be applied to a variety of semiconductor channel materials with diverse flexible substrates (e.g., polyimide, polyethylene terephthalate, etc.) and provide an effective and facile route for large-scale preparation of flexible integrated electronic devices.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51902040), and the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 2023NSFSC0410).

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51902040), and the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province (Grant No. 2023NSFSC0410).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials and Energy, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Hao-wen Zhang, Xiao-han Liao, Yang-sheng Wang, Jian-qiang Luo, Zhao-quan Xu, Yuan-ming Chen, Zhe-sheng Feng & Yan Wang

  2. Sichuan Leader-tech Co., Ltd, Suining, 629000, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Yuan-ming Chen & Yan Wang

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  1. Hao-wen Zhang
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Contributions

Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by HZ and XL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by HZ. Project administration, conceptualization and formal analysis were performed by YW, JL and ZX. Visualization, Investigation and Methodology were performed by YC, ZF and YW. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yan Wang.

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Zhang, Hw., Liao, Xh., Wang, Ys. et al. Hybrid fabrication of flexible fully printed carbon nanotube field-effect transistors. J Mater Sci: Mater Electron 34, 2147 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-023-11585-2

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