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Solution-processed top-contact electrodes strategy for organic crystalline field-effect transistor arrays

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Abstract

Organic crystals, especially ultra-thin two-dimensional (2D) ones such as monolayer molecular crystals, are fragile and vulnerable to traditional vacuum deposition. Up to now, most of the methods reported for fabricating organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) with top-electrodes on the 2D molecular crystals are based on mechanical-transfer method. Nondestructive method for large scale in-situ electrode deposition is urgent. In this work, the silver mirror reaction (SMR) is introduced to construct top-contact electrodes on 2D organic crystalline thin films. OFETs based on bilayer crystalline films with solution-processed silver electrodes show comparable performance to devices with transferred gold electrodes. In addition to that, OFETs with SMR fabricated silver electrodes show lower contact resistance than the ones with evaporated silver electrodes. Furthermore, the temperature under which SMR electrodes annealed is relatively low (60 °C), making this approach applicable to varies of organic semiconductors, such as spin-coated polymer films, vacuum evaporated films, 2D and even monolayer crystalline films. Besides, OFETs with sub-micrometer channel width and 25 µm channel length are realized which might find practical application in the ultra-small pixel mini/micro-LEDs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Nos. 2017YFA0204704 and 2016YFB0401100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21805284 and 21873108), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Hundred Talents Plan), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (No. 2019M660807), and the Strategic Priority Research Program (No. XDB30000000).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Xi Zhang, Xiaotong Zhao, Limei Rao, Jing Zhang, Mingchao Xiao, Danlei Zhu, Chunlei Li, Xiaosong Shi, Jie Liu, Jie Liu & Lang Jiang

  2. University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xi Zhang

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  1. Xi Zhang
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  2. Xiaotong Zhao
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  3. Limei Rao
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Correspondence to Jie Liu or Lang Jiang.

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Zhang, X., Zhao, X., Rao, L. et al. Solution-processed top-contact electrodes strategy for organic crystalline field-effect transistor arrays. Nano Res. 15, 858–863 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-021-3563-0

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