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Organic-semiconductor: Polymer-electret blends for high-performance transistors

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Abstract

As compared with polymer semiconductors, solution-processed small-molecule semiconductors usually have poorer film-formation properties, which induces wide variations in device performance in terms of mobility and threshold voltage, thus severely limiting their commercial applications. In this work, we propose an easily accessible method to improve the performance and reduce the variability of small-molecule organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) by blending organic semiconductors with an insulator polymer, which is subsequently post-treated by gate stress to generate an electret. By blending the organic semiconductor 2,7-didodecyl[1]benzothieno[3,2-b][1]benzothiophene (C12-BTBT) with the insulator polystyrene, uniform transport layers with vertically phase segregated morphology are obtained, from which the mobility and threshold voltage of OFETs are largely manipulated. The OFETs exhibit field-effect mobilities as high as 7.5 cm2·V−1·s−1 with an on/off ratio exceeding 106 in ambient conditions. This double-layer structure provides an appropriate architecture for applying gate-stress to inject charges into the insulating layer, forming an electret. The generation of the electret is thermally accelerated and thus can be easily realized under moderate gate-stress at elevated temperature (e.g., 60 °C). After cooling, the electret layer serves as a floating-gate, which not only continuously tunes the threshold voltage and field-effect mobility, but also helps minimize the contact resistances and optimize the subthreshold swing. As an application of this method, a digital inverter is built and its performance is optimized via in situ tuning of its individual transistors.

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Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51473132 and 21574103) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Nos. 2015M580841 and 2016T90910). G. L. thanks Cyrus Tang Foundation and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. The authors are grateful to Wanlong Lu, Yuming Qiu, Ziyu Wang, Yupeng Hu, and Xinyuan Dong for experimental assistance and fruitful discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, and State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710054, China

    Peng Wei, Shengtao Li, Dongfan Li, Han Yu, Xudong Wang, Congcong Xu, Yaodong Yang & Guanghao Lu

  2. School of Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Laju Bu

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  1. Peng Wei
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  2. Shengtao Li
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  3. Dongfan Li
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  7. Yaodong Yang
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  8. Laju Bu
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  9. Guanghao Lu
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Correspondence to Shengtao Li, Laju Bu or Guanghao Lu.

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Wei, P., Li, S., Li, D. et al. Organic-semiconductor: Polymer-electret blends for high-performance transistors. Nano Res. 11, 5835–5848 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-2088-7

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