Recipe for smarter organic transistors

The flexibility of organic materials makes them desirable for fabricating devices that can be integrated into clothes, paper and flexible displays.  

Transistors made using organic materials, however, have a major drawback. The transport of particles carrying an electric charge faces resistance during travel from a metal electrode into the semiconductor layer. Known as contact resistance, it considerably reduces ‘charge carrier’ mobility, significantly decreasing the efficiency of electronic devices. 

A research team, including an author in Saudi Arabia, has now reduced contact resistance in a thin-film organic transistor using a simple technique. They fabricated the transistor by slowly depositing a gold metal electrode on a thermally resilient substrate. This slow deposition tweaked the properties of the metal electrode, leaving the semiconductor layer intact. 

This technique reduced the contact resistance by six times, significantly increasing charge carrier mobility through the transistor. 

“This work represents a significant advance in the effort to produce high mobility organic transistors, which are necessary for creating high frequency organic devices,” says lead researcher Oana D. Jurchescu from Wake Forest University in the US.  

The technique is efficient and robust, and it can be generally applied in all common processes and device architectures.    

The researchers anticipate that the approach could improve performance in a broad range of devices.  

In the next phase, the team plans to push the boundaries of organic thin-film transistors by reducing the device dimensions and integrating them in various applications, adds lead author Zachary A. Lamport.

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