All-printed large-scale integrated circuits based on organic electrochemical transistors

Peter Andersson Ersman,Magnus Berggren,Robert Forchheimer,Jan Strandberg,Simone Fabiano,Vahid Keshmiri,Roman Lassnig,Deyu Tu,Göran Gustafsson

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13079-4

Peter Andersson Ersman, Magnus Berggren + Show 7 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13079-4

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Abstract

The communication outposts of the emerging Internet of Things are embodied by ordinary items, which desirably include all-printed flexible sensors, actuators, displays and akin organic electronic interface devices in combination with silicon-based digital signal processing and communication technologies. However, hybrid integration of smart electronic labels is partly hampered due to a lack of technology that (de)multiplex signals between silicon chips and printed electronic devices. Here, we report all-printed 4-to-7 decoders and seven-bit shift registers, including over 100 organic electrochemical transistors each, thus minimizing the number of terminals required to drive monolithically integrated all-printed electrochromic displays. These relatively advanced circuits are enabled by a reduction of the transistor footprint, an effort which includes several further developments of materials and screen printing processes. Our findings demonstrate that digital circuits based on organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) provide a unique bridge between all-printed organic electronics (OEs) and low-cost silicon chip technology for Internet of Things applications.

Highlights

The communication outposts of the emerging Internet of Things are embodied by ordinary items, which desirably include all-printed flexible sensors, actuators, displays and akin organic electronic interface devices in combination with silicon-based digital signal processing and communication technologies
The PEDOT:PSSbased organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are printed to form a coplanar top-gate configuration (Fig. 2a, b), where a printed solid electrolyte is sandwiched between a bottom channel and a top-gate electrode, allowing for shorter switching times and smaller footprints, as compared with the lateral configuration[43]
The seven-bit shift register of the all-printed coplanar OECTs requires 114 transistors and 29 stages of logic propagation. This number of integrated OECTs is about one order of magnitude higher when compared with the number of transistors included in any other previous attempts to obtain OECT-based logic circuits

Summary

Introduction

The communication outposts of the emerging Internet of Things are embodied by ordinary items, which desirably include all-printed flexible sensors, actuators, displays and akin organic electronic interface devices in combination with silicon-based digital signal processing and communication technologies. We report all-printed 4-to-7 decoders and seven-bit shift registers, including over 100 organic electrochemical transistors each, minimizing the number of terminals required to drive monolithically integrated all-printed electrochromic displays. Slow switching and a large device footprint, i.e., on the scale of 10–100 ms and 0.1–1 mm[2], respectively, which is archetypical for printed OECTs, is not suitable for signal processing but certainly tolerable in decoders, shift registers, and multiplexers This is valid when driving and recording already slow operating and areal devices, such as electrochromic displays, sensors, and actuators, which typically switch and operate at 0.1–10 Hz and are of a size ranging from 0.1 mm[2] to 1 cm[2]. The NAND/NOT logic implementation relies on a resistor ladder and suffers from logic level decay, owing to the particular characteristics of the PEDOT:PSS-based OECT that operate in depletion a Antenna O1 O2

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