Carbon nanotube dual-material gate devices for flexible configurable multifunctional electronics

Abstract

Electronic devices with configurability to providing multiple functions are of great interests for their superior adaptability to the ever-changing and multifarious application scenarios. Here, we report flexible integrated circuits (ICs) possessing configurable functions constructed with dual-material gate (DMG) devices based on carbon nanotube thin films, which can serve as either transistors or diodes, on a 2-μm-thick parylene substrate. When configured as a transistor, the DMG device has great advantages over the normal-gated (NG) devices regarding the current on/off ratio (Ion/Ioff), the subthreshold swing (SS) and the drain-induced barrier lowering (DIBL) due to the regulated energy band distribution in channel area. When operating as a diode, a typical DMG device demonstrates a sufficient rectification ratio of 8×104 and a diode-on-current of over 26 μA. Scalable manufacturing of DMG devices was also demonstrated with great uniformity both in diode and transistor configurations. Finally, multifunctional integrated circuits, which can dynamically switch their function from rectifier to follower or from OR gate to voltage adder by changing controlling signals, were constructed. The functional-configurability, together with scalable manufacturing and the realization on ultrathin flexible substrates, will open up great opportunity for the future environmentally-adaptive system in the field of flexible electronics.