High performance photolithographically-patterned polymer thin-film transistors gated with an ionic liquid/poly(ionic liquid) blend ion gel

Abstract

We demonstrate the fabrication of polymer thin-film transistors gated with an ion gel electrolyte made of the blend of an ionic liquid and a polymerised ionic liquid. The ion gel exhibits a high stability and ionic conductivity, combined with facile processing by simple drop-casting from solution. In order to avoid parasitic effects such as high hysteresis, high off-currents, and slow switching, a fluorinated photoresist is employed in order to enable high-resolution orthogonal patterning of the polymer semiconductor over an area that precisely defines the transistor channel. The resulting devices exhibit excellent characteristics, with an on/off ratio of 106, low hysteresis, and a very large transconductance of 3 mS. We show that this high transconductance value is mostly the result of ions penetrating the polymer film and doping the entire volume of the semiconductor, yielding an effective capacitance per unit area of about 200 μF cm−2, one order of magnitude higher than the double layer capacitance of the ion gel. This results in channel currents larger than 1 mA at an applied gate bias of only –1 V. We also investigate the dynamic performance of the devices and obtain a switching time of 20 ms, which is mostly limited by the overlap capacitance between the ion gel and the source and drain contacts.