Large area formation of self-aligned crystalline domains of organic semiconductors on transistor channels using CONNECT (Presentation Recording)

Abstract

The electronic properties of solution-processable small molecule organic semiconductors (OSCs) have rapidly improved in recent years, rendering them highly promising for various low-cost large area electronic applications such as active matrix displays, radio frequency identification tags, and integrated logic circuits. However, practical applications of organic electronics requires patterned and precisely registered OSC film within the transistor channel region with uniform electrical properties over a large area, a task that remains a significant challenge. Here we present a novel technique known as CONNECT (Controlled OSC NucleatioN and Extension for CircuiTs), which utilizes differential surface energy and solution shearing to simultaneously generate self-patterned and self-registered OSC film within the channel region and with aligned crystalline domains, resulting in low device-to-device variability. We have fabricated transistor density as high as 840 dpi, with a yield of 99%. We have successfully built various logic gates and a 2-bit half adder circuit, demonstrating the practical applicability of our technique for large-scale circuit fabrication. CONNECT was expanded to use with inkjet printed silver electrodes, showing the versatility of our method to accommodate various solution deposition and fabrication methods.