Low-Voltage, High-Performance Flexible Organic Field-Effect Transistors Based on Ultrathin Single-Crystal Microribbons

Abstract

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) have acquired increasing attention because of their wide range of potential applications in electronics; nevertheless, high operating voltage and low carrier mobility are considered as major bottlenecks in their commercialization. In this work, we demonstrate low-voltage, flexible OFETs based on ultrathin single-crystal microribbons. Flexible OFETs fabricated with 2,7-dioctylbenzothieno[3,2-b]benzothiophene (C8-BTBT) based solution-processed ultrathin single-crystal microribbon as the semiconductor layer and high-k polymer, polysiloxane-poly(vinyl alcohol) composite as an insulator layer manifest a significantly low operating voltage of -4 V, and several devices showed a high mobility of >30 cm2 V-1 s-1. Besides, the carrier mobility of the fabricated devices exhibits a slight degradation in static bending condition, which can be retained by 83.3% compared with its original value under a bending radius of 9 mm. As compared to the bulk C8-BTBT single-crystal-based OFET, which showed a large crack only after 50 dynamic bending cycles, our ultrathin single-crystal-based counterpart demonstrates a much better dynamic force stability. Moreover, under a 20 mm bending radius, the mobility of the device decreased by only 11.7% even after 500 bending cycles and no further decrease was observed until 1000 bending cycles. Our findings reveal that ultrathin C8-BTBT single-crystal-based flexible OFETs are promising candidates for various high-performance flexible electronic devices.