Silver mirror reaction for organic electronics: towards high-performance organic field-effect transistors and circuits

Abstract

A highly-conductive (conductivity: 1 × 105 S cm−1) silver film was produced via a silver mirror reaction at room temperature and then was successfully defined as source/drain electrodes and conductor sections in circuits with a photolithographic technique. High-performance bottom-gate bottom-contact (BGBC) organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) on glass substrates based on p-type pentacene were demonstrated, which were comparable to devices based on vacuum-evaporated silver electrodes. The device performance could be further significantly improved by modifying the silver electrodes with 7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ) due to the reduced contact resistance. For pentacene-based transistors, the highest field-effect mobility was approaching 0.57 cm2 V−1 s−1 with the modified silver electrodes. Moreover, complex organic inverters and five-stage oscillators on glass substrates were first successfully manufactured through silver mirror reaction, and the gain and signal propagation delay was 17 and 400 μs for the inverters and oscillators, respectively. Our results demonstrated that the silver mirror reaction can be used as a promising simple and efficient approach to produce solution-processed electrodes and interconnections in low-cost and large-area organic circuits for industrial applications.