Inkjet-printing-based soft-etching technique for high-speed polymer ambipolar integrated circuits.
Here, we report the so-called soft-etching process based on an inkjet-printing technique for realizing high-performance printed and flexible organic electronic circuits with conjugated polymer semiconductors. The soft-etching process consists of selective etching of the gate made of a dielectric polymer and deposition of another gate dielectric layer. The method enables the use of a more desirable polymer dielectric layer for the p-channel and n-channel organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) in complementary integrated circuits. We fabricated high-performance ambipolar complementary inverters and ring oscillators (ROs) using poly([N,N'-bis(2-octyldodecyl)-naphthalene-1,4,5,8-bis(dicarboximide)-2,6-diyl]-alt-5,5'-(2,2'-bithiophene)) (P(NDI2OD-T2)) as the active layer as well as poly(vinylidenefluoride-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) and polystyrene ((PS)/P(VDF-TrFE)) as dielectric materials for the p-channel (pull-up transistor) and n-channel (pull-down transistor) OFETs, respectively. The PS dielectric polymer was selectively etched by inkjetting of n-butyl acetate as an orthogonal solvent for P(NDI2OD-T2). Employing this methodology, the five-stage ambipolar ROs with P(NDI2OD-T2) exhibited an oscillation frequency of ∼16.7 kHz, which was much higher than that of non-soft-etched ROs with a single dielectric layer (P(VDF-TrFE); ∼3 kHz).
Department of Energy and Materials Engineering, Dongguk University , 26 Pil-dong, 3 ga, Jung-gu, Seoul 100-715, Republic of Korea.
Dongyoon
D
Khim
Kang-Jun
KJ
Baeg
Minji
M
Kang
Seung-Hoon
SH
Lee
Nam-Koo
NK
Kim
Jihong
J
Kim
Geon-Woong
GW
Lee
Chuan
C
Liu
Dong-Yu
DY
Kim
Yong-Young
YY
Noh