Lateral organic photodetectors for imaging applications

Organic semiconductor detectors have always been in active research interest of researchers due to its low fabrication cost. Vertical organic detectors have been studied in the past but not much of the works have been done on lateral organic detectors. The lateral design has an advantage over the vertical design that it is easy to fabricate and can be easily integrated with the backplane TFT imager circuit. Integrating an organic photodetectors with TFT imager can improve the over all sensitivity of the imager. However the lateral design limits the fill-factor. Here in our work we propose a new bilayered lateral organic photodetectors with Copper-Phthalocyanine (CUPC) as top and Perylene- Tetracarboxylic Bis- Benzimidazole (PTCBI) as the bottom layer organic material. The bottom organic semiconductor layer work as both, charge transport layer and photon absorption layer. The top and bottom layer provides and heterojunction a potential gradient enough to separate the photo generated excitons in to electrons and holes. The incident photons are absorbed in the two layers active layers giving an exciton. These excitons see a potential barrier at the CUPC-PTCBI heterojunction and separated into holes and electrons. The separated electrons are directed by the external applied electric field and thus give a increase in photocurrent. Lateral organic photodetectors are simple to design and have low dark current. The photo-response of these photo detectors is observed approximately three orders higher in magnitude compare able to its dark response. The dual layer has an advantage of tuning the devices for different absorption wavelengths and were observed more stable comparable to vertical devices.