Low‐Voltage Ring Oscillators Based on Polyelectrolyte‐Gated Polymer Thin‐Film Transistors

There has been a remarkable progress in the development of organic electronic materials since the discovery of conducting polymers more than three decades ago. Many of these materials can be processed from solution, in the form as inks. This allows for using traditional high-volume printing techniques for manufacturing of organic electronic devices on various flexible surfaces at low cost. Many of the envisioned applications will use printed batteries, organic solar cells or electromagnetic coupling for powering. This requires that the included devices are power efficient and can operate at low voltages. This thesis is focused on organic thin-film transistors that employ electrolytes as gate insulators. The high capacitance of the electrolyte layers allows the transistors to operate at very low voltages, at only 1 V. Polyanion-gated p-channel transistors and polycation-gated n-channel transistors are demonstrated. The mobile ions in the respective polyelectrolyte are attracted towards the gate electrode during transistor operation, while the polymer ions create a stable interface with the charged semiconductor channel. This suppresses electrochemical doping of the semiconductor bulk, which enables the transistors to fully operate in the field-effect mode. As a result, the transistors display relatively fast switching (≤ 100 µs). Interestingly, the switching speed of the transistors saturates as the channel length is reduced. This deviation from the downscaling rule is explained by that the ionic relaxation in the electrolyte limits the channel formation rather than the electronic transport in the semiconductor. Moreover, both unipolar and complementary integrated circuits based on polyelectrolyte-gated transistors are demonstrated. The complementary circuits operate at supply voltages down to 0.2 V, have a static power consumption of less than 2.5 nW per gate and display signal propagation delays down to 0.26 ms per stage. Hence, polyelectrolyte-gated circuits hold great promise for printed electronics applications driven by low-voltage and low-capacity power sources.