A study of bottom-contact organic thin-film transistors based on source/drain tunneling structure

Abstract During recent years, OLED display has become one of the important products for consuming electronics and industrial domains. For AMOLED display, thin film transistor (TFT) is necessary for driving OLED devices. As the polysilicon and amorphous silicon TFTs have become mainstreams, organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) have also been proposed and shown their advantages in low-temperature process compatible with flexible substrates. However, OTFTs applicable to drive OLED generally adopt bottom-contact configuration. The performance of bottom-contact OTFTs are often inferior relative to top-contact OTFTs, due primarily to the high contact resistance of bottom-contact OTFTs. To overcome this disadvantage, the source/drain tunneling structure is proposed in this article. This tunneling structure can not only decorate the electrode/organic semiconductor interface to obtain a good metal-semiconductor contact, but also can form a MOS configuration at source/drain contact, so as to increase the carrier concentration at the contact to further reduce contact resistance. In this paper, a typical P-type high-mobility small molecule material of Pentacene is employed as the active layer of the OTFT, while CuO film, Polystyrene (PS) film is separately selected as the tunneling layer at source/drain contact. The diverse parameters, especially field effect mobility, were analyzed by analyzing electrical characteristics of the top-contact and bottom-contact OTFTs. In addition, the contact resistances were confirmed by line transfer method. The bottom-contact OTFTs incorporating tunneling layer own a maximum hole mobility of 0.143cm 2 /V·s. This suggested that the source/drain tunneling structure can indeed improve the electrical characteristics of bottom-contact OTFT, and further improvement is necessitated to achieve the high performance comparable to top-contact device.