Voltage and Thermally Driven Roll-to-Roll Organic Printed Transistor Made in Ambient Air Conditions

Resume: Organic thin film transistors offer great potential for use in flexible electronics. Much of this potential lies in the solution processability of the organic polymers enabling both roll coating and printing on flexible substrates and thus greatly reducing the material and fabrication costs.

We present flexible organic power transistors prepared by fast (20 m min−1) roll-to-roll flexographic printing of the drain and source electrode structures, with an interspace below 50 um, directly on polyester foil[1]. The devices have top gate architecture and were completed by slotdie coating of the organic semiconductor poly3hexylthiophene and the dielectric material polyvinylphenol before the gate was applied by screen printing.

All the processing was realized in ambient air on a PET flexible substrate. We explore the footprint and the practically accessible geometry of such devices with a special view toward being able to drive large currents while handling the thermal aspects in operation together with other organic printed electronics technologies such as large area organic photovoltaics (OPV) and large area electrochromic displays (EC).

We find especially that an elevated operational temperature is beneficial with respect to both transconductance and on/off ratio. We achieve high currents of up to 45 mA at a temperature of 80 °C. Finally, we observe a significant temperature dependence of the performance, which can be explored further in sensing applications.