Self-Assembled Molecular Nanowires for High-Performance Organic Transistors (original) (raw)

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

While organic semiconductors provide tantalising possibilities for low-cost, lightweight , flexible electronic devices, their current use in transistors-the fundamental building block-is rather limited as their speed and reliability is not competitive with their inorganic counterparts, and is simply too poor for many practical applications. Through self-assembly, highly ordered nanostructures can be prepared that have more competitive transport characteristics, but no simple, scalable method has been discovered that can produce devices based on such nanostructures. Here we show how transistors of self-assembled molecular nanowires can be fabricated using a scalable, gradient sublimation technique, which have dramatically improved characteristics compared to their thin film counterparts, both in terms of performance and stability. Nanowire devices based on copper phthalocyanine have been fabricated with threshold voltages as low as-2.1 V, high on/off ratios of 10 5 , small sub-threshold swings of 0.9 V/decade and mobilities of 0.6 cm 2 /Vs, and lower trap energies as deduced from temperature-dependent properties-in line with leading organic semiconductors involving more complex fabrication. High-performance transistors manufactured using our scalable deposition technique, compatible with flexible substrates, could enable integrated all-organic chips implementing conventional as well as neuromorphic computation and combining sensors, logic, data storage, drivers and displays.