Yuji Yamagishi

Current Enhancement with Contact-Area-Limited Doping for Bottom-Gate, Bottom-Contact Organic Thin-Film Transistors

The current enhancement mechanism in contact-area-limited doping for bottom-gate, bottom-contact (BGBC) p-channel organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) was investigated both by simulation and experiment. Simulation results suggest that carrier shortage and large potential drop occur in the source-electrode/channel interface region in a conventional BGBC OTFT during operation, which results in a decrease in the effective field-effect mobility. These phenomena are attributed to the low carrier concentration of active semiconductor layers in OTFTs and can be alleviated by contact-area-limited doping, where highly doped layers are prepared over source–drain electrodes. According to two-dimensional current distribution obtained from the device simulation, a current flow from the source electrode to the channel region via highly doped layers is generated in addition to the direct carrier injection from the source electrode to the channel, leading to the enhancement of the drain current and effective field-effect mobility. The expected current enhancement mechanism in contact-area-limited doping was experimentally confirmed in typical α-sexithiophene (α-6T) BGBC thin-film transistors.

Visualization of trapped charges being ejected from organic thin-film transistor channels by Kelvin-probe force microscopy during gate voltage sweeps

Kelvin-probe force microscopy (KFM) has been widely used to evaluate the localized charge trap states in the organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) channels. However, applicability of the KFM has been limited to the trapped charges whose lifetime is typically longer than several minutes because of the temporal resolution of the KFM. Therefore, it has not long been employed for studying the dynamics of the trapped charges in the OTFTs. Here, we demonstrate a method to visualize the transient distribution of the trapped charge carriers in operating OTFTs. The method allows visualizing the dynamics of the trapped charges during the gate voltage sweeps on a time scale of several hundreds of milliseconds. The experimental results performed on dinaphtho[2,3-b:2′,3′-f]thieno[3,2-b]thiophene (DNTT) OTFTs indicate that, immediately after a bias voltage applied to a device was turned off, the primary discharging of the channel region around the electrode edges started and it limited the ejection process of the remaini...