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Editorial article, editorial: high-performance organic thin-film transistors.

• 1 Institute of Molecular Aggregation Science, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
• 2 Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
• 3 School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
• 4 School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Editorial on the Research Topic High-Performance Organic Thin-Film Transistors

Organic electronics have attracted intensive research interest in the past decades ( Chen et al., 2020 ; Yao et al., 2020 ; Tang et al., 2021 ). The ever-increasing demand for organic electronics calls for the development of high-performance and high-stability organic thin-film transistors (OFETs). OFETs are considered key components to fabricate flexible and printable devices for promising applications, such as flexible displays, chemical sensors, wearable devices, and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The design and synthesis of novel structural materials (such as semiconductors, dielectrics, electrodes, and substrates), as well as the development of efficient interface engineering strategies, would further promote the development of flexible electronics and lay the foundation for their early commercialization ( Ji et al., 2019 ; Ji et al., 2021 ).

Despite remarkable progress in the development of new materials and relevant applications in organic electronics, some challenges remain, not only on the design and synthesis of novel structural materials (such as π-conjugated small molecule or polymer semiconductors, dielectrics, electrodes, and substrates), but also the development of efficient interface engineering strategies, for the fabrication of high-performance and high-stability devices, and eventually the realization of commercially available products. For example: 1) The need for new π-conjugated semiconductors (small molecule or polymer semiconductors) compatible with polymer dielectric for high-performance devices; 2) The need for polymer dielectric (chemical structures, polarity effects, etc) compatible with commonly used microfabrication technologies for highly integrated miniaturized devices (such as inverter, oscillator, etc); 3) The need for low-voltage and high-current-density high-performance devices (new transistor design or high dielectric constant insulators); 4) The strategies for large-scale device fabrication with uniform performance (new fabrication methods); 5) The need for high-stability devices (atmospheric, thermal).

This Research Topic aims to address the above-mentioned challenges, including one Editorial, one Review and five Original research. The following themes will provide some clues to promote progress in this area. First of all, a novel photoactive semiconductor (named as IDTOT-4F) with an A-π-D-π-A-type configuration is synthesized for optoelectrical device with photo response and optical memory behaviors provided by W. Huang et al. Then, the development of new efficient interface engineering strategies (electrode approach by W. Li et al.; interface modification by T. Li et al.) for high-performance organic thin-film transistors. In addition, new methods for the construction of high-performance and high-stability organic thin-film transistors and relevant optoelectronic applications, which could be listed in the review article by L. Huang et al. and original research in the paper of W. Wang et al. Finally, X. Ren and co-workers reported a low-temperature solution process to fabricate a high-k metal oxide dielectric for low-power OFET applications.

Overall, the articles published in this research topic cover the device materials for high-performance organic thin-film transistors. We hope that contributions published within this issue will contribute to a new insight into the field of organic electronics, exploring more possibilities of achieving high-performance optoelectronic devices.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

The authors are grateful to Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS202006, BNLMS202004) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (62004138, 51973111).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We thank all authors, reviewers, and editors who assisted in the article collection.

Chen, H., Zhang, W., Li, M., He, G., and Guo, X. (2020). Interface Engineering in Organic Field-Effect Transistors: Principles, Applications, and Perspectives. Chem. Rev. 120, 2879–2949. doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.9b00532

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Ji, D., Li, L., Fuchs, H., and Hu, W. (2021). Engineering the Interfacial Materials of Organic Field-Effect Transistors for Efficient Charge Transport. Acc. Mater. Res. 3, 159–169. doi:10.1021/accountsmr.0c00112

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Ji, D., Li, T., Hu, W., and Fuchs, H. (2019). Recent Progress in Aromatic Polyimide Dielectrics for Organic Electronic Devices and Circuits. Adv. Mater. 31, 1806070. doi:10.1002/adma.201806070

Tang, Q., Zhang, G., Jiang, B., Ji, D., Kong, H., Riehemann, K., et al. (2021). Self‐assembled Fullerene (C60)-Pentacene Superstructures for Photodetectors. SmartMat 1, e1024. doi:10.1002/smm2.1024

Yao, Y., Chen, Y., Wang, H., and Samorì, P. (2020). Organic Photodetectors Based on Supramolecular Nanostructures. SmartMat 1, e1009. doi:10.1002/smm2.1009

Keywords: thin-film transistors, high performance, organic semiconductor active layer, interface engineering, electrode modification techniques, new structures

Citation: Ji D, Yao Y, Huang J and Li T (2021) Editorial: High-Performance Organic Thin-Film Transistors. Front. Mater. 8:685409. doi: 10.3389/fmats.2021.685409

Received: 25 March 2021; Accepted: 27 July 2021; Published: 13 August 2021.

Edited and Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Ji, Yao, Huang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Deyang Ji, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

High-Performance Organic Thin-Film Transistors

Effect of morphology on organic thin film transistor sensors

• Published: 03 December 2005
• Volume 384 , pages 336–342, ( 2006 )

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• Zhenan Bao 1  

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This review provides a general introduction to organic field-effect transistors and their application as chemical sensors. Thin film transistor device performance is greatly affected by the molecular structure and morphology of the organic semiconductor layer. Various methods for organic semiconductor deposition are surveyed. Recent progress in the fabrication of organic thin film transistor sensors as well as the correlation between morphology and analyte response is discussed.

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Jason Locklin thanks the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) postdoctoral research fellowship for support.

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Locklin, J., Bao, Z. Effect of morphology on organic thin film transistor sensors. Anal Bioanal Chem 384 , 336–342 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-005-0137-z

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00216-005-0137-z

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Lab on a Chip

Thin-film-transistor digital microfluidics for high value in vitro diagnostics at the point of need †.

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a Sharp Life Science (EU) Ltd, Edmund Halley Road, Oxford Science Park, UK E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.aqdrop.com

The latest developments in thin-film-transistor digital-microfluidics (TFT-DMF, also known by the commercial name aQdrop™) are reported, and proof of concept application to molecular diagnostics ( e.g. for coronavirus disease, COVID-19) at the point-of-need demonstrated. The TFT-DMF array has 41 thousand independently addressable electrodes that are capable of manipulating large numbers of droplets of any size and shape, along any pathway to perform multiple parallel reactions. Droplets are continually tracked and adjusted through closed-loop feedback enabled by TFT based sensors at each array element. The sample-to-answer molecular in vitro diagnostic (IVD) test for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) includes nucleic acid extractions from saliva, removal of dsDNA and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). This proof of concept illustrates how the highly configurable TFT-DMF technology can perform many reactions in parallel and thus support the processing of a range of sample types followed by multiple complex multi-step assays.

• This article is part of the themed collections: Coronavirus articles - free to access collection and Coronavirus collection – Analytical

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• Reverse Engineering
• Published: 13 July 2018

How we made the IGZO transistor

• Hideo Hosono 1  

Nature Electronics volume  1 ,  page 428 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Thin-film transistors made from indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) are driving the next evolution in active-matrix flat panel displays. Hideo Hosono recounts how demand for a high-performance alternative to amorphous silicon transistors led to their development.

Liquid crystal displays (LCD) began to replace cathode-ray tube-based televisions in the early 2000s. The pixels in these LCDs were, until 2012, driven exclusively by thin-film transistors (TFTs) that use amorphous hydrogenated silicon (a-Si:H) as the semiconducting channel. But as demand grew for ever larger displays, with better viewing and energy performance, a need for improved TFTs emerged. TFTs block light coming from the display, so they need to be small, which lowers their current-driving ability. Additionally, there was a push to move away from LCD technology and into organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) in order to capitalize on their better performance, which includes direct emission and richer colours, but OLEDs need to be driven by large amounts of current, at levels a-Si:H TFTs cannot accommodate. What was needed was a new technology that could be used to create TFTs with a high charge carrier mobility, which could drive large currents.

Charge carrier mobility tells us how quickly charge carriers (electrons and holes) can move through a semiconductor, and determines the amount of current we can drive through a TFT of a given size. This is limited by the nature of the path that charge carriers take though a material. This path can be thought of in terms of the atomic orbitals and how they interconnect to make up the conduction and valence bands — the energetic levels at which the electrons and holes are free to move around. The sp 3 hybridized orbitals in silicon are highly directional, and in the crystalline state the silicon–silicon bonds properly overlap, providing an efficient path to travel through. However, in amorphous silicon, structural disorder leads to disconnects and conduction cannot occur through the orbitals in the same way. Instead, the charge carriers have to hop across the orbitals, which leads to mobilities of at most 1 cm 2 V –1 s –1 — about 2–3 orders of magnitude lower than in crystalline silicon.

I thought an ionic semiconductor with a wide bandgap might be different because the conduction and valence bands are made up of orbitals that have different characteristics. In certain oxide materials containing p -block metal cations, the vacant metal s -orbital that predominantly makes up the conduction band minimum is spherical and spatially spread, making their overlap insensitive to bonding angle variation. As such, I hoped that when going from their ordered crystalline state to their disordered amorphous state, these oxide semiconductors might still show a high mobility. To verify this hypothesis, I, together with my research group, selected and sputtered a range of metal oxide thin films, including CdO–GeO 2 . Testing their Hall mobility, these amorphous thin films showed values higher than 10 cm 2 V –1 s –1 , which is comparable to polycrystalline thin films. The idea and experimental results were published in the May issue of the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids in 1996, but gained little interest from the research community. By 2004, for example, the paper had received only 4 citations, and 2 of those were self-citations!

After a few years verifying the validity of the hypothesis, we started research on transparent oxide TFTs. To develop high-mobility TFTs using transparent conductive oxides, the major issue was their high carrier concentrations (the TFTs can’t be turned off). Indium oxide is a typical transparent conductive oxide with a large mobility, but reducing its excessive carrier concentration is difficult due the ease with which oxygen vacancies form. We tested InGaO 3 (ZnO) m epitaxial films, where m = 4 and 5, as I believed the unique local structure around Ga 3+ would help lower the carrier concentration. As expected, the carrier concentration in epitaxial InGaO 3 (ZnO) 4 reduced to a suitable level, and when applied in TFTs showed excellent performance, with a mobility of approximately 80 cm 2 V –1 s –1 . We then fabricated thin films using amorphous InGaZnO 4 (a-IGZO). The electron concentrations in the resulting a-IGZO thin films, which were deposited on glass substrates at room temperature, were below 10 16 cm –3 and the TFTs exhibited mobilities of approximately 10 cm 2 V –1 s –1 — an order of magnitude larger than that of a-Si:H TFTs. We also found that TFTs fabricated on plastic substrates offered almost identical performance (Fig. 1 ). At this point we applied for patents and then submitted our paper to Nature , which was published in 2004.

Hideya Kumomi

Amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors fabricated on a plastic substrate.

Demonstrations of IGZO TFT-based displays began to emerge in 2007, when Samsung Electronics first reported a-IGZO TFT-based high-definition LCDs. Demonstrations of IGZO TFT-based backplane LCDs in smart phones and tablet computers then appeared around 2012. Arguably the most striking application emerged in 2015, when LG Display demonstrated large-sized OLED televisions. Here the a-IGZO TFT was indispensable because of the need for high mobility and simple formation over large areas.

I believe the success of IGZO transistors is due to a number of factors. First is their high mobility, which is an order of magnitude higher than a-Si:H, and the excellent controllability of their carrier concentration. Second, the production process is almost the same as a-Si:H, except for the deposition of the channel layer (chemical vapour deposition is used for a-Si:H whereas sputtering is used for IGZO), making integration into current manufacturing workflows relatively painless. Third, synthesizing large-sized high-quality sputtering targets is relatively easy, which also makes thin-film deposition on large-sized substrates a relatively simple task. With these attributes, IGZO transistors provide a promising backplane technology to drive the future of flat panel displays.

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Hosono, H. How we made the IGZO transistor. Nat Electron 1 , 428 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0106-0

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Published : 13 July 2018

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0106-0

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