Organic integrated circuits for information storage based on ambipolar polymers and charge injection engineering

Ambipolar semiconducting polymers, characterized by both high electron (μ e) and hole (μ h) mobility, offer the advantage of realizing complex complementary electronic circuits with a single semiconducting layer, deposited by simple coating techniques. However, to achieve complementarity, one of the two condction paths in transistors has to be suppressed, resulting in unipolar devices. Here, we adopt charge injection engineering through a specific interlayer in order to tune injection into frontier energy orbitals of a high mobility donor-acceptor co-polymer. Starting from field-effect transistors with Au contacts, showing a p-type unbalanced behaviour with μ h = 0.29 cm2/V s and μ e = 0.001 cm2/V s, through the insertion of a caesium salt interlayer with optimized thickness, we obtain an n-type unbalanced transistor with μ e = 0.12 cm2/V s and μ h = 8 × 10 -4 cm2/V s. We applied this result to the development of the basic pass-transistor logic building blocks such as inverters, with high gain and good noise margin, and transmission-gates. In addition, we developed and characterized information storage circuits like D-Latches and D-Flip-Flops consisting of 16 transistors, demonstrating both their static and dynamic performances and thus the suitability of this technology for more complex circuits such as display addressing logic. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.