Induced characteristics of n- and p-channel OFETs by the choice of solvent for the dielectric layer towards the fabrication of an organic complementary circuit

In this study, we proposed a facile and low-cost method to fabricate complementary circuits, by the careful selection of the solvent for the dielectric layer. We show that the dielectric solvent exerts a direct influence on performance of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), but the difficulty rests in finding solvents whose orthogonality does not attack the semiconducting layer in a device of top-gate architecture. OFETs (p- and n-channel), in which such orthogonality was achieved, exhibited the best performance, most probably due to the lower roughness of the semiconductor/dielectric interface. The search for transistors that have similar characteristics (mobility, threshold voltages, I-on/I-off, etc.) afforded the manufacture and characterization of an organic complementary circuit whose gain was higher than 7. This study therefore shows that the correct choice of solvents, especially that of the dielectric layer, is very important for the development of organic electronic circuits. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (AU)