Committee:

Dr. Bernard Kippelen, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Muhannad Bakir, ECE

Dr. Elsa Reichmans, ChBE

Dr. Farrokh Ayazi, ECE

Dr. Jeffrey Davis, ECE

Abstract: 

In this dissertation, the device structure and fabrication of high-performance top-gate organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) comprising a TIPS-pentacene/PTAA film as an active layer and a CYTOP/metal-oxide bilayer as a gate dielectric layer developed previously by members of our group have been adopted and further improved. Particularly, the top-gate OFETs have been fabricated on a shape-memory polymer substrate demonstrating the potential of the device being used for 3D-shape applications, such as wearable electronics. In detail, the performance of the top-gate OFETs has been improved by significantly lowering the contact resistance of the OFETs at the metal-semiconductor interface by developing a contact-doping method, which inserts a thin layer of dopants on source/drain electrodes before the solution processing of an organic semiconductor layer. The OFETs having low contact resistance have been used as a backplane of OFET circuits combined with a newly developed patterning method of a CYTOP/metal-oxide gate dielectric layer, by reverse stamping. Finally, high performance top-gate OFET circuits on a shape-memory polymer substrate have been developed and demonstrated based on this dissertation work.