Easily Manufactured Complementary-Like Flexible Inverters Integrating Bulk Heterojunction Organic Thin-Film Transistors With Well-Balanced Electron and Hole Mobilities

Logic circuits are a key link in the development from discrete organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) to integrated circuits (ICs). The development of low-power and easy-to-manufacture logic circuits is an outstanding challenge for emerging flexible and wearable electronics. In this work, we propose a strategy for achieving flexible inverters by a facile manufacture process. The inverters integrate two identical ambipolar OTFTs in series, whose performances are optimized by engineering both gate dielectrics and bulk-heterojunction channels. The polystyrene (PS)/poly(methyl methacrylate) bilayer gate dielectric is employed to consider both mobility and operating voltage of OTFTs. Furthermore, the bulk-heterojunction channels, consisting of binary polymer semiconductors, are proposed and optimized to achieve balanced electronandhole mobilities. The optimal flexible OTFTs exhibit high and well-balanced electron and hole mobilities of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.41\times 10^{-{2}}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$6.08\times 10^{-{2}}$</tex-math> </inline-formula> cm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>/V <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\cdot $</tex-math> </inline-formula> s, respectively. Furthermore, the high-performance complementary-like flexible inverter is achieved, with a high gain of 38.0 and good noise margin (NM) at a moderate operating voltage of 15 V. This work provides an efficient strategy for developing the potential practical flexible inverters that are manufactured by a facile process flow.