The subject application relates to a method for printing carbon nanotube thin-film transistor circuits, and in particular for printing transistor circuits for use in driving organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).
Compared to liquid crystal displays (LCDs) organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are low cost, light weight and provide flexible plastic substrate compatibility. Additionally, OLEDs can provide wider viewing angles, enhanced brightness, greater power efficiency and shorter response times.
In some aspects, the subject technology relates to a method including steps for disposing a first electrically conductive material on a substrate to form a first layer of electrodes on the substrate, wherein the first layer of electrodes comprises a source electrode and a drain electrode, and printing a film comprising carbon nanotubes on the substrate between the source electrode and the drain electrode, thereby defining at least a first interface between the carbon nanotube film and the source electrode and a second interface between the carbon nanotube film and the drain electrode. In certain implementations, the method can further include steps for disposing a second electrically conductive material over the first interface between the carbon nanotube film and the source electrode and the second interface between the carbon nanotube film and the drain electrode, and disposing a dielectric material over exposed portions of the carbon nanotube film.
In yet another aspect, the subject technology relates to a transistor including a substrate, a first layer of electrodes formed on the substrate and comprising a source electrode and a drain electrode and a single-walled carbon nanotube film printed between the source electrode and the drain electrode and forming an interface between the carbon nanotube film and the source electrode and the carbon nanotube film and the drain electrode. In certain implementations, the transistor can further include a second layer of electrodes formed over the interface between the carbon nanotube film and the source electrode and the carbon nanotube film and the drain electrode, and a dielectric layer formed over the carbon nanotube film.
Certain features of the subject technology are set forth in the appended claims. However, the accompanying drawings, which are included to provide further understanding, illustrate disclosed aspects and together with the description serve to explain the principles of the subject technology. In the drawings:
The detailed description set forth below is intended as a description of various configurations of the subject technology and is not intended to represent the only configurations in which the subject technology can be practiced. The appended drawings are incorporated herein and constitute a part of the detailed description. The detailed description includes specific details for the purpose of providing a more thorough understanding of the subject technology. However, it will be clear and apparent that the subject technology is not limited to the specific details set forth herein and may be practiced without these specific details. In some instances, structures and components are shown in block diagram form in order to avoid obscuring the concepts of the subject technology.
In certain aspects, circuits contain only one switch thin-film transistor (TFT) and one storage capacitor (1T1C), as illustrated in the example of
One advantage of the combination of printed electronics and semiconducting single walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is described herein for display electronics. In certain aspects, conductive silver ink and a 98% semiconductive SWCNT solution are used to print thin film transistors (TFTs) with high mobility, high on/off ratios and a high current carrying capacity. Combined with printed solid electrolyte (PEI with LiClO4) as the gating material, these top gated devices are suitable current switches for OLEDs. An OLED driving circuit including two top gated fully printed transistors has been fabricated and the successful control over OLEDs has been demonstrated. In addition, a CNT TFT inverter has been fabricated. Frequency operation of single top gated fully printed transistors indicates the transistors described herein to be a viable technology for backplane display applications.
An OLED control circuit with a 2T1C structure is described herein as an example having a good compromise between more complex device structures and the shortfalls of the less complex 1 T1C control circuit. For simplicity and ease of demonstration, the 2T1C structure has been modified by removing the storage capacitor and fabricated 2T control circuit.
For OLED based displays, driving current up to 1˜5 μA/pixel is typically required for high resolution display. Commercial LED/OLED-based displays adopt low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT or amorphous silicon (α-Si) TFTs for compatibility with mainstream silicon fabrication processes. However, they require high-temperature processing and suffer from low mobility (e.g., <1 Vs/cm2). Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are ideal channel materials for TFTs due to their high mobility, high on/off ratio as well as small operation voltage. CNTs also allow for solution deposition fabrication routes. Due to the excellent current carrying capacity of SWCNTs, SWCNT TFTs can provide enough driving current for typical high-resolution OLED displays with a much smaller channel length and width, as well as operation voltage. Such advantages allow dense integration of pixels, higher aperture ratios, and smaller power consumption without sacrifice of brightness, resolution and/or response time.
As described herein, 98% separated semiconducting SWCNTs and printed electronics are used in the fabrication of fully printed back gated SWCNT TFTs. In some implementations, the mobilities of back gated SWCNT TFTs fall in the range of 10˜30 cm2/Vs, with the highest reaching 34.2 cm2/Vs. On/off ratio of the back gated devices varies between 104˜107 and the highest on/off ratio is 1.28×107. Based on the success of fully printed back gated devices, fabricated printed top gated SWCNT TFTs with printed PEI/LiClO4 as polymer electrolyte gating material were prepared. By varying PEI/LiClO4 coverage, the device behavior was tunable to either ambipolar or p-type. A fully printed 2T single pixel OLED control circuit has also been demonstrated.
Uniformity and high density are two factors in the printed back gated TFTs. It also influences the success of turning a back gated TFT into a top gated TFT by adding a strip of ion gel dielectric.
In certain aspects, electric performance characterization can be carried out for the as-fabricated back gated devices. The W of the devices we studied approximately ranged from 100 μm to 500 μm, while L ranged from 10 μm to 200 μm. More accurate values of the W and L used in mobility derivation can be measured via FESEM. Most devices exhibit an Ion of 1˜10 μA (at drain voltage of 1.0 V and gate voltage of −20 V), Ion/Ioff ratio of 104˜107, mobility of 10˜30 cm2/Vs and Vth of −5.0 V. For example,
One curve of transconductance versus gate voltage (VG) is derived from and plotted together with the drain current (ISD) versus gate voltage plot when drain voltage (VSD) equals 1.0 V, as is shown in
Mobility can be calculated by:
where L and W are the device channel length and width, VD=1 V, ID-VG curve is measured at VD=1 V, and Cox is the gate capacitance per unit area. If the nanotube film is treated as a uniform and continuous film, a simple parallel model can be used to calculate Cox:
This results in a mobility of 23.1 cm2/Vs. If the quantum capacitance of nanotube networks is taken, there is a more sophisticated and rigorous model to calculate Cox, which gives:
where CQI=4×10−10 F/m is the quantum capacitance of single nanotube26 and D≈28 tubes/μm is the nanotube density. This gives Cox=6.74×10−9 F/cm2, which is similar to the Cox value based on the simple model. In some embodiments, this is the capacitance generated by 500 nm SiO2, and is smaller than the quantum capacitance generated by nanotube networks. Since these two capacitances are in series, the smaller one should dominate. Hence the simple model for mobility calculation of all back gated CNT TFTs was adopted.
This study shows that back gated devices can have relatively uniform device performance, and tunable on current by designing proper W and L without compromising mobility and Ion/Ioff. Overall, these as-printed CNT TFT devices show similar performance to their photolithography-made CNT TFT counterparts.
Based on the measured high Ion, high Ion/Ioff ratio, as well as high mobility of the printed CNT TFTs, their application in display electronics is further explored. In one example, an OLED was connected to a typical SWCNT TFT back gated device. The schematic diagram is plotted in the inset of
From the figures, the SWCNT TFT was able to provide enough driving current (21.4 μA when VG=−10 V and VSS=−10 V) for OLED, which requires as low as ˜1 μA to have observable light emission. In certain aspects, the OLED can be on up to the point when VG is as positive as 2 V, and is totally turned off when VG becomes more positive (6 V), corresponding to the IOLED-VG curve measured at VSS=−10 V, where the curve enters cutoff region around 5.5 V.
The next step toward the 2T1C display control circuit is to fabricate top gate SWCNT TFTs based on printed back gated TFTs. Here PEI (Mw: 10 k, Sigma Aldrich) was used as an ion gel dielectric for CNT TFTs, due to its well known property that when applying a voltage to the surface of a thin film of this gel, the surface would become conductive and could work as a self-aligned gate electrode, while underneath this metallic layer, the gel would still remain insulating and work as a gate dielectric. Due to the large molecular weight, pure PEI has a high viscosity and therefore is unable to print out. Here PEI is dissolved in methanol in 1:5 volume ratio and stirred overnight to reduce the viscosity before printing. Besides, to improve the gate conductance, a small amount of LiClO4 (LiClO4 to PEI weight ratio: 1˜2.5) is added to fine tune the device performance.
The printed top gated CNT TFTs were characterized by electric property measurements in ambient air. Interestingly, both ambipolar and p-type behaviors were observed for most devices.
Earlier studies of polymer electrolyte-gated CNT TFTs reveals that, the oxygen atoms in PEI/LiClO4 would be adsorbed onto the SWNT sidewall and act as electron donors to compensate for the p-type doping effect from the oxygen molecules. It was also observed that if (2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyanobenzoquinone) DDQ, a strong electron acceptor, was introduced into PEI, the polymer electrolyte-gated CNT TFT would become ambipolar at low DDQ concentration and return to p-type at a high DDQ concentration. A similar competition between oxygen atoms in PEI/LiClO4 and oxygen molecules adsorbed onto CNT may be attributed to what is observed here. If the PEI/LiClO4 coverage is 100%, then electron donors would dominate and the devices would assume exclusively n-type behavior. If the PEI/LiClO4 coverage is very high, there are more electron donors than electron acceptors and thereby the CNT TFTs work as ambipolar top gated devices. If the PEI/LiClO4 coverage is relatively low, there are more electron acceptors and the CNT TFTs remain p-type. However, the coverage of PEI/LiClO4 may, beyond certain point, provide enough gating effect or the device would become very resistive after PEI printing.
From
Where λ is the Debye length calculated by:
Here, ρ is the concentration of LiClO4, ∈=10 is the dielectric constant of PEI. The calculated value for CPG is 2.062×10−3 F/cm2. Quantum capacitance generated by carbon nanotube network is quantified by:
C
Q
=C
QI
×D=1.12×10−6 F/cm2.
For nanotubes gated by PEI/LiClO4, the nanotube capacitance and the polymer gate capacitance would be in series, and thereby the nanotube capacitance would dominate, which is almost 103 times smaller than that of PEI/LiClO4. Based on this, the calculated mobility for holes of the ambipolar top gated transistor is about 0.42 cm2/Vs and the calculated mobility for electrons is about 0.56 cm2/Vs, while the calculated mobility for holes of the p-type top gated transistor is about 2.80 cm2/Vs. Compared to the back-gated devices, the polymer gated transistors have a much lower mobility. This is not surprising as there would be more scattering at nanotube/polymer gate interface, which impedes carrier transportation. Noticeably, the mobility of the ambipolar device is much lower than that of the p-type top gated device. From the previous energy band analysis, it is indicated that ambipolar top gated transistors would have a lower on current compared to either n-type or p-type top gated transistors with same W and L, as their Schottky barrier for both holes and electrons are relatively thicker than that of their unipolar counterparts. Thereby, ambipolar devices would have a lower mobility.
Top gated CNT TFTs were printed on Kapton to demonstrate fully printed flexible devices. Electric property measurements of devices on Kapton and Si/SiO2 show no significant differences compared to Si substrates, indicating no selectivity over substrates of these fully printed top gated CNT TFTs.
The hysteresis of all the devices mentioned above was compared: back gated device on silicon wafer, top gated ambipolar device on Kapton or silicon wafer, and top gated p-type device on silicon wafer. Hysteresis of top gated devices can be small, compared to that of the back gated devices, due, for example, to stronger gating effects from polymer electrolytes. Although there is a small amount of hysteresis, these devices were good enough for a simple logic circuit. A simple inverter function was demonstrated by using two ambipolar transistors.
The study of how the PEI/LiClO4 operates as a dielectric and gate electrode for CNT TFTs paves the way for the 2T1C OLED control circuit. For demonstration purpose, the storage capacitance was omitted and the transistor-only (2T) OLED control circuit was tested. As p-type top gated CNT TFT has a higher mobility, and unipolar transportation ensures a symmetric cut off and turn on region, a p-type top gated CNT TFT for this circuit was utilized.
Electric property characterizations were done first without the OLED, as is indicated in the circuit diagram shown on the inset of
Then an external OLED is directly connected to this display circuit, with cathode connected to the drain of driving transistor and anode connected to a negative voltage of −3.4V, which is used to provide the voltage drop on OLED in on state. IDD-VData was measured at VDD=0.1 V, 0.2 V, 0.3 V, 0.4 V and 0.5 V. Noticeably, the on/off ratio decreased to about 10 due to the fact that in this circuit configuration the OLED is never turned off due to the negative voltage applied to VSS, the absolute value of which approximately equals the threshold voltage of OLED. Yet the light intensity difference is still observed for the controlled OLED.
Display applications typically operate at 60 Hz. Accordingly, frequency investigation of single top gated and back-gated transistors was conducted. The external OLED was replaced with a resistance and found out the 3 dB frequency to be 5.66 kHz for back-gated CNT TFT and 93.3 Hz for top gated CNT TFT.
In summary, fully printed CNT TFT circuits based on 98% semiconducting SWCNT and printed electronic technologies have been fabricated. These CNT TFTs have good mobility, good on/off ratio and good current capacity. They are suitable components for OLED-based display backplane electronics and the control over external OLED using one single backgate CNT TFT is achieved. Based on that, with one more printing step of PEI/LiClO4, these back gated CNT TFTs are converted to top gated CNT TFTs. Top gated CNT TFTs are also made on Kapton to demonstrate the potential of using this technology for flexible electronics. Good CNT inverter functionality and transistor frequency characteristics were observed. Finally, 2T OLED control circuit composed of two fully printed top gated CNT TFTs is made and its ability to control over external OLED is demonstrated.
It is understood that any specific order or hierarchy of steps in the processes disclosed is an illustration of exemplary approaches. Based upon design preferences, it is understood that the specific order or hierarchy of steps in the processes may be rearranged, or that all illustrated steps be performed. Some of the steps may be performed simultaneously. For example, in certain circumstances, multitasking and parallel processing may be advantageous. Moreover, the separation of various system components in the embodiments described above should not be understood as requiring such separation in all embodiments, and it should be understood that the described program components and systems can generally be integrated together in a single software product or packaged into multiple software products.
The previous description is provided to enable any person skilled in the art to practice the various aspects described herein. Various modifications to these aspects will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, and the generic principles defined herein may be applied to other aspects. Thus, the claims are not intended to be limited to the aspects shown herein, but are to be accorded the full scope consistent with the language claims, wherein reference to an element in the singular is not intended to mean “one and only one” unless specifically so stated, but rather “one or more.” Unless specifically stated otherwise, the term “some” refers to one or more. Pronouns in the masculine (e.g., his) include the feminine and neuter gender (e.g., her and its) and vice versa. Headings and subheadings, if any, are used for convenience only and do not limit the subject disclosure.
A phrase such as an “aspect” does not imply that such aspect is essential to the subject technology or that such aspect applies to all configurations of the subject technology. A disclosure relating to an aspect may apply to all configurations, or one or more configurations. A phrase such as an aspect may refer to one or more aspects and vice versa. A phrase such as a “configuration” does not imply that such configuration is essential to the subject technology or that such configuration applies to all configurations of the subject technology. A disclosure relating to a configuration may apply to all configurations, or one or more configurations. A phrase such as a configuration may refer to one or more configurations and vice versa.
The word “exemplary” is used herein to mean “serving as an example or illustration.” Any aspect or design described herein as “exemplary” is not necessarily to be construed as preferred or advantageous over other aspects or designs.
All structural and functional equivalents to the elements of the various aspects described throughout this disclosure that are known or later come to be known to those of ordinary skill in the art are expressly incorporated herein by reference and are intended to be encompassed by the claims. Moreover, nothing disclosed herein is intended to be dedicated to the public regardless of whether such disclosure is explicitly recited in the claims.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/721,289, filed Nov. 1, 2012, and entitled “Fully-Printed Carbon Nanotube Thin Film Transistor Circuits for Organic Light Emitting Diode,” which is incorporated herein by reference.
This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under SBIR contract No. HR 0011-10-0-0003 and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency under contract No. HDTRA1-10-1-0015. The government has certain rights in the invention.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind |
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PCT/US2013/067886 | 10/31/2013 | WO | 00 |
Number | Date | Country | |
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61721289 | Nov 2012 | US |