Thin, ultra-flexible devices that can be manufactured in a process that covers a large area will be essential to realizing low-cost, wearable electronic applications including foldable displays and medical sensors. The printing technology will be instrumental in fabricating these novel electronic devices and circuits; however, attaining fully printed devices on ultra-flexible films in large areas has typically been a challenge. Here we report on fully printed organic thin-film transistor devices and circuits fabricated on 1-mm-thick parylene-C films with high field-effect mobility (1.0 cm 2 V À 1 s À 1 ) and fast operating speeds (about 1 ms) at low operating voltages. The devices were extremely light (2 g m À 2 ) and exhibited excellent mechanical stability. The devices remained operational even under 50% compressive strain without significant changes in their performance. These results represent significant progress in the fabrication of fully printed organic thin-film transistor devices and circuits for use in unobtrusive electronic applications such as wearable sensors.
Direct printing of thin-film transistors has enormous potential for ubiquitous and lightweight wearable electronic applications. However, advances in printed integrated circuits remain very rare. Here we present a three-dimensional (3D) integration approach to achieve technology scaling in printed transistor density, analogous to Moore’s law driven by lithography, as well as enhancing device performance. To provide a proof of principle for the approach, we demonstrate the scalable 3D integration of dual-gate organic transistors on plastic foil by printing with high yield, uniformity, and year-long stability. In addition, the 3D stacking of three complementary transistors enables us to propose a programmable 3D logic array as a new route to design printed flexible digital circuitry essential for the emerging applications. The 3D monolithic integration strategy demonstrated here is applicable to other emerging printable materials, such as carbon nanotubes, oxide semiconductors and 2D semiconducting materials.
Ultrathin electronic circuits that can be manufactured by using conventional printing technologies are key elements necessary to realize wearable health sensors and next-generation flexible electronic devices. Due to their low level of power consumption, complementary (CMOS) circuits using both types of semiconductors can be easily employed in wireless devices. Here, we describe ultrathin CMOS logic circuits, for which not only the source/drain electrodes but also the semiconductor layers were printed. Both p-type and n-type organic thin film transistor devices were employed in a D-flip flop circuit in the newly developed stacked structure and exhibited excellent electrical characteristics, including good carrier mobilities of 0.34 and 0.21 cm2 V−1 sec−1, and threshold voltages of nearly 0 V with low operating voltages. These printed organic CMOS D-flip flop circuits exhibit operating frequencies of 75 Hz and demonstrate great potential for flexible and printed electronics technology, particularly for wearable sensor applications with wireless connectivity.
Low‐voltage circuit operation is one of the primary requirements for the practical use of printed electronic devices employing organic thin‐film transistors, in particular, the driving of devices with power supplied by energy harvesting using organic solar cells or biofuel cells, which require low‐voltage operation, typically below 1 V. This study reports on printed organic inverter circuits that operate at 0.3 V with negligible hysteresis, a gain of greater than 10, and rail‐to‐rail input and output operation, by utilizing a blend of 2,7‐dihexyl‐dithieno[2,3‐d:2′,3′‐d′]benzo[1,2‐b:4,5‐b′]dithiophene and polystyrene. The ultralow voltage operation of these circuits can be attributed to its finely tunable turn‐on voltage, low trap density, ohmic contacts, and minimal channel length modulation coefficients. Moreover, these organic inverter circuit arrays exhibit high uniformity with an average switching voltage of 0.32 ± 0.03 V. As a result, printed organic devices with ultralow operating voltages can be realized with exceptional reproducibility, helping to further the potential of printed electronic applications based on ultralow power organic devices in the future Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.
Wearable sensor device technologies, which enable continuous monitoring of biological information from the human body, are promising in the fields of sports, healthcare, and medical applications. Further thinness, light weight, flexibility and low-cost are significant requirements for making the devices attachable onto human tissues or clothes like a patch. Here we demonstrate a flexible and printed circuit system consisting of an enzyme-based amperometric sensor, feedback control and amplification circuits based on organic thin-film transistors. The feedback control and amplification circuits based on pseudo-CMOS inverters were successfuly integrated by printing methods on a plastic film. This simple system worked very well like a potentiostat for electrochemical measurements, and enabled the quantitative and real-time measurement of lactate concentration with high sensitivity of 1 V/mM and a short response time of a hundred seconds.
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