Bottom‐Up Growth of n‐Type Polymer Monolayers for High‐Performance Complementary Integrated Circuits

Abstract

Downscaling the semiconductor into ultrathin film is of vital importance to high‐performance field–effect transistors (FETs), but the high‐mobility FETs based on conjugated polymer monolayers have been rarely realized. Especially, the lack of high‐performance n‐type polymer monolayer FETs hinders the development of complementary integrated circuits. Herein, by fine‐tuning the supramolecular assembly of two thiazole flanked naphthalene diimide‐based conjugated polymers, the ≈2.5 nm‐thick monolayers with well‐defined fibrillar morphology are grown in a controllable way, where the one‐dimensional solution‐state structures are inherited. The resultant monolayer FETs show the electron mobility up to 0.25 cm2 V−1 s−1, among the record for n‐type polymer monolayer FETs. More importantly, the first demonstration of polymer monolayer complementary integrated circuits is present, and a record‐high inverter gain of 113 is achieved, which is also identical to the best polymer thin‐film inverters.

Low-voltage polymer monolayer transistors for high-gain unipolar and complementary logic inverters

“…Furthermore, in complementary inverters, one transistor is consistently in the off state, characterized by the low off-state drain current, resulting in notably reduced power consumption. 2 Due to the lack of high-mobility n-type conjugated polymers, 25 an amorphous indium–gallium–zinc–oxide (IGZO) TFT is utilized, offering distinct advantages such as high electron mobility and minimal off-state drain current. This IGZO TFT is seamlessly integrated with a polymer monolayer TFT, as depicted in Fig.…”

“…The remarkable voltage amplification achieved in our study is benchmarked against various semiconductor systems, including pristine semiconducting polymers 16,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] (both unipolar and complementary configurations), p-type oxide semiconductors, [38][39][40][41][42] p-type organic semiconductors [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52] (such as polymers and carbon nanotubes) and n-type IGZO (complementary). At V DD o 10 V, the voltage gains reported in the literature typically fall below 50 V/V, representing a roughly 4-fold difference compared to our hybrid inverters composed of the polymer monolayer and IGZO.…”