Low saturation voltages and extremely high intrinsic gain can be achieved in contact‐controlled thin‐film transistors (TFTs) with staggered device architecture, enabled by the energy barrier introduced at the source contact. The resulting device, the source‐gated transistor (SGT), is limited in its usefulness by the high temperature dependence of the drain current induced by the source energy barrier. Here, the interaction between the thermal characteristics of the source contact and the semiconductor to show drastically reduced temperature dependence for SGTs based on organic semiconductors (OSGTs) is exploited. This extraordinarily weak temperature dependence of the drain current is observed regardless of the height of the source energy barrier (27.8% in OSGTs with Ti contacts compared to 22.1% when using Au contacts, over a 34 K range). The reduction in mobility of the semiconductor offsets an increase in thermionic‐field emission of charge carriers at the source. This is a first for SGTs and provides a route to removing one of the last hurdles to their wider adoption. The OSGTs with Ti contacts also demonstrate: drain‐current saturation at very low drain‐source voltages (saturation factor of 0.22); noteworthy stability after 70 days; and minimal drain‐current variation with channel length or illumination.
Contact-controlled devices, such as sourcegated transistors (SGTs), deliberately use energy barriers at the source, and naturally, the positive temperature dependence (PTD) of drain current can be utilized for temperature sensing. We exploit the difference in drain current activation energy, which arises with contact doping in polysilicon n-type contact-controlled transistors, to demonstrate output current with either a PTD or negative temperature dependence (NTD). The range over which output current varies linearly with temperature, as well as the sensitivity, can be tailored by the choice of reference current magnitude and relative source contact properties within the current mirror. The sensing scheme simplifies the circuit design because it relies solely on thin-film transistors and it has inherent immunity to output voltage variation. This ability to tune the sign of temperature dependence allows facile integration in applications requiring homeostasis via feedback, e.g., electronic skin, in a minimal layout area and potentially with convenient reduction of patterning steps during fabrication.
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