We demonstrate an alternative path for achieving high transconductance organic transistors in spite of relatively large source to drain distances. The improvement of the electronic characteristic of such a scheme is equivalent to a 60-fold increase in mobility of the underlying organic semiconductor. The method is based on percolating networks, which we create from a dispersion of individual single-wall carbon nanotubes and narrow ropes within an organic semiconducting host. The majority of current paths between source and drain follow the metallic nanotubes but require a short, switchable semiconducting link to complete the circuit. With these nanotube-semiconducting composites we achieve effectively a 60× reduction in source to drain distance, which is equivalent to a 60-fold increase of the “effective” mobility of the starting semiconducting material with a minor decrease of the on/off current ratio. These field-induced percolating networks allow for the fabrication of high-transconductance transistors having relatively large source to drain distances that can be manufactured inexpensively by commercially available printing techniques.

We demonstrate an alternative path for achieving high-transconductance organic transistors by assembling bilayers of pentacene onto random arrays of single-walled carbon nanotubes. We show here that, by varying the connectivity of the underlying nanotube network, the channel length of a thin-film transistor can be reduced by nearly two orders of magnitude—thus, enabling the increase of the device transconductance without reduction the on/off ratio. These field-induced percolating networks enable assembling high-transconductance transistors that, with relatively large source drain distances, can be manufactured with available commercial printing techniques.