Fully Printed Separated Carbon Nanotube Thin Film Transistor Circuits and Its Application in Organic Light Emitting Diode Control

Abstract

The advantages of printed electronics and semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are combined for the first time for display electronics. Conductive silver ink and 98% semiconductive SWCNT solutions are used to print back-gated thin film transistors with high mobility, high on/off ratio, and high current carrying capacity. In addition, with printed polyethylenimine with LiClO4 as the gating material, fully printed top-gated devices have been made to work as excellent current switches for organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). An OLED driving circuit composed of two top-gated fully printed transistors has been fabricated, and the successful control over external OLED is demonstrated. Our work demonstrates the significant potential of using printed carbon nanotube electronics for display backplane applications.

Fully Printed and Encapsulated SWCNT-Based Thin Film Transistors via a Combination of R2R Gravure and Inkjet Printing

“…21,37−40 Device fabrication has been completed by vacuum deposition of gate dielectric and/or source/drain electrodes in some cases and fully printed TFT material layers in others. 14,34,35 Furthermore, examples of fully printed SWCNT-based TFTs employing rollto-roll (R2R) printing are rare 4,41,42 and have yet to be demonstrated with semiconducting-enriched SWCNT with a printed encapsulation layer to provide environmental stability. Herein, the efficacy of a hybrid printing system comprising R2R gravure and inkjet is examined in order to practically produce SWCNT-based fully printed TFTs with encapsulation to avoid environmental sensitivity of the SWCNT channel.…”

Highly stretchable carbon nanotube transistors enabled by buckled ion gel gate dielectrics

“…More reproducible casting techniques, for example, spray printing, will likely allow for better control of film thickness in future implementations. 28,29 Nonetheless, all the FETs demonstrate relatively stable performance up to 80% strain.…”

Short channel carbon nanotube thin film transistors with high on/off ratio fabricated by two-step fringing field dielectrophoresis

“…The feasibility of these applications has been proved by researchers in recent years [4][5][6][7]. Though many methods have been reported for CNT thin film preparation [8][9][10][11][12], the most commonly used is solution deposition [8,9]. CNT thin film on the entire surface of the substrate is obtained by simply immersing the substrate into the CNT solutions.…”

“…Also, the resulted CNT film outside the channel area has to be etched away during the device fabrication process, which is a waste of the precious high purity semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) materials. In order to economize the consumption of the CNT material, site selective deposition of CNTs can be achieved by surface pretreatment of the substrate [16], or by printing technology [6,10]. However, it is still a random network with so many inter-tube junctions.…”