Liquid crystals for organic thin-film transistors

Hiroaki Iino, Takayuki Usui and Jun-ichi Hanna ()
Additional contact information
Hiroaki Iino: Imaging Science and Engineering Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Takayuki Usui: Imaging Science and Engineering Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Jun-ichi Hanna: Imaging Science and Engineering Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Crystalline thin films of organic semiconductors are a good candidate for field effect transistor (FET) materials in printed electronics. However, there are currently two main problems, which are associated with inhomogeneity and poor thermal durability of these films. Here we report that liquid crystalline materials exhibiting a highly ordered liquid crystal phase of smectic E (SmE) can solve both these problems. We design a SmE liquid crystalline material, 2-decyl-7-phenyl-[1]benzothieno[3,2-b][1]benzothiophene (Ph-BTBT-10), for FETs and synthesize it. This material provides uniform and molecularly flat polycrystalline thin films reproducibly when SmE precursor thin films are crystallized, and also exhibits high durability of films up to 200 °C. In addition, the mobility of FETs is dramatically enhanced by about one order of magnitude (over 10 cm2 V−1 s−1) after thermal annealing at 120 °C in bottom-gate-bottom-contact FETs. We anticipate the use of SmE liquid crystals in solution-processed FETs may help overcome upcoming difficulties with novel technologies for printed electronics.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7828 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7828

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7828

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().