Inkjet-printed mesoporous indium oxide-based near-vertical transport thin film transistors and pseudo-CMOS inverters

Abstract

Oxide semiconductors are increasingly becoming the material of choice in the emerging printed and flexible electronics domain. While they have attracted tremendous research attention in the area of solution processed/printed electronics, the vacuum deposited amorphous oxide semiconductor TFTs have also achieved serious commercial success in the transparent and curved display industries. Nonetheless, it may be noted that although the n-type oxides demonstrate excellent electronic transport, the performance of the hole conducting p-type oxides are still unsatisfactory and thus it affects the fabrication of all oxide complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. In order to resolve the issue, unipolar depletion-load type pseudo-CMOS inverters have recently been proposed. In this regard, here, we demonstrate a co-continuous mesoporous indium oxide based thin film transistor (TFT) technology with edge-FET architecture and near vertical transport. At the next step, high performance, unipolar depletion-load type inverters have been fabricated using these edge-FET TFTs. The fabricated TFTs have shown average ON-current of 1.95 mA alongside excellent On/Off ratio (>107). On the other hand, the depletion-load type inverters have demonstrated sharp voltage transfer characteristics (VTC) with a maximum signal gain of 58 at VDD= 2 V, supply voltage.