Contact Doping for Vertical Organic Field-Effect Transistors

Doping is a powerful tool to overcome contact limitations in short-channel organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and has been successfully used in the past to improve the charge carrier injection in OFETs. The present study applies this familiar concept to the architecture of vertical organic field-effect transistors (VOFETs), which are often severely limited by injection due to their very short channel lengths. The present study shows that the performance of p-type VOFETs with pentacene as an active material can be significantly enhanced by the addition of the common p-dopant C60F36 as a thin injection layer underneath the VOFET source electrode, resulting in an increase of On-state current and On/Off ratio by one order of magnitude. The present study further investigates mixed injection layers of pentacene and the p-dopant and finds that the improvement is less pronounced than for the pure dopant layers and depends on the concentration of dopant molecules in the injection layer. Through application of the transfer length method to equivalent OFET geometries, the present study is finally able to link the observed improvement to a decrease in transfer length and can thus conclude that this length is a crucial parameter onto which further improvement efforts have to be concentrated to realize true short-channel VOFETs.