Synthesis and evaluation of self-assembled azido monolayer as a novel dielectric layer for fabricating pentacene-based organic thin film transistors

Self-assembled 3-azidopropyltriethoxysilane monolayer (SAM) is used as a dielectric layer to modify the interface between the silicon dioxide wafer and the pentacene semiconductor layer in an organic thin film transistor (OTFT), Au/pentacene/3-azidopropyltriethoxysilane/SiO2/Si. Compared to the commonly used alkyl siliane C18 dielectric, 3-azidopropyltriethoxysilane which possesses stable formal charges is far more effective in increasing the ON/OFF ratio of OTFT device with an improvement of nearly three orders of magnitude. Analysis and measurements reported in this paper have illustrated for the first time the improvement of OTFT performance by a SAM compound with stable formal charges.