Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube Network Thin-Film Transistors With Enhanced Inkjet-Printed Source And Drain Contact Interfaces

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are emerging materials for semiconducting channels in high-performance thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. However, there are concerns regarding the contact resistance (R-contact) in CNT-TFTs, which limits the ultimate performance, especially the CNT-TFTs with the inkjet-printed source/drain (S/D) electrodes. Thus, the contact interfaces comprising the overlap between CNTs and metal S/D electrodes play a particularly dominant role in determining the performances and degree of variability in the CNT-TFTs with inkjet-printed S/D electrodes. In this work, the CNT-TFTs with improved device performance are demonstrated to enhance contact interfaces by controlling the CNT density at the network channel and underneath the inkjet-printed S/D electrodes during the formation of a CNT network channel. The origin of the improved device performance was systematically investigated by extracting R-contact in the CNT-TFTs with the enhanced contact interfaces by depositing a high density of CNTs underneath the S/D electrodes, resulting in a 59% reduction in R-contact; hence, the key performance metrics were correspondingly improved without sacrificing any other device metrics. Published by AIP Publishing.