Prepare with care: Low contact resistance of pentacene Field-Effect transistors with clean and oxidized gold electrodes

In recent years, a number of researchers have voiced concerns regarding the increasing amount of publications which report record performance characteristics of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). These devices often make use of elaborate architectures, ranging from surface treatment by self-assembled monolayers to contact-limited doping, injection layer introduction etc. While these techniques are claimed to improve the device performance, they often result in poorly defined device interfaces, such as that of the organic semiconductor with the dielectric and electrode surfaces, which render a rigorous theoretical description of the interface effects close to impossible. Furthermore, the effects of ambient exposure of prepared devices are often neglected during the analysis. In this work we introduce a completely high vacuum-based manufacturing and electrical characterization of OFETs using commercially available gold bottom-contact bottom-gate FET structures, which enables a rigorous exclusion of any air contact of the devices. Using the example of the prototypical and widely studied organic semiconductor pentacene, we compare various initial cleaning procedures of the FET-structures prior to the vacuum deposition of pentacene films on the device characteristics and complement the electrical in situ analysis by ex situ AFM measurements of the pentacene film morphology. We demonstrate that O2 plasma cleaning with subsequent thermal annealing under vacuum conditions results in well-defined interfaces of the pentacene film with clean surface of gold electrodes, which exhibit a remarkably low width-normalized contact resistance of 1.19 kΩcm. Additionally, we show that the formation of gold oxide on top of the electrodes as a result of O2 plasma cleaning without subsequent heating is beneficial for the charge carrier injection, resulting in a contact resistance of only 0.16 kΩcm – to the best of our knowledge, one of the lowest yet reported values for pentacene-gold systems. In addition, the comparative rigorous vacuum-based processing and analysis allows in particular to study also the effects of controlled exposure to ambient air – even for a short time – as well as aging under different storage conditions on the device performance.