The transfer rate of composite material to enhance plastic electronic components

The response speed of a smartphone to a touch is determined by the rate of charge flow between various display components. The scientists of Imperial Institute of Technology (Imperial Eton London, ICL) and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technologies (King Abdullah University of Sciences and Marvell, abbreviation KAUST's colleagues will collaborate on the manufacturing of organic thin-film transistors (Otfts), which are constantly producing record carrier migration rates through the integration of two organic semiconductors in a detailed solution approach. These organic thin-film transistors and their solutions provide a range of future electronic applications.

Professor Aram Amassian at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Dr. Thomas Anthopoulos of the physics department at Imperial College London, and Professor Iain McCulloch of the Department of Chemistry and Martin Heeney Ph. D. Develops and describes a composite material that increases the charge flow rate and supports faster organic transistor fabrication. They described the novel semiconductor mixture in a joint paper published in the Advanced materials.

In order to meet the challenge of expensive vacuum deposition process, organic synthetic chemists are becoming more and more effective in the synthesis of conjugated soluble small molecules. "Although they have a tendency to form large crystals, it is still a problem to repeat the formation of high quality, continuous and homogeneous films," said Dr Anthopoulos, chief researcher at Imperial College. "In contrast, polymer semiconductors are often soluble and can form high-quality continuous films, but until recently, the charge-carrier mobility of polymer semiconductors was not higher than 1 cm 2/vs."

In this collective work, the Imperial College of Chemistry, through collaboration with the university's Plastic Electronics Center's equipment physicists and the King Abdullah University of Technology materials scientists to work together, the polymer and the advantages of small molecules into a composite material. The properties of this composite are higher than that of each individual component, and also enhance the reproducibility and stability of equipment to equipment.

The performance of composite materials can be improved partly due to the crystal structure of the small and medium molecular composition of the mixture and the smoothness and smoothness of the top surface of the polycrystalline film. The latter is critical to the upper gate and the down-touch configuration device, because the top surface of the semiconductor mixture forms the semiconductor dielectric interface when coated with a polymer dielectric solution.

For highly polycrystalline small molecules in a pure state, the smooth surface continuity and lack of surface grain boundaries are uncommon, suggesting that polymer binders can smooth semiconductor crystals and may even be coated with nano-thin layers of semiconductor crystals. "The performance of the polymer-molecule mixture is more than 5 cm 2/vs, which is very close to the previously released single crystal migration rate of the molecule itself," said Professor Amassian, co-author of the research paper, at King Abdullah's University of Technology. ”

Materials scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology by combining the use of the Cornell high-energy synchronous emitter (CHESS) D1 beam Line synchrotron radiation X-ray scattering technology, cross section energy filtration transmission electron microscopy (EF-TEM) The phase separation, crystallinity and morphological analysis of organic semiconductor mixtures are solved by using the terrain Phase mode Atomic force microscopy.

"This work is particularly exciting because it shows that by applying the powerful characterization technology of complementarity to these complex organic mixtures, Professor Alberto Salleo of Stanford University (Stanford University) is an expert in advanced structural characterization of polymers," he said. You can learn a lot about how they work. This is a study example of the relationship between structure and attribute, which highlights the effectiveness of such cooperation. The migration rate of the 5 cm 2/vs has been an alarming figure. The method described provides an opportunity for researchers to achieve higher migration rates. ”

Dr Anthopoulos added: "In principle, this simple hybrid method can promote the development of organic transistors, so that the functional characteristics of organic transistors far beyond the current highest level." ”