Salts as additives: A route to improve performance and stability of n-type organic electrochemical transistors

Published

March 9, 2023

Author(s)

David Ohayon, Lucas Flagg, Andrea Giugni, Shofarul Wustoni, Ruipeng Li, Tania Hidalgo, Abdul Hamid Emwas, Rajendar Sheelamanthula, Iain McCulloch, Lee J. Richter, Sahika Inal

Abstract

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in a wide variety of applications at the interface with biological systems, including biosensing, neuromorphic computing, and logic circuits. The widespread use of these versatile devices is, however, hampered by the scarcity of electron-conducting (n-type) backbones and the poor performance and stability of the existing n-OECTs. Here, we introduce different salts as solution additives which dramatically improve the transconductance, shelf life, and operational stability of an n-type OECT material. We demonstrate a ten-fold increase in transconductance for films co-cast with the salt additive and show that this improvement can be attributed to increased electronic charge carrier mobility. We investigate potential mechanisms that might explain this improved mobility but are unable to identify an obvious source of the improved mobility. Finally, we demonstrate that these salt-cast devices are shelf stable for at least one year while the pristine devices show significant degradation within 4 months. Our work provides a new and easy route to improve n-type device performance and stability in ambient conditions, which can be adapted for any other electrochemical device operating n-type films at the electrolyte interface.

Citation

(potentially a different journal, still TBD)

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1021/acsmaterialsau.2c00072

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Keywords

Organic Electrochemical Transistors

Citation

Ohayon, D. , Flagg, L. , Giugni, A. , Wustoni, S. , Li, R. , Hidalgo, T. , Emwas, A. , Sheelamanthula, R. , McCulloch, I. , Richter, L. and Inal, S. (2023), Salts as additives: A route to improve performance and stability of n-type organic electrochemical transistors, (potentially a different journal, still TBD), [online], https://doi.org/10.1021/acsmaterialsau.2c00072, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=935625 (Accessed October 4, 2024)