A simple and robust approach to reducing contact resistance in organic devices

Published

December 3, 2018

Author(s)

Lamport Zachary, Katrina Barth, Hyunsu Lee, Martin Guthold, Iain McCulloch, John E. Anthony, Lee J. Richter, Eliot Gann, Dean DeLongchamp, Oana Jurchescu

Abstract

Efficient injection of charge carriers from the contacts into the semiconductor layer is crucial for achieving high-performance organic devices. The potential drop necessary to accomplish this process yields a resistance associated with the contacts, namely the contact resistance. A large contact resistance can limit the operation of devices and even lead to inaccuracies in the extraction of the device parameters. Here, we demonstrate a simple and efficient strategy for reducing the contact resistance in organic thin-film transistors more than order of magnitude by creating high work function domains at the surface of the injecting electrodes to promote channels of enhanced injection. We find that the method is effective for both organic small molecule and polymer semiconductors, where we achieved a contact resistance as low as 200 Ωcm and device charge carrier mobilities of 20 cm2/Vs, independent of the applied gate voltage.

Citation

Nature Communications

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

organic electronics, transistor

Citation

Zachary, L. , Barth, K. , Lee, H. , Guthold, M. , McCulloch, I. , Anthony, J. , Richter, L. , Gann, E. , DeLongchamp, D. and Jurchescu, O. (2018), A simple and robust approach to reducing contact resistance in organic devices, Nature Communications, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=926313 (Accessed October 8, 2025)