Pentacene-carbon nanotubes: Semiconducting assemblies for thin-film transistor applications

Abstract

We demonstrate an alternative path for achieving high-transconductance organic transistors by assembling bilayers of pentacene onto random arrays of single-walled carbon nanotubes. We show here that, by varying the connectivity of the underlying nanotube network, the channel length of a thin-film transistor can be reduced by nearly two orders of magnitude—thus, enabling the increase of the device transconductance without reduction the on/off ratio. These field-induced percolating networks enable assembling high-transconductance transistors that, with relatively large source drain distances, can be manufactured with available commercial printing techniques.