Impact of the Capacitance of the Dielectric on the Contact Resistance of Organic Thin-Film Transistors

As the operation of organic thin-film transistors relies exclusively on injected charge carriers, the gate-induced field assumes a dual role: It is responsible for charge-carrier accumulation and, provided that an injection barrier at the contact-semiconductor interface is present, aids charge-carrier injection across this barrier. Besides the gate-source bias, the thickness of the insulator and its dielectric constant influence the gate field. Here, we explore the impact of the capacitance of the gate dielectric on the performance of organic thin-film transistors utilizing drift-diffusion-based simulations comprising a self-consistent consideration of injection. Upon varying the capacitance of the insulating layer, we observe a conceptually different behavior for top-contact and bottom-contact architectures. Top-contact devices possess a nearly constant contact voltage in the linear regime leading to an apparent mobility lowering. In strong contrast, bottom-contact architectures possess non-Ohmic contact resistances in the linear regime due to a contact voltage whose value depends strongly on both the gate-source bias and the capacitance. Counterintuitively, this is accompanied by a mobility being apparently unaffected by the substantial contact resistance. Additionally, threshold-voltage shifts appear due to gate-limited injection. The latter is particularly dominant in bottom-contact architectures, where the threshold voltages steeply increase with the thickness of the insulating layer.