Suppression of short-channel effects in organic thin-film transistors

To improve the speed of organic thin-film transistor (TFT) circuits device architectures with submicrometer channel length are of interest. However, in conventional, submicrometer TFT structures the performance is degraded as a result of short-channel effects. Here we present an architecture for short-channel organic TFTs which is based on incorporating an insulating mesa structure in between source and drain electrodes. For submicrometer organic TFTs the mesa structure results in a significant enhancement of the on-off ratio and saturation characteristics. Device modeling shows that the mesa improves the ability of the gate electrode to modulate the carrier concentration in a submicrometer channel. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.