Electrically Stable Transparent Complementary Inverter with Organic-inorganic Nano-hybrid Dielectrics

Transparent electronics has been one of the key terminologies forecasting the ubiquitous technology era. Several researchers have thus extensively developed transparent oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) on glass and plastic substrates although in general high voltage operating devices have been mainly studied considering transparent display drivers. However, low voltage operating oxide TFTs with transparent electrodes are very necessary if we are aiming at logic circuit applications, for which transparent complementary or one-type channel inverters are required. The most effective and low power consuming inverter should be a form of complementary p-channel and n-channel transistors but real application of those complementary TFT inverters also requires electrical- and even photo-stabilities. Since p-type oxide TFTs have not been developed yet, we previously adopted organic pentacene TFTs for the p-channel while ZnO TFTs were chosen for n-channel on sputter-deposited $AlO_x$ film. As a result, decent inverting behavior was achieved but some electrical gate instability was unavoidable at the ZnO/$AlO_x$ channel interface. Here, considering such gate instability issues we have designed a unique transparent complementary TFT (CTFTs) inverter structure with top n-ZnO channel and bottom p-pentacene channel based on 12 nm-thin nano-oxide/self assembled monolayer laminated dielectric, which has a large dielectric strength comparable to that of thin film amorphous $Al_2O_3$. Our transparent CTFT inverter well operate under 3 V, demonstrating a maximum voltage gain of ~20, good electrical and even photoelectric stabilities. The device transmittance was over 60 % and this type of transparent inverter has never been reported, to the best of our limited knowledge.