Physical force-sensitive touch responses in liquid crystal-gated-organic field-effect transistors with polymer dipole control layers

• Liquid crystal-gated-organic field-effect transistors act as a physical touch sensor.
• Sensitive to the strength of external physical touches including human fingers.
• Quick response to the repeated physical touch and excellent reproducibility.

We report the sensing performances of liquid crystal-gated-organic field-effect transistors with a polymer dipole layer (DCL-LC-g-OFETs) upon physical touches. The DCL-LC-g-OFET devices, which were fabricated by employing 4-cyano-4’-pentylbiphenyl (5CB) as a sensing gate insulating layer, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) DCL, and 50 nm-thick poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) channel layer, which were optically semi-transparent and exhibited p-type transistor behavior. A pencil-like load (0.6 g–4.8 g) was introduced as a means for physical touch, while a human finger was used to examine the practical sensing capability of devices. Results showed that the drain current responded quickly upon physical touch and increased linearly with the strength of physical touch. The response time upon physical touch was slightly affected by the touch strength but was as fast as less than 1 s, while the drain current signals were quite reproducible and stable even after repeated physical touches. The present DCL-LC-g-OFET devices exhibited excellent sensing performances and reproducibility upon the human finger touch.

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