Operation voltage reduction and gain enhancement in organic CMOS inverters with the TTC/gelatin bilayer dielectric

•The TTC/gelatin bilayer works very well as the gate dielectric for pentacene and PTCDI-C8 OFETs in organic CMOS inverters.•The organic CMOS inverter with the TTC/gelatin bilayer dielectric exhibits balanced electron and hole motilities.•The organic CMOS inverter exhibits a high static gain of 60 with sharp inversion.

An air ambient operated organic complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) inverter has been fabricated on poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) using pentacene and N,N-dioctyl-3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI-C8) as active layers with a bilayer dielectric of tetratetracontane (TTC) and gelatin. The inverter performance is greatly improved by replacing the gelatin dielectric with the TTC/gelatin bilayer. With the TTC/gelatin bilayer, both types of organic field-effect transistor (OFET) show better pinch-off and current saturation in output characteristics and negligible hysteresis transfer characteristics. The organic CMOS inverter with the TTC/gelatin bilayer dielectric exhibits balanced motilities of 0.5 (pentacene) and 0.3 cm2 V−1 s−1 (PTCDI-C8) with low threshold voltages of −1 (pentacene) and 3 V (PTCDI-C8). A high static gain of 60 may be achieved with sharp inversion.

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