Induced characteristics of n- and p-channel OFETs by the choice of solvent for the dielectric layer towards the fabrication of an organic complementary circuit

•We proposed a facile and low-cost method to fabricate complementary circuits.•The used method was based on the selection of the solvent for the dielectric layer.•The best OFET performance was reached when an orthogonal solvent was used.•This method allows to improve and to tune the performance of p- and n-channel OFETs.•Organic complementary circuits were obtained with promising characteristics.

In this study, we proposed a facile and low-cost method to fabricate complementary circuits, by the careful selection of the solvent for the dielectric layer. We show that the dielectric solvent exerts a direct influence on performance of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), but the difficulty rests in finding solvents whose orthogonality does not attack the semiconducting layer in a device of top-gate architecture. OFETs (p- and n-channel), in which such orthogonality was achieved, exhibited the best performance, most probably due to the lower roughness of the semiconductor/dielectric interface. The search for transistors that have similar characteristics (mobility, threshold voltages, Ion/Ioff, etc.) afforded the manufacture and characterization of an organic complementary circuit whose gain was higher than 7. This study therefore shows that the correct choice of solvents, especially that of the dielectric layer, is very important for the development of organic electronic circuits.