Electrical properties of organic field effect transistors with thin graphite/metal electrode directly grown by ICP-CVD at low temperatures

•Thin graphite sheet was directly grown on a metal electrode by the ICP-CVD.•The thin graphite sheet was grown at as low temperature as 400, 500 °C.•We applied the graphite sheet to OFETs as source and drain electrodes.•The OFETs exhibit much lower contact resistance than OFETs with metal-only electrode.

The high contact resistance of organic thin film transistors (OTFTs), due to the work function difference between metal electrode and organic channel, seriously decreases the electrical properties. Graphene electrode could reduce the contact resistance and improve the electrical performance of OTFTs. However, the high chemical vapor deposition (CVD) temperature (900–1000 °C) limits the available OTFT substrate in the case of direct graphene growth on S/D metal electrodes. Furthermore, the application of a transferred graphene electrode induces significant problems due to the transfer process. In this work, thin graphite sheet was directly grown on a metal electrode by the inductively coupled plasma-chemical vapor deposition (ICP-CVD) method at as low temperature as 400, 500 °C. We show that OFETs with thin graphite sheet/metal, grown at 400, 500 °C, exhibit much lower contact resistance than OFETs with metal-only electrode.