Electrical and mechanical properties of low temperature evaporated silicon dioxide/polyimide dual-layer insulator for plastic-based polymer transistor

Conjugated polymer thin film transistors have been prepared using silicon dioxide (SiO₂) and polyimide films as the dual layer gate dielectric on a plastic substrate. The dielectric layers were evaluated to investigate mechanical properties, surface morphology, capacitance-voltage and current-voltage characteristics. Spun polyimide and low temperature ion-beam deposited silicon dioxide layers were used as the gate dielectric, forming a dual layer structure. The organic layer with appropriate Young's modulus was found not only to improve the roughness of the SiO₂ surface, but also to relieve the mechanical stress of the dielectric, and accordingly bring about enhanced device performance. The dual layer gate dielectric indicated a good insulating property of 10^-5 A/cm² at 3 MV/cm, flat band voltage of 0.5 V, and root-mean-square surface roughness of 0.6 ∼ 1.2 nm. Based on the experiments, we built high performance plastic-based P3HT transistor including 0.007 cm²/V·s in carrier mobility and on/off current ratio of approximately 10³.