Fully transparent solution-processed carbon nanotube thin film transistors on a flexible substrate

Fully transparent solution-processed carbon nanotube thin film transistors (CNT-TFTs) on flexible substrate are proposed and fabricated by a facile and low-cost process. By using 95%-semiconducting enriched carbon nanotubes as channel and transparent indium tin oxide as gate, source and drain electrodes, CNT-TFTs with a high on/off current ratio of 2.68×10⁶, a low threshold voltage of 0.38 V, a steep subthreshold swing of 0.28 V/dec, a good device mobility of 2.95 cm²/vs as well as a high transparency of 91.1% has been achieved. In addition, the whole fabrication of solution-processed CNT-TFTs involves no high temperature and complicated processing, which satisfies the manufacturing requirements for future transparent and flexible electronics.

I. Introduction

Flexible and optically transparent electronics, as an emerging technology for the next-generation optoelectronic devices, has attracted numerous research efforts in recent years due to its great potential to make significant commercial impact in a wide variety of areas [1], [2], such as flexible circuits [3], flexible displays [4], and conformable RFID tags [5], [6].