Defect healing at room temperature in pentacene thin films and improved transistor performance

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that defect healing in pentacene thin films at room temperature improves organic transistor performance by reducing shallow trap densities, enhancing mobility, and decreasing contact resistance without chemical doping.

Contribution

It reveals a thermally promoted defect healing process in pentacene that enhances device performance and provides a method to accurately analyze trap densities in organic semiconductors.

Findings

Mobility increased up to 0.45 cm²/Vs

Contact resistance decreased by over an order of magnitude

Performance improvement driven by reduction in shallow trap density

Abstract

We report on a healing of defects at room temperature in the organic semiconductor pentacene. This peculiar effect is a direct consequence of the weak intermolecular interaction which is characteristic of organic semiconductors. Pentacene thin-film transistors were fabricated and characterized by in situ gated four-terminal measurements. Under high vacuum conditions (base pressure of order 10E-8 mbar), the device performance is found to improve with time. The effective field-effect mobility increases by as much as a factor of two and mobilities up to 0.45 cm2/Vs were achieved. In addition, the contact resistance decreases by more than an order of magnitude and there is a significant reduction in current hysteresis. Oxygen/nitrogen exposure and annealing experiments show the improvement of the electronic parameters to be driven by a thermally promoted process and not by chemical doping. In order to extract the spectral density of trap states from the transistor characteristics, we have implemented a powerful scheme which allows for a calculation of the trap densities with high accuracy in a straightforward fashion. We show the performance improvement to be due to a reduction in the density of shallow traps <0.15 eV from the valence band edge, while the energetically deeper traps are essentially unaffected. This work contributes to an understanding of the shallow traps in organic semiconductors and identifies structural point defects within the grains of the polycrystalline thin films as a major cause.