High-performance microscale single-crystal transistors by lithography on an elastomer dielectric

Organic single crystals have emerged as powerful tools for the exploration of the intrinsic charge transport properties of organic materials. To date, however, the limited number of fabrication techniques has forced a steep compromise between performance, reproducibility, range of feature sizes, gentle treatment of the single crystal, and facility of construction. Here the authors present a materials-general technique for the fabrication of single-crystal field-effect transistors with the use of a spin-coated elastomer gate dielectric and photolithographically defined source and drain electrodes. This allows the production of feature sizes and patterns previously impossible with reported elastomeric techniques yet yields devices with performance far superior to those fabricated on nonconformal dielectrics. The authors measure saturation-regime mobilities of 19.0 and 1.9 cm(2)/V s for the semiconductors rubrene and pentacene, comparable to the best published values, and 2.4 cm(2)/V s for tetracene, nearly double that previously reported. Device characteristics are indicative of good contact, with negligible hysteresis and exceptionally low normalized subthreshold swings. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.