High-performance all-polymer integrated circuits

In this letter, we demonstrate the integration of all-polymer field-effect transistors in fully functional integrated circuits with operating frequencies of several kHz. One of the key items is an approach to incorporate low-Ohmic vertical interconnects compatible with an all-polymer approach. Inverters, NAND gates, and ring oscillators with transistor channel lengths down to 1 mu m have been constructed. Inverters show voltage amplification at moderate biases and pentacene seven-stage ring oscillators show switching frequencies of a few kHz. The potential to realize large integrated circuits is demonstrated by a 15 bit code generator circuit using several hundreds of devices. The proposed concept was evaluated for three solution-processable organic semiconductors. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(00)03736-0].