A TCAD-based study on the design and performance of VOFET-based CMOS-like inverters

Abstract Research on inverters that utilize organic field-effect transistors has garnered significant attention in recent years. Currently, most organic complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-like circuits use planar organic field-effect transistors as switching devices. However, due to limitations in fabrication processes, the channel lengths of these planar transistors are typically at the micrometer scale. This often leads to challenges such as high operating voltages and low intermediate logic levels in CMOS-like inverters built with these transistors. This paper proposes a CMOS-like inverter based on vertical organic field-effect transistors. The input and output characteristics of this inverter were numerically analyzed using the TCAD (Silvaco-Mixedmode) simulation tool. Thanks to the ultrashort nanometer-scale channels of vertical organic field-effect transistors, this inverter achieved a low operating voltage of 1.5 V and an intermediate logic value of 0.72 V.