Fully Printed Negative-Capacitance Field-Effect Transistors with Ultralow Subthreshold Swing and High Inverter Signal Gain

The switching of conventional field-effect transistors (FETs) is limited by the Boltzmann barrier of thermionic emission, which prevents the realization of low-power electronics. In order to overcome this limitation, among others, unconventional device geometry with a ferroelectric/dielectric insulator stack has been proposed to demonstrate stable negative-capacitance behavior. Here, the switching of the ferroelectric layer behaves like a step-up amplifier and results in a body factor less than 1. This implies a larger change in the semiconductor surface potential compared to the applied gate voltage variation. The transistors with such ferroelectric/dielectric stack are known as negative-capacitance field-effect transistors (nc-FETs), and can demonstrate a subthreshold slope lower than the Boltzmann’s limit (60 mV/decade). While nc-FETs have typically been realized with high-vacuum-deposition processes, here we show fully printed nc-FETs with amorphous indium–gallium-zinc oxide (a-IGZO) as the semiconductor material, Al 2 O 3 as the dielectric, and poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) (PVDF-TrFE) as the polymer ferroelectric. The printed nc-FETs demonstrate an extremely low subthreshold slope of ∼2.3 mV/decade at room temperature, which remains below the Boltzmann’s limit for over 5 orders of magnitude of drain currents. Furthermore, the unipolar depletion-load-type inverters fabricated using n-type nc-FETs have demonstrated an extraordinary signal gain of 2691.