Fully Printed Flexible Dual-Gate Carbon Nanotube Thin-Film Transistors with Tunable Ambipolar Characteristics for Complementary Logic Circuits

Semiconducting single-wall carbon nanotubes (sSWCNTs) have been widely used as the channel material for high-performance printed flexible thin-film transistors (TFTs). Due to the absorption of moisture and oxygen in air, the printed sSWCNT TFTs generally exhibit p-type characteristics only. In this paper, we report fully printed dual-gate sSWCNT TFTs that exhibit almost symmetric ambipolar characteristics. With the applied control gate voltage varying from -60 to +60 V, a threshold voltage tuning range of 27 V is achieved, allowing the device to be effectively tuned into either predominantly p-type or predominantly n-type. The tunable ambipolar characteristics are found to be very stable over a long period of time (4 months). By integrating two printed dual-gate TFTs biased with different control gate voltages, a complementary metal oxide semiconductor inverter with close to rail-to-rail output voltage swing is demonstrated. The use of a dual-gate structure for achieving n-type printed carbon nanotube TFTs is much more controllable and repeatable compared to other methods such as chemical doping. Our work shows the feasibility of implementing more sophisticated complementary logic circuits using printed flexible carbon nanotube transistors.