Limitations of the tuning of interface dipoles for the reduction of the contact resistance in organic thin-film transistors

Achieving gigahertz transit frequencies in low-voltage organic thin-film transistors (TFTs) will require a contact resistance below about 1 Ohm-cm [1,2]. A general approach to reduce the contact resistance in organic devices is to modify the surface of the metal contacts with a chemisorbed interface layer, ostensibly by reducing the nominal injection barrier. Combined with a thin gate dielectric, this approach can enable contact resistances below 30 Ohm-cm and transit frequencies above 10 MHz at low voltages in coplanar organic TFTs [3,4]. However, further reduction of the contact resistance depends strongly on non-idealities of the interface other than the nominal barrier height according to the Schottky-Mott limit. We show a detailed study on the efficacy of interface layers based on various thiols to improve the contact resistance in coplanar dinaphtho[2,3-b:2′,3′-f]thieno[3,2-b]thiophene (DNTT) TFTs. We compare the contact resistance of multiple sets of TFTs to results from ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy measurements and find strong evidence that Fermi-level pinning prevents a significant reduction of the contact resistance below about 100 Ohm-cm in DNTT TFTs. Therefore, we conclude that this approach may not be a generally sufficient method by itself to eliminate the contact resistance in organic TFTs.