This device concept is now being studied in a multitude of material systems 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 after first being identified as having different operation to conventional and indeed Schottky-barrier, field-effect transistors by Shannon and Gerstner 19. The source-gated transistor (SGT) 18, 19, 20, 21, a device suitable for LAE, allows improved energy efficiency 22, bias stress stability 23, tolerance to process variations 24 and gain 22, 25, 26 to be achieved in analog circuits with minimal changes to standard fabrication processes. Furthermore, many applications do not require particularly fast circuits, but current uniformity, stability and tolerance to geometric variations which are more likely to occur in low-cost large-area technologies such as printing. Despite these continuing improvements, the architecture of the fundamental building-block used for LAE, the thin-film field-effect transistor (TFT, FET) has seen little development in comparison to the changes observed in nanoscale devices for ultra-large-scale integrated circuits (ULSI) 14, 15, 16, 17. Concurrently, conventional large-area technologies are being adapted to permit processing on plastic substrates with minimal performance loss 2, 13. New forms of air-stable semiconductor materials, which allow low-temperature deposition from solution 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, have been invented. Research has concentrated on improving material properties and refining device design, in order to improve power efficiency 1, speed of operation 2, 3, 4, 5 and stability of performance during and after electrical 5, 6 and mechanical 7, 8 stress. These findings have far-reaching consequences, as LAE will form the technological basis for a variety of future developments in the biomedical, civil engineering, remote sensing, artificial skin areas, as well as wearable and ubiquitous computing, or lightweight applications for space exploration.įlexible, large-area electronic (LAE) circuits are particularly attractive due to their potentially simple, low-cost of manufacturing and high throughput. Here, we show using measurements on polysilicon devices that these characteristics lead to substantial improvements in gain, noise margin, power-delay product and overall circuit robustness in digital SGT-based designs. With its simple structure and operational characteristics of low saturation voltage, stability under electrical stress and large intrinsic gain, the SGT is ideally suited for LAE analog applications. Now, a device concept with fundamentally different operation, the source-gated transistor (SGT) opens the possibility of unprecedented functionality in future low-cost LAE. In large-area electronics (LAE), however, the basic building-block, the thin-film field-effect transistor (TFT) has largely remained static. Ultra-large-scale integrated (ULSI) circuits have benefited from successive refinements in device architecture for enormous improvements in speed, power efficiency and areal density.
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