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Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) transduce ionic into electric signals, which makes them a promising candidate for a wide range of bio-electronic applications. However, despite their promise, the influence of their device geometry on performance is still not fully understood. Here, two different device geometries—top contact and bottom contact OECTs—are compared in terms of their contact resistance, reproducibility, and switching speed. It is shown that bottom contact devices have faster switching times, while their top-contact counterparts are superior in terms of slightly reduced contact-resistance and increased reproducibility. The origin of this trade-off between speed and reproducibility is discussed, which provides optimization guidelines for a particular application. 

Organic Electrochemical Transistors are versatile sensors that became essential for the field of organic bioelectronics. However, despite their importance, an incomplete understanding of their working mechanism is currently precluding a targeted design of Organic Electrochemical Transistors and it is still challenging to formulate precise design rules guiding materials development in this field. Here, it is argued that current capacitive device models neglect lateral ion currents in the transistor channel and therefore fail to describe the equilibrium state of Organic Electrochemical Transistors. An improved model is presented, which shows that lateral ion currents lead to an accumulation of ions at the drain contact, which significantly alters the transistor behavior. Overall, these results show that a better understanding of the interface between the organic semiconductor and the drain electrode is needed to reach a full understanding of Organic Electrochemical Transistors. 

Organic doping is widely used for defining the majority charge carriers of organic thin films, tuning the Fermi level, and improving and stabilizing the performance of organic light‐emitting diodes and organic solar cells. However, in contrast to inorganic semiconductors, the doping concentrations commonly used are quite high (in the wt% range). Such high concentrations not only limit the scope of doping in organic field‐effect transistors (OFETs), but also limit the doping process itself resulting in a low doping efficiency. Here, the mechanism of doping at ultralow doping concentrations is studied. Doped C₆₀metal‐oxide‐semiconductor (MOS) junctions are used to study doping at the 100 ppm level. With the help of a small‐signal drift‐diffusion model, it is possible to disentangle effects of traps at the gate dielectric/organic semiconductor interface from effects of doping and to determine the doping efficiency and activation energy of the doping process. Doped C₆₀OFETs with an ultralow operation voltage of 800 mV and an excellent on/off ratio of up to 10⁷are realized. The devices have low subthreshold swing in the range of 80 mV dec⁻¹and a large transconductance of up to 8 mS mm⁻¹.

 

Research in Organic Permeable Base Transistors (OPBTs) has led to a significant increase in their performance. However, despite this progress, understanding of the working mechanism of OPBTs is still limited. Although first numerical models of OPBTs are able to describe the switching mechanism of OPBTs correctly, they neglect currents injected at the base electrode, which leads to unrealistically low off-currents and high ON/OFF ratios. Here, a tunneling model is developed that is capable of describing injection of charges through a thin oxide layer formed around the base electrode of OPBTs. With the help of this injection model, the performance of the base-collector diode of OPBTs is discussed. In particular, the model is used to explain the reduction in backward currents due to an exposure to ambient air by an increase in the thickness of the oxide layer. Furthermore, the tunnel model is used to show that the reduction in backward currents of the base-collector diode leads to a decrease in off-currents of complete OPBTs, which in turn leads to an increase in their ON/OFF ratio. 

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) operate at very low voltages, transduce ions into electronic signals, and reach extremely large transconductance values, making them ideally suited for bio‐sensing applications. However, despite their promising performance, the dependence of their maximum transconductance on device geometry and applied voltages are not correctly captured by current capacitive device models. Here, current scaling laws are revised in the light of a recently developed 2D device model that adequately accounts for drift and diffusion of ions inside the polymer channel. It is shown that the maximum transconductance of the devices is found at the transition between the depletion and accumulation region of the transistors, which as well provides an explanation for the observed shift of the transconductance peak with geometric dimensions and the drain potential. Overall, the results provide a better understanding of the working mechanisms of OECTs, and facilitate design rules to optimize OECT performance further.