High-performance transistors for bioelectronics through tuning of channel thickness

By Jonathan Rivnay, P. Leleux, Marc D Ferro, M. Sessolo, A. Williamson, D. Koutsouras, D. Khodagholy, M. Ramuz, X. Strakosas, Roisin M. Owens and 4 more. Science Advances, 2015

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transistors with tunable transconductance allow high-quality recordings of human brain rhythms. Despite recent interest in organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), sparked by their straightforward fabrication and high performance, the fundamental mechanism behind their operation remains largely unexplored. OECTs use an electrolyte in direct contact with a polymer channel as part of their device structure. Hence, they offer facile integration with biological milieux and are currently used as amplifying transducers for bioelectronics. Ion exchange between electrolyte and channel is believed to take place in OECTs, although the extent of this process and its impact on device characteristics are still unknown. We show that the uptake of ions from an electrolyte into a film of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) leads to a purely volumetric capacitance of 39 F/cm3. This results in a dependence of the transconductance on channel thickness, a new degree of freedom that we exploit to demonstrate high-quality recordings of human brain rhythms. Our results bring to the forefront a transistor class in which performance can be tuned independently of device footprint and provide guidelines for the design of materials that will lead to state-of-the-art transistor performance.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9111003c00439876790bcc3c67324aedf55356d

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Citations in the corpus

Next-generation probes, particles, and proteins for neural interfacing (2017, background): “Hence, ions readily penetrate the bulk of the CP, yielding high volumetric capacitance (45).”